Category: Affiliate Marketing Mentor Blog

Here’s my affiliate marketing mentors blog! I’ve been an affiliate marketer since the early 2000’s and I ran into a lot of problems which, perhaps you have too?

I tried all sorts of strategies at first from building niche websites, running Google Adwords ads, blogging and using free blog platforms such as Hubpages and Blogger.com.

The struggle was pretty real but I was determined to make affiliate marketing work for me because life was so difficult in the many jobs I juggled to keep the wolf from the door!

In 2014 I found a community of online marketing mentors. I decided to start agains from scratch and “empty my cup”. It was tough and it’s hard to let go of thinking you know something when you really don’t!

I don’t consider myself an affiliate marketing mentor, although I hope that this website helps people who are learning. No, I’m still, and always will be a student, which means I can keep emptying my cup when it gets too full of the idea that I know something. The online world changes a lot and very quickly. So just when you think you are getting somewhere, everything is different and you’re starting all over again!

Welcome to affiliate marketing mentors!

How To Make Consistent Money Online

Making money online is one thing, but making consistent money online is definitely something else. To make a sale online alone is an achievement. Once you’ve achieved it, you’ve proved to yourself that it can be done. It gives you belief and confidence that affiliate marketing can in fact work to give you an income.

Once you’ve made a single sale online, you can simply repeat the process you’ve undertaken to repeat the success, again and again. But what if your success was a fluke? What if you posted your link online somewhere and got lucky? If that’s the case it’s going to be very difficult to repeat it.

To earn consistently online you need to make the process of selling reliable, predictable and sustainable. There’s a few solid tactics you can use too, which make this outcome much more probable.

How To Make Consistent Money Online – My Journey

When I started out online I struggled to make any sales. My marketing tactics weren’t reliable and so when I finally did make a sale, it was a “one-off” which happened as often as a blue moon!

Because it was an organic sale, it wasn’t very reliable. A random person had found an article I had written. But before long the article was gone from the search engines, and from the social media feed I had posted it on. It was a fluke! But even though I had “fluked” a sale, it gave me hope!

In 2014 I found a group of affiliate marketing mentors who taught me a few things. The way I approached affiliate marketing completely changed and I was able to start generating sales much more consistently. Here’s some of the strategies I implemented.

How To Make Consistent Money Online – Build A List

I didn’t have an email list as a beginner affiliate and all my effort went into building niche websites (most of which failed to attract any traffic). With an email list you can build on something tangible. An email list gives you more control over your traffic.

By building a list there’s a couple of important advantages it gives you as an affiliate:

You can interact with your subscribers multiple times – (more difficult from a website where most people leave within a few minutes) (See how many touch points before a sale)
You extend the time period where someone can buy from you (I’ve had subscribers buy products from me even years after joining my list).
It gives you chance to build a long term relationship and create trust by delivering valuable messages which genuinely help your subscribers.

Getting traffic online is the major sticking point for many new affiliates and it certainly was for me as a beginner. You either pay for it with paid advertising or you work for it building content. Either way, it’s going to cost you: time or money. But with a list, you are building a digital asset you own and control.

How To Make Consistent Money Online – Sell Recurring Income Products

When I started out, I promoted the products I would buy online. These were generally low cost items such as books from Amazon and trinkets from eBay! Unfortunately, you can’t earn much in the way of commission from low cost physical products (unless you sell in bulk). Amazon pays affiliates as little as 1% commission on it’s products. So if you’re selling a $10 item you can earn as little as $0.10 cents from a sale.

I learned that in order to make affiliate marketing pay, I had to find high ticket products which paid a lot more. Digital products have a much higher rate of commission (30%-40% typically) and certain high ticket digital products sold for over $1000. They would pay you $300-$400 per sale.

You can also sell subscription affiliate products which payout recurring commissions. With a subscription product, each sale contributes to your monthly income which grows over time. It’s one of the best ways to earn consistently with affiliate marketing.

Use Paid Marketing

For a long time, and even now I use organic marketing to find customers for my affiliate products. But organic marketing is a difficult way to build an affiliate business. It can take months or even years to start getting the traction which you need to build a consistent income using only organic traffic – even with a list and subscription products.

My sales were always very sporadic because of this, and I couldn’t control the rate at which I attracted customers. With organic marketing you can control the rate at which you create content (and promote it), but the traffic is kind of out of your hands.

With paid marketing it’s different. With paid marketing you can “turn on” your traffic almost instantly. Plus, you can scale up, and increase your numbers of visitors by turning up your marketing budget. Paid marketing is like a tap where you control your traffic. Organic marketing is different; organic marketing is more like sowing seeds for a future crop! It takes much longer and as such many frustrated affiliates quit with trying to do everything organically.

Use A Product Range

Paid marketing is expensive of course and so you can’t very easily promote low value products and still be profitable. That’s why you should use a product range instead. A good product range offers multiple products within a product “suite”. It means you can refer customers to a low value product and the sales system automatically offers them higher priced items.

high ticket funnel - earning consistently online

Such as system has low, mid and high ticket offers and subscription products. Because of this you can earn considerable more per customer than you would from a standard affiliate product.

Some customers will purchase high ticket items, which give you a large pay day. Recurring income products give you a more stable income more quickly and you can reinvest some of this profit back into your marketing budget at zero risk!

Be Consistent In Your Efforts

As a beginner affiliate I would create a website and then sit back “hoping” that it would come to fruition all by itself. It didn’t! I would throw myself into another project desperate for “it” to work. But the problem was I wasn’t working consistently. I was throwing out blogs and websites hoping that “they” would simply work by themselves!

I would write a bunch of blog posts and then get frustrated because they weren’t “working”, so I would quit. A month later a sale would pop in from the work I had done previously. Only then did I believe in my strategy and get back to work. But a month had gone by with me doing nothing because I was sceptical, doubtful and procrastinating.

Once you find out the right strategy you can employ to get the results you want, stick to the path and stay consistent in your efforts. Don’t quit!

Summary

Consistency online is something which every affiliate wants but few actually attain. Initially there’s going to be a lot to do without much reward, too. But over time if you stick with it and don’t quit, you get closer and closer to an automated business which is profitable without having to do very much.

The main things I learned which changed things for me and allowed me to get more consistent in my sales were:

Building a list – a list of email subscribers puts you in control of traffic and allows you to build a digital asset
Using subscription (and high ticket) products – subscription products give you a recurring income when you make a sale.
Use of paid advertising – paid advertising is much faster and more controllable than organic marketing (which is slow and unreliable).
Finding a high value product range to sell – which gives you multiple income streams and greater access to use of paid marketing tactics
and of course being consistent in your efforts is a major “key” too. It’s easy to work like an ox for a week and then take a week off. Affiliates who make daily habits out of working on their businesses are the ones who are successful!

Learn more about this here.

Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online

What is the easiest way to sell digital products online? There’s several ways you can sell products online and some are easier than others. But one of the best and easiest ways to sell digital products is by sending paid traffic to a landing page. Collect subscribers by offering some freebie giveaway to them such as a free course or ebook. Follow up with an email marketing campaign which delivers value, builds trust and promotes your digital product/s.

There’s lots of good reasons to build an email list and particularly with digital products it’s because digital products tend to be more vague than physical products. With a physical product you know what you’re getting; what you see is what you get. But it can be more difficult to determine the value of a physical product because it is less tangible.

By delivering value through an email course you can also show the value of your product to your potential customers. From a website, this is more difficult because most visitors only stick around for a few minutes; after that they are gone forever. But once they are on your email list, you can extend the time period with which they make a buying decision.

Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online

There’s another reason to use email marketing too and it’s because most people don’t buy a product on their first time seeing it. In fact unless a website is trustworthy, people need 6-8 touchpoints with that product/advertiser before they will buy.

This is very difficult to do if you only have a website to sell from. Most visitors will not come back after landing on your site, and they are only there for a couple of minutes if that. But once on your email list, you can follow up with useful information to keep them engaged over weeks, months and even years.

This gives you much more opportunity to interact with them, give them information about your products and build trust with them.

Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online – Traffic

The easiest way to drive traffic towards your landing page is with paid advertising. It’s fast and scalable unlike organic marketing which can take months before you see the results of your labour. One of the best ways to do it is through the use of video, too. With video you can convey more information in a shorter time period than you can with a written (text based) advert.

Over 50% of communication is unconscious, so video is obviously the answer to communicating online. The belief is that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken, although opinions vary on this. In an online video there are also cues picked up from the lighting, background and energy or “feel” of the person talking.

Before setting out and creating a video advertisement, it’s worth knowing your target audience is first so you can effectively attract the right kind of people to your product.

Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online – Product Reviews

Another common tactic of an affiliate marketer is to create a product review, either in written or video format. A product review is one of the best ways to sell online because it attracts someone who is specifically looking for the product you’re talking about, or one like it. If they believe you and you’re not overly biased (because you’re also selling the product), the visitor has a high chance of buying through your affiliate link after they have found your review.

My first affiliate sale came from a review I wrote on a free blog website (Hubpages.com). Reviews catch online users in the last step of the buying cycle. Since most people are gathering information online, and not looking to buy, it’s well worth targeting this kind of person.

Someone looking for a review has likely already decided (to an extent) that they need a certain type of product. They may have done research already and are ready to buy, or looking to buy. They just need a little confirmation or to understand whether a product meets their needs, which your review can deliver.

Summary

To sell in bulk you need a lot of people to buy through your affiliate link. This can be done through building an email subscriber base and recommending products to your list. The fastest and easiest way to build such a list is to run a paid ad campaign sending people to a landing page. Collect their details and follow up with your email messages, promoting your products.

Reviews also offer a great opportunity to earn online through selling physical or digital products. A review works really well because you attract people looking to buy something. So if you can get a review in front of a lot of people somehow, it’s a great way to sell your products. You’ll find reviews on Google in written form and on YouTube in video format too. Getting a review to rank can be the biggest challenge here.

For more help and support with affiliate marketing click here.

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day

There’s many ways to turn a single website visitor into a hundred “hits” a day. But in this post I’m going to concentrate on doing it organically. When you attract organic traffic to your website it’s free! So any sales you make is 100% profit. When I started out as an affiliate I did use paid advertising. But after getting my Adwords account banned (back in the early 2010’s), I switched to organic only traffic.

The fastest way to turn 1 website “hit” into many is through using paid advertising of course. But there’s a problem with paid advertising: it costs money! And it’s money which you aren’t guaranteed to see back again, even if you sell something. So you need to be very careful with paid advertising because you can spend a lot without a return if you’re not careful. Anyway, that’s a post for another day. In this post I’m going to focus on completely free strategies to bring more people to your website.

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day- Get 1 Hit First

I chose this title deliberately because it’s very specific and measurable. When you set goals for your affiliate business it’s worth having specific and measurable goals so you know when you’ve hit the target. Being vague about a goal is no good. You can’t hit something if it’s not clearly defined. See my post on SMART goals and DUMB goals for more on this. A clearly defined goal also helps you to focus your actions around that specific target. Without a clearly defined goal, you can easily spread yourself too thin, doing unimportant tasks which don’t move you forwards.

But most affiliates who have given it a go for long enough have at least attained a hit on their website. If you haven’t started yet, sign up on this site and get going! You can easily get someone to visit your website organically. Simply write a blog post and then share it on your social media platforms. Make sure you have a counter on your blog so you know if someone (other than you) visits it.

Still no visitors? Rinse and repeat step 1 – write a blog post and share on your social media platforms. Keep doing it until you get that 1 hit and you’ve done it! As Obi Wan (Star Wars reference) would say, “you’ve taken a small step into a larger world”!

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Getting Your Content To Rank On The Search Engines

It can be quite a challenge getting your content to rank on the first page of Google. But it’s worth the effort, even if you fall short, you can still find your content ranks on lesser used search engines such as Bing, Yahoo and Duduckgo etc. You won’t get an easy ranking for the top, most competitive keyword terms, especially if you’ve chosen a competitive niche. But if you can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you’ll have a greater chance of ranking.

The longer tail keywords get fewer monthly searches of course. But a little slice of few is worth a lot more than no slice of many. Here’s a quick tip to get some of your content to rank:

Use Google’s keyword planner and type in your main “seed” keyword
Scroll to the end of the list (by clicking on av. monthly searches) and you’ll see the keyword terms which get the least monthly searches. These tend to be less competitive and have more keywords in them
Write content around these terms and use an SEO plugin to help you write SEO friendly content which has a better chance of ranking (SEO = Search Engine Optimisation)

Now you might not rank your content at all, so don’t hold your breath. But if you keep at it some of it will rank, especially if you do a good job of writing useful content.

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day:Write For Your Target Audience

Before you set about writing a tonne of content, it’s worth mentioning what you’re going to be writing about. Don’t just choose any old topic. Make your content relevant to your target audience. The target audience is the visitor/s you want to attract to your affiliate products.

Most online traffic doesn’t turn into sales. Most people are simply browsing, gathering information. But if you focus on learning about your target audience/customer avatar, you can attract more of the people who are likely or wanting to purchase your products.

To learn more about your target audience visit the customer avatar worksheet pdf on this website. As a quick example, a product review attracts someone who is likely to buy, whereas a “how to” guide is less likely to produce a sale from your visitors.

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Sharing Your Content Automatically With Plugins

If you write a good amount of content some of it might rank on the search engines and this is a major key to attracting organic traffic for free. However, nothing is guaranteed with the search engines so it’s worth also promoting your content yourself too. You can do this by sharing content throughout your social media platforms.

This is often a step that bloggers forget after they have finished a post (I certainly did). What a waste because no one will see your content unless you promote it! There’s a few plugins you can use to help automate the process of sharing your content as you publish it. Here’s a couple of plugins you can use to help you:

Revive Old Posts plugin for WordPress
Social Media Share buttons – for visitors to share your content

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Write SEO Friendly Posts

SEO friendly means they have been specifically written with the search engines in mind and the word count of your specific keywords are considered when writing. I use a plugin called Yoast SEO.

SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and by writing SEO friendly post you’re letting the search engine “spiders” know what your content is about and the keyword/s you want them to rank for. You’re still writing for the person reading your post, but a plugin can help you get the word count right and optimising your content for SEO can help you when it comes to ranking your posts.

Build BackLinks

Building backlinks was always the last thing I wanted to do, so I outsourced it to this company! You can do this yourself of course by posting on other people’s blogs though blog commenting or guest posting.

Backlinks are used by Google (and others) to help determine the authority and ranking position of a website. So a lot of back links from high quality websites which have high authority is going to do you a lot of good when it comes to ranking your content on the search engines.

If you concentrate on creating high quality content, and promoting it, backlinks should be a natural by-product of your high quality posts. People should share and link to them over time which would give you a natural link profile anyway, which is what Google looks for. So avoid paying spammy companies for many links at once, it can have the opposite affect and make your site look spammy.

Rinse and Repeat

I’d like to tell you that some magic will happen when you do all of these steps once! But sadly it isn’t going to happen! In reality, you’re going to need to spend a few months building content and posting it throughout your social media platforms.

Over time as your domain authority improves, you should see some of your content ranking with the longer tail keywords you’ve written content for. This means you’ll likely see only a trickle from the ones which rank. That’s because long tail keywords have fewer monthly searches. But just remember that this is free traffic, so it’s worth building more of these little trickles! Eventually you’ll have a stream and then a river!

You have also build a load of backlinks by sharing content throughout social media. The knock-on effect of this is people will like, share and even link back to your content over time. In turn this will help boost your domain authority and your rankings.

Tipping Point

There will come a tipping point if you carry on doing this for long enough and even though it can be tough, it’s worth pursuing. There were times I wondered whether it was worth all the hard work I put in to blogging. But then a sale would drop in (organically) and I would have another spirt of enthusiasm!

By building content which serves your target audience in some way and attracts potential customers to your products, you are ultimately placing a number of fishing lines in the river, and fishing for a catch!

Your website traffic has multiple sources:

Organic search engines: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and Google
Social media platforms where you and others have shared your content
Backlinks from blog commenting and guest posting.

Build More Sources Of Traffic To Existing Content

Your plugin Revive Old Posts is a great one too. It quietly posts your older posts throughout your social media platforms in the background, while you get on building new content. But there’s a couple of other things you can do to speed up your traffic growth too. One of them is to build an email list of subscribers and send out regular messages to them sharing your new content.

An email list gives you greater control over your traffic, whereas earning traffic organically takes time, and paying for it cost money, a list gives you the power to send your subscribers directly to your content whenever you like!

Quora.com

Quora.com is a question and answer website where you can post answers to relevant questions and also post links to your content. Although Quora doesn’t give you a “do-follow” link, which means you don’t get any ranking “juice” from it like with a guest post, you can attract traffic through Quora.

So by making a small daily habit out of finding and answering questions, you can build up a lot of content which links back to your blog posts. I’ve used this little tactic to great effect and it does bring in traffic, leads and sales.

Quora users look for questions they want to know about and if they find your content, they can also link to your blog post. Make sure to post only relevant content which helps to answer the question and read Quora’s terms and conditions so you don’t fall foul of their link policies. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Paid Marketing

Now I know I said this post was about organic marketing, but still a little paid advertising can easily make a massive difference to your traffic with only a little marketing budget. So it’s worth a mention here. Once you have a good amount of content under your belt, you can also use what’s called a “dynamic” advert on Google Adwords/Microsoft Ads.

A dynamic ad creates adverts which are relevant to your content and serves those ads to people looking for what you’ve written about. You can start an ad for as little as $1 a day too, which means you can test and measure your advertising at very little risk.

Summary

Each of these strategies will take some effort and time but content marketing is renowned for being a much more “slow and steady” form of online marketing than through using paid ads. Over time, if you persist, you should find more and more traffic is landing on your content; especially if you build multiple streams where they can come from:

Organic search results – through your SEO efforts and writing high quality content for long tail keywords in your niche
Social media – through your own sharing of your content and the sharing from your visitors
Back links – improve your SEO score but also bring traffic directly from other websites in your niche
Quora and other Q&A websites – answer questions, provide value and you’ll be allowed to link back to your content from Quora.com, bringing in another source of traffic
Your email list – build an email list from your blog by offering some value driven giveaway (see my ebook/video course) on your site. Send subscribers back to new content and/or your affiliate products
Paid advertising – with a little paid advertising at low cost you can easily push up your website “hits” to 100 given the time and effort. Pay more and you get more traffic!

Remember it’s the small steps you take every day which lead to the big breakthroughs over time. Don’t get overwhelmed with the size of the job ahead of you, focus only on the small step in front of you! This book is a great accompaniment to the blogging strategy:

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work?

So how long does it take for content marketing to work? By “work”, in this instance, I mean how long does it take to start producing an income from content? Content marketing can take many forms. You can create a YouTube channel or build a blog, for example. So the time it takes will depend on many variables which I’m going to define in this post.

Generally though, it will take several months to start seeing a regular stream of traffic from content marketing if you create content regularly and promote it well. How you monetise that traffic will determine how much money you can make from it. The type of traffic you attract through your content will also have a bearing, and the relative competition in the niche you choose will massively impact your success, or lack of it.

So let’s have a look at some of the variables involved in creating content and getting paid for it!

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – SEO & Content Promotion

Typically SEO (search engine optimisation) is very slow. So if you’re relying on your content getting ranked on Google, Bing, Yahoo or on YouTube and other search engines it can take a few months. Your content may never rank too, which is a consideration. In a competitive topic/niche, there’s thousands or even hundreds of thousands of competing websites or videos. So even with awesome content which out performs others, you’re up against high authority domains and channels which will out perform you because they’ve been around much longer than you.

They may have tens or hundreds of thousands of back links which have accumulated over many years. So competing with these high authority sites can be incredibly difficult. So if you’re in a competitive field it’s going to be useful to self promote all your content. This can be done through sharing on social media and through building an email list of subscribers.

Content promotion, when done well will massively speed up your progress. If you simply publish your content and sit back waiting for it to show up in the rankings, you’re going to be very disappointed! It may never show up! So once you have published some content, always promote it through sharing it as much as possible.

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – Your Choice Of Niche/Topic

In a competitive topic, such as money making online for example, it’s going to be very competitive. With a lot of competing content out there and some high authority channels and domains taking the top rankings for many of the best keywords. A new website won’t rank anywhere near the top of Google for the top keywords.

There’s ways round this of course and one way is to find and target long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty.

You don’t have to rely on Google for your traffic either. You can publish your content throughout your social media presence and create a strategy for finding visitors there.

In a less competitive niche, you’re going to be able to rank your content more easily, so you can attract traffic more quickly to your content. If you have a particularly “out there” niche, and therefore little competition, you might even find yourself getting visitors quite quickly.

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – Targeting “The Right” Traffic

Not all traffic is equal, so if your aim is to get targeted traffic to your website, or channel, you’re going to need to determine who that is specifically. Targeted traffic is super important, especially if you’re monetising your website with a specific product or service. Some content will attract buyers and some will only attract “browsers”.

You really want the buyers coming to your website so before you create content, make sure you know who they are. For example, a review of a product will attract people looking to purchase that particular product. This kind of visitor is very likely to buy from you if you can attract them.

On the flip side, “how to guides” don’t attract such specific buying traffic. More likely they will take your guide and leave without having made a purchase.

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – How You Monetise

You can also monetise a website or video channel without selling products from it using advertising placed on your content. This can be done through using Google Adsense, for example, or a similar service. With advertising on your content you get paid for each click on an advert. Your type of content will determine how much a click is worth, with more competitive topics paying more.

If you use affiliate products to monetise your content the targeting of your content is more important, since whatever you create will attract a certain type of visitor; and you want buyer traffic.

Your choice of affiliate products too is important and needs to match your niche. So in a golf niche for example, you would promote some golf related course, training or physical product to your visitors.

This can be done through the use of email marketing. This can dramatically speed up the process of making sales from a website/channel. By choosing subscription products (which carry recurring income) and high value products, you can become profitable more quickly, too.

Using Email Marketing To Speed Up The Process

Email marketing is another “ace” up the sleeve of content marketers. By offering a freebie giveaway on your content, such as an ebook, you can encourage content visitors to subscriber to your list.

An email list gives the content marketer a means to interact with their visitors on a more regular basis and build a longer term relationship. On a website, visitors only stick around for a few minutes. So they are less likely to make a purchase. But get them on your email list and you can follow up with them for months and even years.

This can dramatically speed up the process of selling from your content alone.

Your Content

Your content of course is massively important in the equation of generating an income from content creation. If visitors are impressed with it, they are much more likely to take further action on your site; share it, sign up to your list or purchase a recommended product, for example. This is a massive signal to Google (and other search engines) that your content is valuable.

If people like your content they are likely to share it and link back to it. This gives you a natural looking link profile which is a major SEO signal to the search engines. If you continue creating valuable content for long enough, you should see your content begin to rank on the search engines, further boosting your visitor numbers.

This has a compounding effect over time as more people get to your posts, more will share it and purchase from you/sign up to your list. See also the magical compounding effect of blogging.

Not only do you need to create awesome content which is share-worthy, but you need to actively promote it, too. How well you do these two things are a huge factor in how long it will take you to get a high volume of traffic, leads and sales through your content.

Summary

So, how long does it take for content marketing to work? You could create a post and publish it on social media, attracting a buyer straight away, (in theory), assuming you’ve set up your site/channel to sell something. But long term consistent traffic, leads and sales will take much longer than the odd “lucky win” you might get. In most cases it’s going to take months of consistent publishing and sharing of your content before you see this. In my experience of blogging, I started seeing the odd sale early on, within a couple of months. Over time, they become more consistent as I continued building content.

These are the main factors which will determine whether the timeline of your success:

Your content quality, and action steps towards creation and promotion
The relative competition on the search engines in your particular niche (more competition means it will take longer to become established)
How you monetise your content and the type of traffic you attract is a big factor; ideally use high paying products and recurring income products
Whether you use an email autoresponder – an email autoresponder will dramatically speed up the time it takes to earn consistently from your content so you should definitely get one. (Get one for free here).

Because it can take so long to create and share sufficient content to make your efforts worthwhile, it’s definitely worth choosing a topic you’re going to enjoy working in. Imagine still working 3 months down the line without having made any sales. Are you still going to love what you do? See also how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.

how long does content marketing take to work

Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps

Breaking down big goals into smaller steps is an important move. Ideally spend some time getting clear on your long term goals. Dream big, because if you aim small you’ll only hit small! Once you know what you want, break long term goals into smaller and smaller parts. Eventually you have them broken down into steps you can take immediately, right now, today.

Keep taking those steps and make them part of your daily routine. Unless you do this, and keep doing it, your big dreams will likely stay just that; dreams.

In Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge, he explains that it is the small steps we take every single day which count. We all want the giant leap forwards in life; the breakthroughs, the sudden giant success, but those who achieve in life know that it’s the daily things you do which count over the long term, not the things you wish for.

The breakthroughs come often because of the tiny achievements we have made on a daily basis over time, not from giant leap forwards which comes without any work!

Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing a big goal could be financial and geographical freedom and the ability to quit your job and work from anywhere in the world. That’s a big goal. So you join an affiliate marketing training course and start out promoting something. After a few months you wonder why nothing is happening and so you quit. This is a story which is familiar to many in the affiliate marketing space and around 95% of affiliates quit.

But those affiliates haven’t understood the power of micro habits, or the slight edge. The beginning is always going to be hard. The main problem is people are looking for the “magic bullet” the “instant win” and the giant leap forwards before they’ve put the work in. They want “evidence” that what they are doing will lead them to the promised land of financial abundance and plenty! When they don’t see that evidence, they lose confidence in their direction and stop trying. Quitting is a sure fire method of failure!

Henry Ford said “whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”. So if you’re looking for evidence that something works before doing the work, it probably means you don’t believe you can achieve it. Affiliate marketing does work, but you just have to keep going when everyone else quits to see the first shoots coming through the soil.

Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – The Chinese Bamboo Analogy

The Chinese bamboo tree is a great analogy for affiliate marketing and for breaking down large goals into smaller steps. The plant gestates under the soil for several years. So if you were unfamiliar with the type of plant it is, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s not going to grow! During this time it needs to be fed and looked after and given the right nutrients. After 4-5 years gestating under the soil surface, it can grow 90 feet in a matter of 5 weeks time.

chinese bamboo Breaking down big goals into smaller steps

With affiliate marketing this is also true. At first you need to set up your website and your email marketing service. You need to study a marketing method and get people to sign up to your email list and visit your website. Initially, you will only see one or two visits to a website, for example.

See this as a win and celebrate it when it happens. Then you’ll start to see people signing up to your email list. See this as a win, and celebrate it. This is the point where many new affiliates will quit. “What’s the point?” they think, “I’ve not made any money yet and I’ve put in all this work”.

But these are simply the shoots of your Chinese bamboo tree coming through the soil. Most affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 email subscribers on their list. This is because they don’t see the bigger picture. Long term affiliates build email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands. They make sales every single day on complete autopilot. But they stuck at it when they only had a couple of people landing on their website. They kept going because they understood the long term implications of it, and of quitting!

The Power Of Compounding

Taking daily steps towards your long term goals has power over a long period of time. Admittedly, you don’t see the results for a while and it can be tough keeping going when there’s nothing to show. Joining the gym is a good example of this. Most people will join a gym in January after a period of over indulgence in the festive season. They keep up their New Year’s Resolution for a bit, but then there’s nothing to show for it.

Gyms know that most will drop off by March and so they charge a membership fee – see the compound effect of selling subscription products! The main problem is you don’t see results immediately. Even after a few months, your results won’t look amazing. It’s the small daily steps which you continue to do which have a powerful effect over the longer term. Once you start looking for results, you’re in trouble.

The small changes in your body after going to the gym for a few weeks won’t look like much. But compare this to what it would look like if you did nothing!

Summary

Big goals are important because they get your excited, inspired and motivated by a vision of your future you would like to attain. When you choose goals which inspire and enthuse you, they are the right kind of goals. Goals you don’t believe will happen, aren’t good goals because you don’t really believe in them. If you don’t believe in a goal, you won’t take any action in making it happen.

Once you have a clear idea of what you want to attain and written it down, it’s time to start chopping down your large goal into small achievable pieces. If it’s a fitness goal, make a daily schedule you can stick to. But make it so tiny that it would be difficult not to keep it up when you’re not feeling like it. See also what’s better than goals. Micro commitments help you keep the momentum going to achieve your larger goals. They are so tiny, that you can even do them when you’re feeling super uninspired, which will always happen.

For more on goal setting checkout a great book I found online about cybernetic transposition by a guy called Stuart Lichtman.

The Compound Effect Of Selling Subscription Products

There’s a compound effect of selling subscription products. One of the best ways to earn online is through selling subscription products which carry recurring commissions. You don’t need your own membership products either, because you can sell existing products through joining an affiliate program.

Most affiliate programs offer you the opportunity to earn through product referrals. Amazon, for example, is a popular choice for new affiliates. However, many affiliates struggle and quit before they even make their first sale. That’s a shame because affiliate marketing can be life changing if you persevere with it; especially if you use the power of compounding to your advantage.

With most products, such as physical products you’ll find on Amazon, you only get paid once (per sale). So you need to keep selling in bulk in order to make your affiliate business profitable. But with subscription products, each sale gives you a recurring income.

The Compound Effect Of Selling Subscription Products – Which Products?

The best subscription products to choose are those which offer the most value to customers. If a product is good, and meets the needs of a customer, they will continue using it; potentially for years. If you sell such a product and it carries a recurring commissions, you can build a passive income for life. Even if a product only pays you $20 a month in commission, it’s still a recurring income. 10 sales would give you $200, 100 sales would give you $2000 a month and so on.

Here’s a great product I sell on this website Aweber. Aweber is an email autoresponder service which I’ve used for years. It’s an awesome product because it’s essential for the building of an online business. You don’t even need an online business to benefit from using an email autoresponder. Any business can benefit from it.

An email autoresponder collects emails and delivers automated messages to your subscribers. If you sign up on this website you’ll get automated emails from me with information about starting an online business and affiliate marketing. An autoresponder is not the only product which pays recurring commissions to its affiliates. Checkout subscription affiliate programs for more products to choose from.

Business tools, software and memberships are good examples of products which are useful. Not all of these types of products offer recurring commissions though so check with your affiliate program for the commission structures.

The Compound Effect Of Selling Subscription Products – How To Sell Subscription Products

Aweber is a great tool to help you sell affiliate products online too. Most affiliate marketers use some kind of autoresponder which allows them to collect emails and deliver messages automatically. On this website you should see I have some giveaways such as my free ebook. If you sign up, you join my email list and get access to my ebook. You’ll also receive email messages about the topic of affiliate marketing.

This simple method is used by thousands of affiliates to build their email lists and sell affiliate products through recommendations. Once you have an offer (a free giveaway) you can promote it online through various marketing strategies such as:

Blogging/video blogging
Pay per click advertising
Social media
SEO – search engine optimisation

A common method of selling affiliate products through email marketing is to use landing pages to collect emails and paid marketing to send targeted traffic towards it. A landing page is a web page specifically designed to collect emails through the offer of a “lead magnet” – a freebie giveaway which you can access online through your email inbox.

Knowing Your Target Audience

Your “target audience” is the section of the online marketplace who is most likely to be interested in your product. It’s important to define who this is because there’s millions of people online who simply aren’t interested in whatever you’re selling! So if you attract the wrong audience, you’re unlikely to sell anything.

When you know very specifically who you’re selling to, you can define them in your marketing campaigns and talk to them in terms of their pains and needs.

For example, if most of your customers are over 30 years old, it’s going to be a waste of your marketing budget placing adverts in front of the under 20’s. This can save you a considerable amount of marketing budget (and time). If you have a locally based store or business, it’s a waste placing advertising which is going to show outside your catchment area.

Summary

Subscription products which are super useful and even vital to business owners are the best ones to sell. These kinds of products are necessary for the running of a business. So once a customer is using them for an established business, they are unlikely to ever stop using these products. If you have referred the product to those customers, you can earn a recurring commissions for the lifetime of their custom.

This is far better than selling a standard affiliate product which carries only a “one-off” commission. Recurring commission products give you a greater opportunity to build a real income online through referrals. Each sale gives you a income, rather than just a “one time” commission. Providing the customer maintains their membership/subscription, you’ll continue to receive a recurring income from it, rather like getting a royalty payment.

What’s Better Than Goals?

“What’s better than goals” is a good question? After all, it’s coming up to 2024 (currently Dec 28th 2023 as I write) and it’s the time for New Years Resolutions! Those commitments are seldom kept though. By March most have stopped going to the gym and their lives haven’t changed much. But why is that? The main reason is that the little daily habits you’ve built up over decades are moving in greater momentum than the new ones you’re trying to replace them with.

So you join the gym with good intentions but alas, you haven’t built up the momentum yet. To get to the point of habit, you need to overcome the inertia of your past habits. That is, not going to the gym, eating whatever you want and slobbing out instead of working out. To get into a good habit of going (to the gym) takes consistent steps over a long enough duration for the action to become habitual.

When it does, it feels wrong not to go. The problem is most people don’t stick with their new goals and most drop out. Gyms know this of course which is why they charge a monthly subscription. Once you’re tied in financially, it provides an incentive to maintain the membership, even though you don’t go anymore! By March, your membership becomes a token of your gesture to get in shape and before long you cancel!

What’s Better Than Goals? Micro Commitments/Mini Habits

Micro commitments or systems of behaviour are better than goals for a couple of good reasons. The problem with goals is that you can change your mind when faced with the actual actions you need to take on a regular basis. You think about the goal and decide (in the moment) that it’s not so important after all! With a micro commitment, your focus is on building a new behaviour, not attaining a specific long term goal. These are also known as Mini Habits or Micro Habits. There’s a few great books on this topic: Mini Habits: Stephen Guise, Atomic Habits: James Clear and The Slight Edge: Jeff Olson.

A mini habit is such a small commitment to your long term goal that it’s a no brainer to do it. An example from Stephen Guise’s book Mini Habits is a single push up a day. A single push up is something pretty much anyone can do. Plus, it’s far easier to do it than to go to the gym. You can do it from anywhere (you can do one now!). Once you’ve done your pushup, you’re off the hook for the day. The simplicity of a micro habit is that it gets you to use the power of inertia. Once you’re on the ground doing your push up, you’re much more likely to do two, or three.

Why Goals Fail

Goals fail because when we are in the mood for writing goals we give ourselves a hard task, since we’re inspired. In the right mindset, we can set ourselves some pretty tough objectives, because we’re feeling strong. But when you’re hung over, tired or grumpy, how are you going to feel about doing the 30 minutes on the treadmill you have promised to yourself? Or the 30 minutes of weightlifting? When the inertia of old habits and behaviours meets your new “designated goal” on a bad day, you’re unlikely to carry out the new habit; especially if you haven’t built up momentum with it.

what's better than goals — The Chinese Bamboo tree can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks but gestates for 4-5 years beneath the surface of the soil!

With a micro/mini habit, the objective is to set yourself a ridiculously easy task you can do every single day, no matter what your state of mind is.

A mini habit can apply to any type of goal whether it is to do with your health, business, relationships or something else. A single push up, a blog post or a phone call are all examples of a mini habit which you can apply to your life. By applying this strategy and making your mini habit easy, you establish a new behaviour. Once it’s become ingrained and you can maintain it for long enough it becomes an automatic behaviour.

Behaviours are much more powerful than goals. Brushing your teeth, taking the bins out, washing the dishes. These are the kinds of things which get done no matter what. So no matter how much of a bad day you’re having, you do the behaviour. Over time it becomes powerful because you can add to it, little by little.

The Power Of Inertia

The long term idea of mini habits isn’t that those mini habits will make a massive different immediately. They probably won’t. After all, how much is one press up going to do? The power of a mini habit is in the long term power of inertia in creating the outcome you truly desire. So for example, if your long term goal is to get in shape, a mini habit would help you install a new habit of doing a press up/push up every single day.

Once that habit is installed, and you’ve been doing it for long enough, you won’t feel right unless you do it. At this point you can add to the habit, now that it has been successfully installed. Some days you’ll want to do more than one push up, if you’re feeling good. The bad days you can just do the one, and it’s ok, you’re off the hook for that day!

Over time, you can use your new behaviour to set new behaviours around it. For example, after a month of doing your one push up, you might find you’re doing 10 a day, rather than just one. Now add a sit up to it, just one per day too.

Summary

It’s easy to write out some lofty goals, only to drop them when you’re struggling with a hang over or having a bad day. It’s far easier to install micro habits which require only a tiny commitment each day, than to struggle with a lofty commitment you’ve made beforehand (when you were feeling positive).

Will power is finite and will let you down when your old habits meet your new plans on a bad day. Create tiny micro commitments instead. This will give you more opportunity to shift your mindset over time. You’re less likely to fail when you’re not feeling like it because your mini habit is ridiculously easy. On a good day, you can over perform. On a bad day, simply meet your minimum requirement, whatever that might be.

Give yourself at least 30 days of your new mini habit before changing it. You can add to the action (in terms of repetition), but you mustn’t fall off the daily routine. If you do, consider using a smaller habit which you can sustain over the longer term.

Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing

Organic marketing vs inorganic marketing, or paid marketing; which is best? The best thing about organic marketing is that it can attract free traffic, while the best thing about paid marketing is that it’s super fast. Both organic and inorganic marketing have their benefits and drawbacks and you might choose a particular strategy based on your personal needs and circumstances.

If you lack time, paid marketing is fast and scalable. Once you have a paid marketing strategy which consistently produces a profit, you’ve got it made! Simply scale up by adding more to your marketing budget and make more sales. This is the position every affiliate marketer wants to get into: where they pay $10 on advertising and make $20! Once you’re in a profitable equation such as this, you can scale up easily, and spending $10,000 on this advertising campaign should produce $20,000 worth of sales (assuming the equation holds).

But on the flip side of this coin, you can spend thousands just getting to this point. Many affiliates quit because they can’t find a profitable campaign with which to scale up. So if you spend all this cash on marketing and then quit, you’ve lost a lot. But if you learn from each campaign and stick with it, eventually you should get to this point. At this point you’ve effectively built a money tree! Just pump money in and get profit out! It’s the dream of many entrepreneurs.

Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing

But if you don’t have a large budget and money is a concern, you can go another route when building an online business or selling affiliate products. You can build content. Content creation is the organic method of generating sales with an business. This blog, for example, is an organic method of generating traffic. Organic marketing requires you to build content and then promote it. Over time, as you make a habit out of the building and promotion of your content, you should start to see people coming to your website (for free).

The upside to this is that older content can work for you as much as newer content can. This creates a compounding effect of generating traffic from multiple sources: social media, search engines, back links, blog commenting, forums and so on. As you continue posting highly useful and relevant content (relevant to your target audience), you start to see more and more visitors coming to view your content.

This doesn’t happen straight away of course and many affiliate will quit because they don’t see the longer term picture here. Results don’t show immediately like with paid marketing. You can’t control the flow of traffic quite as easily as with paid traffic. Some days there’s less traffic and other days there’s more.

Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing: Which Is Best?

Many online business owners will recommend to build up organically first, and only pay for marketing when you’re making money from your business. This can be good advice but it also depends on your business model. With high ticket affiliate marketing, (multiple income products including high ticket items and recurring income items), it’s easier to use paid marketing from the get-go. You have a greater chance to earn back your marketing budget more easily (and make profit). If you’re selling low valued products, this can be more tricky because you have less margin to play with when you sell something.

It also depends on your particular circumstances. If you’re working in a highly paid job, but have little time for content creation, paid marketing is better. If you have the time and are creative it can be better and more enjoyable to create content instead of paying for marketing. You can of course do both. Use organic marketing and a little paid marketing once you start generating sales. If you reinvest your profits back into your marketing budget, you get the best of both worlds; organic sales and a potentially scalable business through paid advertising too!

If you’re persistent enough to maintain a habit of content creation, it can ultimately give you free traffic and sales. You’ll also save a heap of costs not running paid advertising, so sales become more profitable. However, organic marketing can take months or years to come to fruition. Paid ads work straight away.

Summary

There’s good points and bad points of both organic and inorganic marketing (paid marketing). Paid marketing is fast and you can see immediately (well, almost immediately) whether a campaign is working for you or not. This comes with the downside that you’ll need to test your advertising before you find a profitable one. This can get costly too and many marketers quit even after spending a huge amount in marketing costs. Once you find a profitable campaign though you can add more budget and have a scalable and profitable business pretty pronto!

Organic marketing is slower and less scalable than paid marketing. But with organic marketing you can ultimately make sales for free once you have enough content working for you. Building content takes time and effort and there’s no guarantee of getting a ranking on Google for it either (in the organic search results). There’s huge competition for organic content and so it can often take months or years before your efforts are rewarded by free traffic and sales in enough quantities to build a profitable business from it.

The upside to organic marketing is that once you’ve put the work in, your content is doing the work for you, generating traffic, leads and sales. That’s a great position to be in if you have the capacity to put the work in upfront with often nothing much to see in terms of results in the early days (weeks, or months)!

A Life on Your Own Terms

Not everyone is motivated by money and when I got involved in affiliate marketing I wanted flexibility and a life on my own terms. You can choose your own hours, work from anywhere (from a laptop) and work in many different ways too. “Digital creators” sell products and services through their online presence. This can be done in many different ways and affiliates can do all kinds of activities to earn a living online. They can run advertising, build email lists, use social media or create content, such as this blog post. I fell into blogging because it was a low cost method of generating content online and I had plenty of time, but little in terms of funds for a marketing budget.

With blogging, you create written content on a website. Over time, as your content grows and grows, you will start seeing organic traffic coming to your website. This is what I wanted. I wanted traffic for free. Plus, I enjoyed the process of blogging. It felt cathartic. Initially with my blogging I struggled. I would write a few posts, share them and sit back waiting for something to happen. Nothing did!

It wasn’t until blogging had become a habit for me that things began to materialise.

A Life On Your Own Terms

Blogging is a slow method of generating online traffic, unlike paid marketing which can turn on traffic immediately. However, once you hit a certain point with blogging, organic traffic starts coming automatically. So when you start selling affiliate products, your commission is 100% profit because you’re not spending money on advertising. It may come a little slower with content creation, but if you have the aptitude for it, blogging can work wonders.

A single blog post won’t accomplish much however. This is the problem in the beginning. You want results quickly but it doesn’t work like that. So, many bloggers or content creators give up too easily. You need to make content creation a habit. Over time, your habit starts paying you.

Initially this is quite frustrating, at least that’s how I found it to be. I kept looking for the results, even only after a small amount of work. I would go through sporadic spirts of action and then quit. Then, a month later, a sale would drop in! “It works”! The sales would then give me confidence in blogging again and I would craft some new content with my new found belief!

Only after months of inactivity I had missed the opportunity to build months worth of content, which would have accelerated the sales.

A Life On Your Own Terms – Belief

It’s belief which drives action and this is particularly true when approaching an online business. The problem is we want results so we can prove that “it works” before we actually do any work. I spotted my own cynicism and realised the obvious conflict here. If I doubted that my online business worked before it proved itself to me, how much action and activity would I really put in. And would my doubt be (subconsciously) sprinkled throughout my content anyway, therefore putting off potential buyers!?

Certainly this was true and in the midst of recording a video some time ago I realised my own doubt was coming across. In a video recording there’s a lot of information. Someone’s tone and their pitch can all convey their own doubt. So what’s conveyed in a script for example is only what the marketer wants you to hear. A lot more is conveyed unconsciously if they are afraid or full of doubt, for example (which I was). Only when I realised that this was the equivalent of my driving with my breaks on (in marketing terms).

I realised the importance of belief, and in particular self belief when it comes to conveying an idea online, or selling a product.

A Life On Your Own Terms – How To Work On Beliefs

Beliefs can hold you back in life, not just in business. So if you say to yourself it can’t be done, or you’re not worthy somehow, your subconscious mind is listening.

Working on your beliefs is the “unseen” work which needs to be done if you’re holding yourself back in any way. How will you take the appropriate action if you don’t believe it will reap the rewards you desire?

As Henry Ford is quoted: “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”

I’ve written a post on the best mindsets for affiliate marketers. You can also access my ebook on money mindset too. In it you’ll learn some important ideas and steps you can take to reprogram your subconscious mind for greater success.

Summary

A life on your own terms, flexible working, geographical and/or financial freedom are all possible reasons people build online businesses. For me, it was a life on my own terms, at least financially. When you have an income source which gives you financial independence, there’s a lot of don’t have to’s which come with it:

Don’t have to have a boss ever again!
Don’t have to commute!
Never need a job again!
No more crappy jobs!

If you’re interested in learning affiliate marketing for greater control and freedom in your life, checkout my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners Here. You’ll also access a free video series which set me on the right path for success online after a lot of struggle and hardship in my early years as an affiliate.

Why You Need An Affiliate Mentor

There’s a few reasons you need an affiliate mentor. Firstly, there’s so many avenues to take as an affiliate, you can easily get lost. There’s thousands of products you can choose from and many marketing methods you can use. When you’re learning, you make mistakes. All of this adds up to a difficult experience for most people who try to earn from selling affiliate products.

If you create content and try to sell from your content, you never know how long you need to keep going for. Most quit before they even make their first sale. An affiliate mentor acts as a “touchstone” to help, instruct and guide you. A mentor can hold you accountable for the actions you take. If you’re alone with your endeavours, there’s no-one to hold you accountable except you!

Your friends and family may even try and talk you out of doing affiliate marketing! A mentor is someone who has succeeded and their presence gives you confidence in your direction.

Without belief, you’re going to struggle, because everything comes from belief. If you doubt you can make it as an affiliate, you’ll soon give up.

Why You Need An Affiliate Mentor – You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

As a beginner I started out with a couple of cheap “how to” courses. They both taught different things, so I was immediately at odds with my marketing methods. One taught paid advertising, and the other taught organic marketing . By jumping from one strategy to another, I wasted valuable time. Each time I changed tact, I lost momentum. An affiliate mentor can help you choose the best strategy for you, according to your situation.

I also sold cheap items from eBay and Amazon and barely made anything in commission even when I did make a sale! This is incredibly demoralising, when you finally make a sale but you earn next to nothing for it.

I learned the best products to sell which gave me recurring and high ticket commissions. Before I found a mentor, I wasted a tonne of time selling low value physical products.

Why You Need An Affiliate Mentor – The Traps Of Affiliate Marketing

A good mentor can help you become aware of the many mind traps of affiliate marketing. Jumping from one course to another for example is one such trap. If you think there’s an easy way to do things, a “magic bullet” for affiliate success, you’ll believe all those marketers who tell you so and you’ll keep jumping ship when things get tough looking for an easier way. That’s not going to help you in the long run. Affiliate marketing can be tough, but you need to stay the course and overcome the difficulties you encounter to get anywhere with it.

Being a “busy fool” is another one. A busy fool spends time on those actions which although perhaps enjoyable, don’t move your affiliate business forwards. A mentor will hold you accountable to the tough tasks and present the hard truths about time wastage.

Getting stuck in learning mode is another affiliate trap. It feels productive learning and indeed it can be. But once you’ve learned enough, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned and put the theory to practice. Without action you won’t get anywhere with affiliate marketing. Once you know your direction, take action and shift your learning:implementing ratio to 80% implementing and taking action to 20% learning.

Summary

For me, finding an affiliate mentor completely changed things in affiliate marketing. I learned to build an email list, whereas before I was relying on organic traffic for my sales. I learned to promote subscription and high ticket items, which gave me residual and larger commissions. Being part of an online community gave me accountability and I was able to reach out and ask for help. Two community members helped me overcome my fears when I nearly quit several years ago. This help and support is vital because you will run into difficulties and doubt the journey.

If you’re alone, you’re much more likely to quit and 95% of affiliates do so. If you’re ready to get started you can do that here.