Author: AffiliateMentor

Are you wondering what affiliate marketing promotion methods you should be doing? When I started out doing affiliate marketing I jumped from one strategy to another. As a result, I didn’t really generate any traction with anything! The top affiliates tend to use paid marketing of course.

Paid marketing works well because you can start and stop and advert very quickly. You can also learn what works and what doesn’t very quickly too and of course scale up when you have a profitable advert. But paid ads aren’t for everyone.

What if you don’t have the funds to test and measure adverts which could potentially make zero sales and bomb? And what if your products don’t support using paid ads? With high ticket items and recurring commission affiliate programs it’s much more viable to do this. But with low value affiliate products it’s out of the question. You’ll lose money every time unless you know your ROI (return on investment) and average value of a customer.

Affiliate Marketing Promotion Methods – Niche Websites

So if you can’t do paid advertising for your affiliate marketing promotions, that leaves free strategies like blogging and YouTube’ing! These are slow and steady strategies which can work wonders over time. But you need to put in the work upfront and you’ll need a strong work ethic and belief in what you are doing.

One of my first affiliate marketing promotion methods was building niche websites to get free traffic from Google’s search engines. This is a tough method and if you’re going to approach it you’ll need to do your homework. Here’s an article on how to build a niche website and get free traffic.

My first few outings in this strategy were pretty unimpressive. I build several niche websites and linked them to affiliate products. Most of them didn’t even make it on to Google since I was just spamming my links which must have been a huge red flag for Google. You need to create a useful resource with sites like these. Using keyword targeted domains can still help you gain some traction though, even with a small amount of work. Here’s a site I built around a specific keyword to get some free traffic.

Affiliate Marketing Promotion Methods – Blogging

Blogging is one of my favourite methods of getting eyes on my affiliate products. It’s slow and can take months or years before you see any traction. But if you stick at it and keep sharing your content and creating new content, you should, over time, see your traffic grow.

There’s various strategies for blogging but the main thing should always be to create valuable content which is sharable. If you write crap nobody will share it, Google definitely won’t rank it and you’ll be giving zero value to anyone. When I first started blogging, it was to sell affiliate products.

I wanted maximum exposure from minimum output. But that was a flawed strategy for a couple of reasons. Firstly Google knows when your content is thin and your affiliate links are plentiful. It’s just too clever to throw up some thin content and loads of affiliate links. You just won’t get anywhere! Instead, aim to provide value and help people instead of having the end goal as financial reward.

A few blogging tips:

• Put quality first – Write a minimum of 1000 words for an article
• Share your content – Use an automated social share plugin
• Use an SEO plugin – I use Yoast SEO
• Put social share buttons on your site
• Aim to write every week or day if you can
• Learn about SEO and never stop learning and improving

Social Media Marketing

There’s a few social media marketing platforms you can use too. Facebook is one I’ve used with some success. Paid marketing is best of course because you can reach a larger number of people more quickly with it. But it’s costly and it can burn cash like nobodies business if you’re not careful.

But social media platforms can be used for free too. Facebook for example can be used to generate leads and sales by joining groups and connecting with people who might find your products useful. Tweak your profile so people can see your offer on it and create an enticing picture which leads them to a landing page, where you can collect their email. More on this in this article: promote clickbank products for free.

Affiliate marketing on Quora is an option for marketing too. Quora is a question and answer website but you can answer questions and lead people to your content; either through links in your answers or through you bio.

Belief and Affiliate Marketing

At first when you start out as an affiliate, you’ll probably fall into the trap of jumping from one strategy to another. There’s many affiliate marketing promotion methods to choose from and the danger is to get lost finding one which suits you. For years I was stressed, frustrated and procrastinating while jumping around without direction to apply myself to affiliate marketing.

The best advice is to pick a strategy which suits you and stick with it until you have mastered it. But this can be very difficult; especially if you don’t fully believe in what you’re doing. If you’ve been blogging for months and have nothing to show for it, you can easily lose hope. But keep going because once you start seeing results from any given strategy, you can hone in on it. Or try another strategy if you’ve given it a good amount of time – several months of consistent work.

Expect blogging to be a lengthy process though, and if you don’t have the patience for it, start with another strategy.

Pareto’s Principle Applies

Pareto’s principle states that 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. This is very true for affiliate marketers. In the first instance you will likely find you are doing a lot of work with no results. But once you find the one activity which makes the largest difference to your affiliate business, you can focus in on it. As you progress, you’ll find that you are doing less and less but still keep making money through affiliate commissions.

Ask yourself important questions about your actions and your outcomes. You are always the cause of your effects. So if you have a bad outcome, it’s because your actions aren’t creating those outcomes. How can you change your behaviour to create the outcomes you want in life? Clue, it starts with your thinking and taking responsibility for your outcomes.

Once you start earning from affiliate marketing, and know which affiliate marketing promotion methods are bringing your the result, you can focus on it with more belief and more confidence that you’re doing the right work. Until that point you need to keep learning and “failing forwards“.

If you’re struggling with your affiliate marketing business or are interested in starting one from scratch, join an online business community and get the help you need. Access a webinar by clicking the image below and meet one of my mentors Stuart who will share his huge experience of earning online.

Within affiliate marketing, high ticket items can make all the difference. With a low value product or a product with a low commission, you can’t make the same kind of commissions as you can with high ticket. In order to sell some high ticket items you’ll need to purchase them yourself to access the highest levels of commission.

This is mostly the case with digital products but there are some physical products you can promote free of charge (without purchasing them yourself). However, physical products tend to pay far lower levels of commission than digital products do. Take a look at the highest paying affiliate programs list.

Affiliate Marketing High Ticket Items – Why High Ticket ?

It’s a good idea to position yourself at the highest earning level if you decide to go high ticket. When promoting your sales funnel and selling products through email marketing, you’ll get a much higher return if you do. Larger commissions are not only better for your bank balance but they also give you the ability to spend money driving quality traffic through the more expensive (and better) paid marketing platforms.

Without large value products in your sales funnel, you’ll be making less money even when you make sales. This limits your ability to spend money on advertising. It’s also worth considering using recurring income affiliate products as part of your product range. With membership products or software products affiliates can earn ongoing commission from each sale. This is far better than single point of sale products which only pay you once.

If you chose a product from Amazon to promote you can make as little as 1% commission on the sale. This doesn’t allow you to spend money to advertise so you’ll have to use the free marketing methods to promote low value items.

This can be very limiting and slow.

Affiliate Marketing High Ticket Items & Multiple Earning Methods

The best high ticket items have multiple earning strategies built in too. These are things such as:

• Subscription products – which pay you recurring income from each sale
• Up-sells – A range of products delivering more and more value at each price range
• A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.
• Multi-tier commissions – earn residual income from your referrals’ sales.

With a good product range like this which includes high ticket items, you can grow an online business quite quickly using paid marketing strategies. You can access a sales system like this one by clicking this link.

Selling High Ticket Products vs. Low Value Products

I used to think that no one would buy the very expensive products online. That thinking was based on my own personal ability to do so. I didn’t know about high ticket items when I started out as an affiliate either. So I just promoted products I could find on Clickbank or Amazon. The main problem with low value items is that you need to sell a lot of them.

To make $1000, for example, you would need to sell 20 items which gave you a commission of $50. 20×50=1000. Or 100 items which paid you $10.

However, with a high ticket item you could earn $1000 in a single sale. You would think that there would be more people who are able to purchase a low value item, and less people able to purchase big ticket items. However, to make $10,000 you would need to sell 200 of your low value item. Whereas with a high value item, you could just sell 10 of them. So despite it being more difficult to find a customer for a large value item, it’s not 20 times more difficult. It would be far harder to sell 200 items compared to 10; and often the same amount of work is required in both cases.

Choose Products Which Offer The Most Value

What problem would you pay the most to fix? For many, it’s changing their income and giving them more freedom and control over their financial destiny. How much would you pay to never have to work your 9 to 5 job again? Or do a uncomfortable commute? Or to sack your boss? Some of the best products online will solve these kinds of problems by helping people to build online businesses and create more financial certainty and geographical freedom.

Plus if you promote products which change people’s lives, they will continue to use them. Products like these include:

• Training products – for online businesses
• Software products for online business owners.
• Coaching and mentoring products

Good products offer a lifetime value to the customer. If you use a product or service and it improves your life in some way, you’ll keep using it. So if you choose these kinds of products as an affiliate, your customers will stay. If your products also pay you residual commissions, you can keep earning for the lifetime of each customer.

Choose Products You Would Buy Yourself

When I first started out in affiliate marketing, I tried to sell products that I didn’t buy myself. There’s a couple of things wrong with that. For starters how can you authentically recommend a restaurant, for example, if you’ve never been? Of course you can say “I heard this is a good restaurant”. But if you’ve never been, it’s much harder to talk intelligently about it.

Most of my affiliate marketing strategy back then involved blogging about products. So I would write content based on products I knew very little about. This is pretty difficult and probably why I struggled to make any sales. The main reason to recommend a product should be out of authenticity, not a desire to make a sale! If this isn’t the case, it can come across in your content or marketing efforts and put off potential customers.

If you’re interested in learning more about building your own business online, check out this course and get started.

Looking for PPC affiliate marketing for beginners? PPC, or “pay per click” refers to how marketers use paid marketing platforms. PPC is also known as direct response marketing. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their advert. PPC can be used in conjunction with affiliate marketing products to send targeted traffic (visitors) to affiliate products. When you make a sale you earn a commission on the product. Using PPC as an affiliate should be done with some caution because you can spend a lot of money very quickly, and potentially without recouping it in sales.

You can also use PPC programs on your website content to make money from advertisers. When someone clicks on an advert on your content, you earn a portion of the advertising cost. Google Adsense offers an advertising program which lets blog owners or YouTubers place adverts on their content. Google Adwords is the program used by marketers who want to run adverts themselves. You can also use other platforms which offer PPC advertising such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Bing etc.

PPC Commissions

Some affiliate programs offer to pay affiliates for clicks, rather than (or as well as) sales. So this is another way affiliates can earn money through placing banner ads on their content and hoping their visitors will click on them.

PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

If you want to use PPC marketing as an affiliate, it means you’ll be sending website traffic to a landing page or a website with the intention of selling affiliate products to make a profit.

PPC affiliate marketing for beginners can be a tough nut to crack. For starters pay per click platforms can be expensive and complicated. Ideally start out with a cheaper platform such as Bing, where you’ll learn the basics. Depending on your products, you may even not be able to afford the more expensive platforms such as YouTube.

With PPC, you need to know the value of a customer, your average return on investment per lead/sale and other metrics. When you know your numbers, you’re prepared before hand and know what you can reasonably expect to spend. Many new PPC business owners get frustrated and quit because they don’t know their numbers and expect to start making money straight away. But there’s a bit more to it.

PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Many business owners set up an advert using a PPC advertising platform, get no results and quit. But you need to understand the longer term implications of understanding how PPC works. Initially you shouldn’t expect too much from a single advert; especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. The people who succeed online have tested and measured many adverts before they find a profitable one. Plus, many of their adverts don’t work first time!

They spend money learning which adverts work and which don’t. By tracking all of their results and starting out with a low, manageable budget which they can afford, they learn how to run profitable adverts.

Once they find an advert which regularly brings back a profit, they can just leave it running and move on to the next one. They can also increase their budget and scale up very easily once they’ve hit on a profitable campaign. So it’s worth persevering and being careful with your budget in the first instance.

Affiliate Marketing Product Range

For many affiliate marketing business models, PPC is out of the reach of affiliates because of the competition. Advertisers bid for their adverts to be found by people typing in certain search queries on YouTube, or Google. Or the advertiser targets a certain type of person from a certain area for example.

Depending on the topic and general search relevancy, there might be a lot of other competing advertisers who also want to get found by those same people. If those marketers can afford to spend much more than you can, you’ll lose the placing and be priced out of the market.

Unless your business model allows it, you won’t be able to run adverts on certain platforms and still make a profit. The cost of advertising may be too high for you to recoup your advertising spend and make a return on your investment (ROI) which is greater than your expenditure. And no-one wants to run adverts just to lose money.

In short, without a large value product range you may be unable to use PPC.

Affiliate Marketing – ROI

Many new affiliates will choose low value affiliate products to start out with, as I did. The problem here is that if you only have a product valued at $100, for example, you’ll only receive a $40- $50 commission at the most for the sale as an affiliate. This means that if you want to use PPC to sell your product, you’ll need to spend less than $40 or $50 to sell it. This is very limiting and it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed.

Just testing adverts in likely to cost you more than this and it can be easy to just lose money while you find this out.

With a high value product range, you’re ROI is much higher. If you have a number of high value digital products, subscriptions products (or recurring income affiliate products), and can earn multi-tier commissions, for example, you’ll have a greater chance of making a profit from running your adverts.

With a sales funnel like this you can earn a larger average return per customer. This in turn means you’re better able to run profitable campaigns than by only using low value items.

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Looking for an affiliate marketing mentor near me, or you?! I was in the same boat several years ago; looking for someone to help and advise me with my affiliate business. I wanted an affiliate marketing mentor near me; someone real who wasn’t hiding behind their computer!

It took me several years of searching to find someone real, but eventually I managed to find a business community of like minded entrepreneurs who helped me earn online through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Mentor Near Me

I might not be an affiliate marketing mentor near you, but I can help you. I can also suggest the same online community which has helped me. Over several years I took many courses in the search to find a way to legitimately earn from my laptop. Before stumbling onto affiliate marketing I tried Forex Marketing, eBay – buying and selling and even created my own ebooks. Here’s a short video explaining my story.

The main problem I found with learning from the internet was trust. I just didn’t know who to trust and I found myself jumping from one online course to another. Each one promised an easier path that the last!

When I found the community I now am a part of, I took another leap of faith. I was pretty desperate, in heaps of debt and trying to build a career as a stunt performer. But it wasn’t working and mostly I was out of work and filling in with whatever jobs I could get hold of.

After attempting affiliate marketing for several years without much success, I joined Stuart and Jay’s community in the SFM (Six Figure Mentors). Despite my initial scepticism, I was able to meet other affiliates in the UK, where I live. This was unusual since most companies I’d previously found were in the US. I was also able to meet people in person and I joined a number of seminars and get togethers.

Affiliate Marketing Mentor Near Me – Where Are You?

The SFM Mentors run workshops globally, so yes, there is an affiliate marketing mentor near you. The community has been growing since 2012 too so there will be people near you who you can meet up with, wherever you are in the world. I’m based in the UK and recently met up with other affiliates in Chester. Here’s a picture of the meet up.

Why Meet-Ups?

For me the get togethers are of real value because they make an internet business seem real. Working on your own online is hard and its difficult to really commit to a path online when there are so many to choose from. When I started researching online businesses, my inbox became full very quickly with one scheme and then another.

I jumped from one course to another – shiny object syndrome and months passed before I found a suitable strategy and plan. It’s easy to lose hope or direction with an online business too. Other people who you can trust and rely on can help you and hold you accountable. This just wasn’t something I got from many of the previous courses I had taken.

Interactive webinars have been a massive support too. With question and answer webinars you can gain support in all aspects of your affiliate business.

Mentors Near You

Mentorship is about trust. Without trust it’s very difficult to maintain a path for very long. Another problem I had with my affiliate marketing was in choosing a strategy which was right for me. No one can tell you that, people can only advise. Paid marketing is great, if you have the money. Blogging is good, if you have the patience. But ultimately it’s up to you which direction you take with your affiliate marketing business. It’s your responsibility.

With affiliate marketing too there are no guarantees. “Do this and that will happen” doesn’t always translate because everyone is different. Everyone has a different approach, different knowledge and a different work ethic. Unless you take full responsibility for the results in your affiliate business you’re putting the outcome onto someone else.

Making someone else responsible for your outcomes is a bad idea. It lets you off the hook but also disempowers you.

Affiliate Marketing And Mindset

I always thought mindset in affiliate marketing was a little bit of a red herring. But I was soo wrong! When I first started out learning affiliate marketing, I just wanted a formula – do this and make money. But what I didn’t realise is there’s lots of mistakes to make along the journey. Mistakes which either cost money or time. Here’s a few of the affiliate marketing mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.

But once you’ve been through all of that, the other side is worth the struggle. You’ll know exactly which actions generate the best results for you. But most quit on that journey because they don’t see the bigger picture. They fail a couple of times and throw it all away. The affiliates who succeed realise this and use each failure as a stepping stone to success.

Dart Board Analogy

Let’s look at a simple analogy. You have a dart board which has a prize for hitting the bulls eye. The prize is $1000. Each dart costs you $200 to throw. The darts represent your advertising campaign and the prize represents an affiliate sale. You miss the first 10 times but then you hit the bulls eye! It costs you $2200 and you only make $1000. Most would consider this a complete failure. But if you take a longer term view, it’s actually a success. You now know which dart to throw (which advert to run) to make $1000 and only spend $200.

You can use the same analogy for any affiliate strategy providing you track all your sales. Pareto’s principle states that around 80% of your results will come from only 20% of your activities. So initially as an affiliate you’ll spend time on many things which amount to nothing. At this point most will quit. If you understand the graph below though it may give you some hope.

The “valley of disappointment” is where most affiliates quit! It’s where they try and try to no avail. They decide that “affiliate marketing just doesn’t work”. But they don’t ask themselves why affiliate marketing does not work. It’s because they haven’t yet hit upon a strategy they can rinse and repeat to generate a profit. Once they do, they are free! So it’s worth enduring the difficulties for the end goal.

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Thinking entrepreneurially doesn’t come naturally to most people. Entrepreneurs must challenge their thinking processes in order to grow and attain the results they want to create.

The level of thinking you bring to any business will affect the ceiling limit of how much that business will grow. This is what many business owners get wrong – the work hard in their business, being “busy”, but neglect to work hard on themselves, growing their thinking. What psychological factors limit the growth of a business?

A business will never outgrow the level of thinking through which it is created and developed. So wise entrepreneurs spend time and invest in being around others who have reached higher levels of success than they have.

Thinking Entrepreneurially – Cause and Effect

There’s a cause and effect relationship between what you do (behaviour) and the results you enjoy in your life. Behaviour is affected by your beliefs and attitudes which are effected by your consistent thinking processes.

AUTOSUGGESTION is the agency of control through which an individual may voluntarily feed his subconscious mind on thoughts of a creative nature, or, by neglect, permit thoughts of a destructive nature to find their way into this rich garden of the mind. – Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

The chapter on autosuggestion (in Think and Grow Rich) is an important one and talks into our thinking processes as being the cause of our subconscious beliefs. So it is our thinking we should aim to improve if we are to become better entrepreneurs and create better results in our lives.

Thinking Entrepreneurially – Unconscious Beliefs

An unconscious belief might stem from childhood, where everything was absorbed without a conscious filter (the conscious mind) deciding which attitudes and ideas to absorb.

What makes children such awesome learners who can pick up language, learn to walk and talk within such a short time, is the ability to absorb without conscious reasoning. In the early stage of a child’s life, information is taken in without critical thinking and although this makes us amazing learners, we also collect information which isn’t useful.

Some of the obstacles which entrepreneurs will encounter relate to unconscious beliefs which are hidden in the subconscious mind.

What You Believe About Yourself

How you see yourself has a huge amount to do with your unconscious programming you received as a child too. Your unconscious mind controls a lot of what you believe about life, yourself, how much money you can make, your earning potential and how to live your life.

Without an awareness of this vast storage of all the information of your life, you’ll continue to repeat patterns and behaviours which don’t serve you or your highest potential. Once you get clearer about what it is you want, and what is holding you back, you’ll be able to take more steps towards the purpose driven life you’re really wanting to live into.

Unconscious Success Blockers

Here’s an example. Lets say Sam wants to earn more money and is attempting to build an online business. However, he keeps hitting a brick wall and doesn’t seem to be able to earn beyond a certain point. He keeps taking action but it’s like there’s an invisible wall holding him back. What is it?

There could be many reasons for this. Perhaps he just hasn’t done the required work, or he’s lazy or inept. Maybe he’s too entitled and believes it’s easier than it actually is. These assumptions aside, lets assume he is holding himself back due to an unconscious reason he’s currently unaware of.

Perhaps, he received many unconscious ideas as a child about money and how bad it is. Or about self worth and doesn’t believe he is worth it. Perhaps a sibling is struggling with money and he can’t accept being much more successful than his brother/sister. What relationships or meanings could you attribute your lack of success to?

Limiting Beliefs

Some people unconsciously hold themselves apart from success due to a relationship they had with their parents. They don’t see themselves as successful, or they attribute a negative connotation with monetary success.

Think about some of the following beliefs/ideas:

• Money is the route of all evil
• Monetary success is only for greedy people
• I’m not worthy of success, more than I need
• You should only want “enough” and no more
• Life is a struggle
• I don’t deserve it
• Rich people are greedy
• I can’t outgrow my parents in terms of financial success
• Money brings more problems with it

Which statements chimed with you most? What areas of your past are holding you in your current situation and stunting your growth?

Until your make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate. – Carl Jung

Clear Goals Aligned With Action Steps

You can’t train your mind to focus on something if you don’t give your mind a target. If you’re unclear in your thinking about what it is you want, you’re unlikely to achieve it.

Entrepreneurial thinking therefore demands a certain clarity. With confusion, you create chaos. With clarity you can attain an plan and take daily action steps towards your target.

Most people are unclear about what it is they want. So they create something in-between their idea of success and what they believe they are capable of or willing to do.

To gain clarity over what you want to accomplish, you must set specific measurable goals. Then you can train your unconscious mind to flag up your target so that it continually thinks about it and plans for its execution.

Stuart Lichman’s book on Cybernetic Transposition is the best resource I have found on this topic. In it, he uses what he calls the Cybernetic transposition three step process to specify your most attractive goal and create a “meta-story” around it to flag it up to your unconscious mind.

Thinking entrepreneurially means more than just thinking on a surface level. It means to look within at the unconscious ideas which are blocking your success through limiting thinking too.

To learn more about becoming a conscious entrepreneur, join this entrepreneurial community and build an online business from scratch. Or if you already have a business and want to develop yourself as an entrepreneur, access a training and educational tool here.

Setting small goals to achieve big ones is the key to self mastery. Some even go so far as to say don’t set goals at all; instead create processes which lead naturally to where you want to go.

A goal projects into the future the person you want to be, the lifestyle you want to live and so on and so on. It carries with it the idea that you’re not enough right now, in this moment. So be careful with goals because once you achieve one, you’re on to the next. Where do your goals lead you?

If you’re carrying the feeling of never being enough, having enough or doing enough, you may be very goal oriented. But will achieving your goals make you happy, or will you need more goals to really feel fulfilled, happy and content?

So start out with being enough, feeling like you are enough and being happy right now, in this moment.

Setting Small Goals To Achieve Big Goals

In my 20’s I met a stuntman and knew this was what I wanted to pursue. I had a big goal ahead of me – to become a stuntman. To me, a stuntman represented something I thought I wanted: self employed, self assured, confident, purposeful, and so on. It just felt right in every way.

I had a number of tasks to complete which can be summed up briefly as:

• 30 weeks work under an Equity contract
• 6 instructor skills in various activities

I choose to do martial arts, trampolining, SCUBA diving, fencing, swimming and rock climbing. It took me 3-4 years to complete everything. I did it and joined the British Stunt Register in 2002 because I was setting small goals to achieve big ones.

If I had looked at the mountain of things in front of me to do, I would have felt overwhelmed and never even tried. But instead I wrote everything down and made large steps into small achievable goals. Getting a qualification in fencing for example, became “find a fencing school and contact them”. Then turning up for my first lesson. Getting 30 weeks’ work under Equity became finding my first TV extras job – which meant finding an Extras agency. Each large goal was broken down into many small achievable steps.

Setting Small Goals To Achieve Big Goals – Overwhelm

There will be times when you feel overwhelm, whatever you’re attempting. Learn to rest but not to quit. Some days you’ll struggle and others you’ll be flying! But large goals take time so you need to be patient with yourself.

Later on when the stunt work became more of a burden than a joy, I looked to the internet as a means to earn an income. This was another mountain I found to climb! The internet offers a means to earn an income to whoever pursues it for long enough and with enough dedication.

My own personal journey online has had many ups and downs. I’m still on the journey but have learned to celebrate the small wins. When I look to other entrepreneurs who have achieved huge financial success online, I ofter get demoralised because I compare myself to them!

This, I have learned is a mistake. I become disempowered and disillusioned. Thoughts like “I’ll never get to where they are”, “Why bother it never seems to work” and other self defeating expressions surface in my mind. But these kinds of thoughts seldom lead to any inspirational activities!

Small Thoughts Lead To Big Thoughts Too

From a demoralised state of mind to productive and inspirational action is a huge leap. It’s pretty much impossible. So a small step towards a more productive and happy state of mind is always a good thing.

As an affiliate marketer, I sell and promote other people’s products on the internet. I joined an online community who have helped me to earn an income from the internet. But one of the biggest hurdles I’ve found with building my online business is keeping focused on the small actions which I can control and not focusing on the things I don’t have yet!

You can get excited about the first hit you get on your website, for example. You can focus on your first lead. But when your mind is looking for results before you have done the work, you’re creating a mindset of entitlement. Entitlement is wanting things to be different to what they actually are. You want results before you do the work. Here’s a few examples of the mindsets which can work against you with an online business:

• “I should be there by now I’ve been doing this for ages” – Where is “there” and what have you specifically been doing for “ages” – and for how long exactly? Maybe try another strategy?
• “I’ll wait to see if it works first before I commit to it”– another counterproductive mentality which expects results to show without belief and hard work.
• “I can’t in good conscience promote something as a successful model, when I haven’t achieved that success yet.” – I definitely experienced this mind trap. But without promoting something as an affiliate, you can’t make money from it! Belief must be there for success to happen.

Blogging And Big Goals

I started out online thinking I could write a few blog posts and make hundreds of millions from them! While it’s true that a blog post can go viral, and this can lead to many sales, my expectations weren’t a good match for reality. But also, because I expected so much from such little work, I was always disappointed!

As I stuck with it and over time, I realised how my expectations were based on many of the “get rich quick” schemes I had seen over the years. They promised loads of easy money but never delivered. I nearly quit many times just because of the continual disappointments that I had online.

But slowly and surely things got better as I kept going.

Big goals don’t come true without processes which are followed day after day. Unless you put the effort in with an online business, you’ll never see any results. With blogging, results are hard won. It’s far easier and quicker to use paid marketing. However, when I started out online I didn’t have the funds to use paid marketing. So I blogged.

What happens with blogging is nothing for a very long time. Eventually you see your traffic rise steadily and then boom! – If you get to the “boom” stage, you’ve probably been blogging for a very long time. It’s where your traffic goes from a trickle, to a stream to a flood. All of a sudden, you’re making sales and it’s like Christmas! Your sales come in whether you work or not! That’s always been my goal. The hard part is keeping going through the desert when nothing seems to happen.

Daily Processes Instead Of Goals

When your long term goals/desires line up with your daily habits, you know you are on track. Everything feels right and you know you can just keep going, following your daily habits and things will eventually transpire the way you want them to.

Having a set of daily processes you can follow almost without thinking, is key. To get to this point you need to clearly identify your long term plan. Write down what you want you life to look like in every area 10 years from now. Then ask yourself whether your daily actions will take you there. If the answer is no, you need to create some new daily habits and actions steps which will lead you to a better future.

When you align your values, goals and daily action steps, you get to work in a way which is conducive to your daily happiness and your long term goals.

Although a blog post won’t make my online business by itself, as I build more and more content online, my leads and sales come in at a greater pace over time; simply due to the volume of content I have out there in the online world.

Setting Small Goals To Achieve Big Goals – Aligning Who You Are

Have you ever given up on a goal mid way through? Or have you achieved something only to find out that it didn’t give you lasting happiness and fulfilment. Are you chasing goals because there’s a void in your life and you never quite feel fulling aligned with your purpose or reason for being? That’s why it’s a good idea to ask yourself to start with “why”?

Your reason for doing something can often be the reason why you give up, re-direct or stay the course. Once you know your “why”, you can determine whether your path is aligned with your highest values. Knowing your values will save you heaps of time and wasted energy too. Your “why” is the reason you decide on a particular path or journey.

It’s easy to forget that we can achieve pretty much anything we set out minds to. Instead though, most of us get caught up in repeating patterns and habits which don’t lead us to our ideal lives.

Can you really learn entrepreneurship online? Back in 1995 I began my online journey when eBay opened its doors. I sold a few things from around the house but years later started using the platform to buy and sell. Originally I found the strategy from an ebook I bought from the site.

I considered the ebook purchase for some time. Despite being able to make a profit using the strategy in the ebook, I thought the ebook was a better strategy. The idea wouldn’t go out of my mind that this simple transaction was automated. I wanted to get on the other side of the digital download business, and make money on autopilot. I started to learn entrepreneurship online, although I never really considered that was what I was doing.

Learn Entrepreneurship Online

I began to create my own ebooks. At the time I was working as a stunt performer in the UK and thought it a good idea to write a short “how to” book about it. I also did one about becoming a TV extra too and attempted to sell them. Unfortunately I was lost and hadn’t a clue about selling anything online back then. I thought I could just put up a website and people would come.

But little did I know back then, I may as well have put up a restaurant in the middle of the dessert. Nobody saw my website and I never made any sales. So I bought a few online courses which claimed to teach me how to make money on the internet. See my digital profit course review for some of the courses I took.

Learn Entrepreneurship Online

The courses I took led me down several paths and I tried many strategies of making money online. The two main ones I attempted were using Google Adsense and affiliate marketing. With Adsense you get paid when people click on your adverts and encourage people to visit your website/YouTube channel by creating lots of content.

I did made some small trickles with this strategy but nothing really substantial. To make a lot of money with this strategy you need a lot of content. Plus, Google can pull the plug any time they want and did for many who had worked really hard towards building a living like this.

My first real success was selling a digital product from a review I had written of it. I used the site Hubpages and didn’t even have my own website. You can read about this strategy in my article “get paid for advertising online without a website“.

Struggling Affiliate

I became a “struggling” affiliate and despite making a huge number of mistakes with affiliate marketing I kept going. This, perhaps is the key to success – simply never quit! Jumping from strategy to strategy and course to course for a number of years, eventually I found mentors – an online business “all in one” training resource and community of entrepreneurs.

Before finding the community I didn’t even realise that I needed an affiliate marketing mentor. The previous courses I took only offers recordings and no actual personal help. This is the key to learning how to earn online. It’s simply too difficult to do it alone. You can find yourself chasing your tail for years, without ever getting anywhere.

Finding Help

I joined with the same mentality I brought to previous courses. I had scepticism and doubt and this held me back for sure. It wasn’t that I was lazy, just not very directed. So I spent months and eventually years focused on either learning continually (and never applying), or working on the wrong actions which didn’t move things forwards.

Money was a problem when I started out and so I focused on the free strategies. This is far harder than using paid marketing. With paid marketing you can build an online business very quickly. But without it, you need traffic and free traffic is usually hard-won traffic.

But what I really learned (from personal help) was how to get out of my own way and to think differently. I learned how to transition from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial one.

The invisible enemy to making money from the internet is yourself. An online business can’t grow beyond the thinking you bring to it.

How Your Thinking Needs To Shift

As an employee you are trained to work a set shift and work in a certain way. You’re not taught to think and you’re basically a “technician” working a role in a wider company. Bring this same mindset to an entrepreneurial role and you’re likely to get nowhere, like I did for several years.

Afraid of spending money, I worked really hard at the things which didn’t matter. I spent far too long in the wrong activities and didn’t get the help I needed. Once my thinking changed, so did my success online. Getting the help I needed was the best money I could have spent. But before I took that step, nothing changed.

Access this mentors community and start your online entrepreneurial journey today.