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!

Free Ebook Make Money Online

My online journey started with a search for “free ebook make money online”! I tried all kinds of strategies and business models before I finally found something that worked. So it’s fitting that I write this post and share a free ebook. Click on the image below to download this ebook completely free:

Free Ebook Make Money Online – Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. For me it was the most powerful too. After trying various online earning strategies such as eBay, Forex trading, Google Adsense and affiliate marketing, it was the latter which worked the best for me. With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products to sell and you don’t have to deal with any customers. You simply refer customers to other people’s products online.

So the main skill you need for affiliate marketing to work for you is marketing. This can take many forms such as blogging, content creation, social media marketing, email marketing or paid marketing methods. Because there’s so many ways to do affiliate marketing, it can suit most people. Working all hours? Use paid marketing. No money? Build content instead.

When I first started out I had no money for advertising. So I created written content on a free blogging site; Hubpages.com. My very first sale came from a review I had written. I knew then that affiliate marketing was the way to go.

Free Ebook Make Money Online – Types Of Products

There’s thousands of products to choose from in affiliate marketing. I made a lot of mistakes when I started out and wasted a lot of time. Hopefully my ebook will clue you up to the things NOT to do. For example, I used low value physical products which paid peanuts. So when I eventually did make a sale, it paid next to nothing in commissions.

I’ve since learned to promote products which reward me for the lifetime of a customer. With physical products – you only get paid once as an referrer. But with certain products, such as those which carry memberships, you can get paid over and over again for your referrals. This is particularly important as a beginner affiliate because you’ll need some positive feedback to keep going initially. When it’s a tiny one off commission, it’s more difficult. But when you see a regular income coming from your efforts quickly, you’ll see the huge potential of selling other people’s products online.

Get Help – With Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts

It can be very difficult starting out as an affiliate marketing. You’re going to be bombarded with information and your email inbox gets rammed with the offers you’ve signed up for. This can become overwhelming and the result is inaction. I joined a community in 2014 who helped me to stay consistent in my efforts and believe in affiliate marketing as a real career path.

Without that support I doubt I would have continued for long. You can join an online community, get products to sell and support and coaching- just sign up to my email using a form somewhere on this website for more information.

Getting help and support is pretty underrated. I believed I could do everything by myself when I started out. But affiliate marketing is pretty vast. You can spend years jumping from one strategy to another without getting traction. So aligning yourself carefully with the right products and marketing strategy can shave years off your affiliate journey.

Summary

Download my free ebook below and learn how to make money online:

Here’s the main things I learned over struggling with affiliate marketing for a few years:

Organic marketing is very slow and it can take months or years to gain traction
Use paid marketing if you can – it’s fast and more scalable
Use an email autoresponder. Get one free here. Building an email list puts you in charge of your traffic.
Subscription products pay you over and over again. It much easier to build a sustainable income with these kinds of affiliate products.
Use high ticket products – they give you more leverage, you earn more and it’s easier to access the costly marketing platforms with them.
Get help – affiliate marketing is tough by yourself. Especially if you’re surrounded by people talking you out of doing it!

Selling eBooks From Your Own Website

Selling ebooks from your own website is quite simple. First create your ebook and save it to pdf format. Then upload it to your files on your website. On a WordPress website you can click on Media and then click “Add New Media Files”. Then upload your pdf and copy the url to your clipboard.

Click on select files and upload your pdf from your laptop or computer.

Once you have your pdf file uploaded, you’ll want to create a sales page for selling your ebook. If you haven’t already got one, you can create an ebook cover using Fiverr.com fairly cheaply. Here’s one I had done using Fiverr:

how to sell an ebook from your website — Click on the image to see my sales page.

Selling Ebooks From Your Own Website

Once you have created a sales page, you’ll need to add a payment method. I use Paypal for this. You can create a Paypal button which sends your customers to the ebook once they have gone through checkout. You’ll need a Paypal account to do this. Once set up head over to Paypal.com/buttons.

You’ll need to be logged in to Paypal to create a button for your website. Click on the payment button you want to use. I use buy it now.

how to set up a buy it now button on Paypal

Fill out the details for your button and then click on optional settings:

You’ll come through to a page which looks like this:

Check the box for “Don’t request a customer shipping address” and fill out the two fields below that on the page. You’ll need to create a page on your website for when customers cancel checkout before the purchase. Here’s my “cancelled checkout” page. For the successful checkout page, send your customers directly to your ebook pdf url.

Copy the code once you have completed the checkout button and past it on your sales page near your ebook image.

Selling Ebooks From Your Own Website

Once you have finished, you should have a sales page which looks something like this:

Make sure the details on your sales page match the inputs you have created with your Paypal button. You can check out the sales page I created for my ebook here.

Selling Ebooks From Your Own Website – Traffic

That’s the easy part! Now you have created your sales page, Paypal button, cancelled checkout page and uploaded your ebook to your website, you’ve almost done. You’ve created a potentially automated source of income. Congratulations! Now you just need to send thousands of hungry buyers to your page!

I’ve written a lot about how to send organic traffic to your website and how to use paid advertising. Checkout paid advertising versus organic marketing too.

My favourite way to drive traffic for free is to create a lot of content on my website. Pdf’s are particularly good because you can target the main keywords with which you want to rank your ebook for. PDF articles are much less competitive on the Google search algorithm. So if your PDF is in a particularly unsubscribed to niche, you can win a lot of free traffic should your article rank highly on Google. See also find low competition long tail keywords.

PPC Advertising – Running Paid Ads To Your Ebook

The fastest way to drive traffic though is through using paid advertising platforms:

Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing)
Facebook
Google Adwords
Other social media platforms (Linkedin, X, etc.)

A good place to start is with Microsoft advertising. Set up a campaign which targets people searching for keywords which relate to your ebook. So for my ebook (on affiliate marketing), that would be things such as “affiliate marketing for beginners”, “step by step affiliate marketing”, “affiliate marketing for dummies” and so on. Test and measure advertising carefully with a small marketing budget. Once you find a “vein of gold” which brings in consistent sales and you’re making profit, you can slowly start to increase your budget.

Summary

The setting up of the page to sell your ebook is fairly easy. Getting targeted traffic to your sales page is the more difficult part of selling online.

Before I became an affiliate marketer, I tried (in vain) to sell an ebook and struggled to make sales. I couldn’t get people (in enough volume) to my website because I didn’t understand how to attract the right customers.

So before you spend a huge amount of time writing an ebook which might not even sell, it’s worth getting some help and support in the most important part of selling online: marketing. You can even sell other people’s products as an affiliate while you’re learning. So you can save a lot of time and effort without even using your own products!

Access an online training and education platform which offers products to sell and help and support with your marketing efforts here.

Controlling Your State Of Mind

Controlling your state of mind is particularly important when you’re building an online business, but it’s also useful in life in general. Once your affiliate business has given you some positive feedback, you have faith it in and in yourself. But before this happens there’s often a whole lot of worries and anxiety. You might be wondering whether affiliate marketing actually works? This thought alone is enough to send you down the spiral of uncertainty and disbelief – hardly the place of empowered action!

The opposite side of the coin is of course faith, belief and positive action. But this action won’t happen from a thought pattern of frustration and scepticism. So if you’re struggling to get started, indecisive of your next step or stuck in procrastination mode, the key is to get started doing something. But when you’re frustrated and disillusioned, how do you get started?

The answer lies in changing your state of mind. It’s the smallest most inconceivable step which is totally invisible. When you’re trying to take a positive step, but something holds you back, it’s often your mindset which needs to change.

Controlling Your State Of Mind

My mentor explained to me that controlling your state is one of the most important things an affiliate can learn. As an affiliate, (or in any worthwhile endeavour), you’re going to experience some set backs. When these set backs come, how you deal with it will determine your ultimately success.

Most affiliates quit because of some small setback. Unfortunately they quit too early. If you keep going long enough you’ll experience some small win. This can change your feedback loop. You have now achieved something notable. If your “win” is making $1000 a month, for example, but you haven’t started doing anything, you’re going to get very frustrated when it doesn’t happen. If your win is to build the website, you can acknowledge your achievement much more quickly. Celebrate small wins and give yourself a pat on the back.

Small steps are within your control when building something big such as an internet business. Write a blog post, join a course, run an advert. Frustration happens when we focus on the wins we would like to have way down the line. We look at our lack of results and become disillusioned. This reinforces our negative state. It’s a downward spiral which leads to no action, and no results.

To reverse this pattern of negative feedback, look for small steps and achievements you can do right now, today. Do them. Then reward yourself for having taken some small action. This reinforces the positive self esteem needed to sustain the efforts longer term.

Controlling Your State Of Mind – Negative Versus Positive Feedback Loops

In my worst days, I look at others who have achieved far more than me. I wonder why I am such a loser for not having achieved as much as them! This only serves to make me feel worse. I say things like, “what’s the point”? “I’ll never get there” and so on. I look at the whole mountain I think I need to climb. I become demoralised and as a result get nothing done that day. I have a “pity party” instead of shifting my mindset.

On my better days, I focus only on the small step in front of me. One of my business mentors told me to focus on the activity not the results. Once I get the small step done, I am already in a better state. I’ve taken positive action towards my goals.

Negative feedback loop – look for results I don’t yet have, become disillusioned, do nothing

Positive feedback loop- focus on a small step I can achieve today, now. Reward myself and feel empowered.

The size of the small step will depend on your current state of mind. So if you’re in a low state of mind pick something very small. I often write a blog post as my daily routine. A single blog post doesn’t make an online business, but through making it a habit, you create momentum. The same is true of more leveraged online business strategies such as paid advertising, list building and so on.

Small Shifts, Big Results

In Atomic Habits (James Clear) there’s a great image I often share in my blog posts. This is the “plateau of latent potential” and shows the journey of an affiliate marketer quite well, I believe.

The valley of disappointment is where most affiliates quit. Despite putting in a lot of work, they don’t see any results. So they quit. If only they had seen this graph they would think differently.

Making daily habits out of meaningful activities which move your affiliate business forwards is paramount to your success. But to install these habits in the first place is the work of shifting your mindset so that your actions can be consistent over time.

Long term consistency beats short term intensity, every time! To maintain the efforts needed to succeed online you need to have a positive mindset amidst adversity. When no results show for your efforts, most will quit. But when you control your state, it is your intention and enthusiasm which keeps you going, rather that outside assurance. See also why motivation doesn’t work and why you need to build habits.

Summary

Learning to control my state of mind has definitely been one of the most important skills I’ve learned from affiliate marketing. In many ways it’s much more important than earning money online. It’s a life skill which can have so many uses.

Noticing your mental state and what you’re giving focus to is a good stepping stone. Make daily habits out of looking at information which excites and motivates you, rather than that which demoralises and disempowers you. Watch motivational videos, read motivational books. Removing the overload of negative information online and on television is a good place to start!

How To Make Money While You Sleep

One of the best ways to make money while you sleep is through the internet. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets anyone sell online through automation. You don’t need your own products because you can earn through product referrals. It’s a little bit like recommending a restaurant to a friend. Only with affiliate marketing you get paid when your friend visits that restaurant because of your recommendation.

In this post I’m going to share some of the ways in which you can use affiliate marketing to make money in your sleep! There’s nothing better than waking up to an online sale. Automating the process of selling online can give you both time and financial freedom. So if you’re looking for another income stream or a way to escape the 9 to 5, this one’s for you!

How To Make Money While You Sleep – Advertising Methods

There’s many ways to earn online but affiliate marketing is one of the simplest. Simply find an affiliate product to sell and then learn how to promote it. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and services online. Here’s some of the most popular methods:

PPC – pay per click advertising – send online traffic to products directly through paid marketing
Email marketing – build a large list of subscribers and automate email messages containing your affiliate links
Blogging – this post is an example of the content I create on this website to attract people to the products I promote
Video marketing – you can upload videos to TikTok/YouTube and use both organic and paid marketing methods
Social media marketing – find your ideal customers through a variety of social media marketing activities.

Anyone can learn the skills for selling online and automate them to make sales in your sleep!

How To Make Money While You Sleep – Types Of Products

Most people have used the website Amazon to buy something online. But did you know that Amazon has an affiliate program which anyone can join? Once you have joined the program you can promote any product from the site as an affiliate and earn commissions for any sales you generate.

selling high ticket products online — Here’s an example of a high ticket which affiliates can promote to earn 8% commission

Amazon’s commission structure isn’t the best opportunity for making money in your sleep however, although it’s where many affiliates will start out. You get paid between 1% and 10% commission for most of Amazon’s affiliate products. There’s other products however which pay much more. Digital products don’t require any postage or handling fees and tend to pay much more. Typically digital products will pay between 30% and 40% commission. So even with fewer sales you can earn a lot more.

Subscription affiliate products offer one of the best opportunities if you’re wanting to make money in your sleep. You can sell a subscription product and earn ongoing commissions for the lifetime of a customer.

What’s The Catch?

The catch is that there’s work to be done before you can actually start making sales on autopilot. Many affiliate marketers will quit before they get over the hump of the learning curve. If they commit they can ultimately start making money passively and grow a large international business online, even without any products of their own!

You can dramatically speed up the journey from being a complete beginner to making sales in your sleep if you:

Use both subscription and high ticket products
Build an email list using paid marketing
Get help and support from coaches and a community

Affiliate marketing offers a great opportunity for anyone who wants to build a genuine business online through the sale of other people’s products and services. Anyone can learn if they are dedicated and committed.

A good analogy of affiliate marketing is that of the Chinese bamboo tree. The plant has a 5 year gestation period beneath the surface. Once it breaks through the soil, the tree can grow 90 feet in only 5 weeks.

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy

The most effective affiliate marketing strategy is always one which works for you. Depending on your marketing budget, available time and choice of products, a variety of different approaches might be appropriate. You should definitely diversify in your products.

If a particular product disappears, you’re going to be pretty annoyed if you’ve created a tonne of content promoting only that one product. You should definitely own your relationship with your audience. Spending a fortune sending traffic straight to a product puts the product owner in the driving seat. If terms of the affiliate program change, you can find yourself out of pocket and trapped.

Building an email list ticks many of these boxes. It lets you control your traffic, build a long term relationship with your audience and diversify the products you choose to promote.

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Paid Marketing

There’s several ways you can build an email list and the bigger your list (in general) the more people you can serve with your content and products. Since we’re talking about the most effective affiliate marketing strategy here, I’m going to say this is with paid marketing. While content marketing is great once the work is done, and gives you free traffic (if successful), it’s slow and unreliable.

Paid marketing is fast and scalable. It’s instant too and you’ll know almost immediately whether a campaign is working or not. With content, it can take months to gain traction and much of your work (and time) is wasted.

most effective affiliate marketing strategy — Convertri is one of the best landing page software’s available. It offers super fast loading times and easy user friendly interface

The downside of using paid marketing is that you’ll need to spend money while you’re figuring out what works. Many of your campaigns are likely to not hit the mark. This can feel like throwing money away. But so long as you are learning from each advert you run by tracking your data, you’ll eventually find one which produces a profit.

One of the best ways to build an email list is to send paid traffic directly to a landing page. With a landing page software you can cross test your campaigns to find the most efficient one.

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Video Marketing

While contextual advertising does work, video often offers a better level of communication. This is particularly relevant if you’re selling something less tangible such as a digital product of some kind. Physical products are pretty self evident. But some digital products such as business training courses, for example, will require a more in-depth approach.

This is where video advertising comes into its own. A short video can relay a lot more information to a potential customer than a line of text. You can also build a greater level of trust through video if you communicate in a deliberate way to connect with your customer avatar.

Selling digital products which solve large problems (such as building an online business) can be more difficult unless you build rapport with your potential customers. This can be done by talking in a deliberate way and relating to their pain points or difficulties.

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Products & Alignment

Whatever strategy you decide to use as an affiliate, you also need to be well aligned with your product/s. The better you know your product/s the more you will understand the needs of your customers. This might mean choosing products which you find highly valuable and useful to you personally. If you don’t care about (or understand) your product/s as an affiliate, it’s going to be more difficult building your business around them, promoting them and talking about them.

Ultimately if you’re passionate about your affiliate products you’re going to be a much more heart aligned advocate for them. If you genuinely care about what you’re doing, it’s going to show in your marketing efforts. Video in particular is a very difficult medium to be fake in. Non-verbal communication is said to amount to as much as 60-70 of communication.

Affiliates are in effect “middle-men” for the sale of products and services online. But being aligned with what you’re doing always comes across better than simply selling something only because you want the outcome (the affiliate commission).

Subscription Products & High Ticket

With a well chosen product you can earn considerably more than with even the greatest products you can find online. Some products pay much more than others. For example, Amazon products pay as little as 1% commission. So even if you manage to sell a lot of them, you can still end up out of pocket, particularly if you’re using paid marketing for their promotion. Digital products pay a lot more than physical product, in general. The standard affiliate commission of a digital product is around 30%-40%. With physical product it is 1%-10%.

So with certain products you can earn more even if you sell fewer items. This is particularly true of subscription items which pay out recurring commissions and high ticket items which pay the most one-off commissions. Checkout my post on high ticket recurring income products.

Don’t Quit!

While your individual strategy will depend on your own personal circumstances, choice of products and marketing budget, it’s also a good idea not to quit! Not quitting is definitely the best strategy for success as an affiliate marketer. Since 95% of affiliates do quit, that leaves only 5% of people who start doing affiliate marketing who actually carry on a make an income out of it.

So this seems like the simplest advice to finish off this article with! Don’t quit. You’ll probably want to quit at some point or another. This is the time to take stock of what you have learned, not to make a judgement. Affiliate marketing does work and you can make a living out of it (if you believe you can). But you’ll need to keep at it for longer than most others.

To succeed you’re going to need to fail a few times first, which is only natural for anything you want to learn. Checkout my recent post on failing forwards in affiliate marketing.

Get help and support and start here.

Summary

Some affiliates build content and others run advertising. Some use video and others run contextual ads. Not every method of advertising will suit everyone and your best results will come by aligning yourself to products you love and a suitable strategy which you can sustain over the longer term. It’s important to choose a path you can enjoy and this might mean trying out one or two strategies to see what works best for you.

If you’re in a full time employment (and have little available time), you’re probably better off using paid advertising. If you’re short on funds, but are more time free, content marketing might be more suitable. It’s difficult to say which is the most effective affiliate marketing strategy across the board because everyone’s circumstances are different. Not everyone will have the patience for content marketing, and not everyone will have the budget to run paid ads.

Your product choice has something to say in terms of what is affordable too, as is your choice of niche. In a top niche, your ads are going to be more expensive, so you’ll need high ticket and recurring income products to be able to compete with those other ads.

Why An Online Commission Is So Much Sweeter Than A Wage

There’s a few reasons why an online commission is so much sweeter than a wage. A wage is guaranteed when you turn up to a job of course. But you need to keep turning up again and again. If you fail to turn up you stop getting the wage.

I wanted to be able to earn from online sales and have sales come in whether I turned up or not. With an online sale, and particularly with subscription sales, you can keep earning long after the initial sale. With an affiliate subscription product you can keep earning for the lifetime of a customer.

Granted you need to actually make the sale. With affiliate marketing you don’t get paid unless you actually refer a product to a customer. But once you’ve learned this skill, it can serve you for the rest of your life!

In the initial phase of becoming an affiliate marketer, I had many problems. I struggled making those sales. But I knew once I had “cracked it” that I would be able to earn independently of a job or an employer. To me this was freedom!

Why An Online Commission Is So Much Sweeter Than A Wage

Before I found affiliate marketing I was struggling to make ends meet financially. I was attempting to make it in film and television as a stunt performer but in the early days I didn’t work much. This meant I needed to pick up part time casual jobs when I wasn’t working. After years of this pattern it eventually got pretty tiresome. Even the stunt work, which was picking up meant that I had to commute for hours to get to the jobs.

I couldn’t imagine a better job than the stunt work, but work was unstable and sporadic. I became trapped by the big pay days and couldn’t find anything which paid so well. This problem is common. The “golden handcuffs” of a well paid job traps people for years and they will sacrifice their health and well-being for the financial stability.

Affiliate marketing gave me a way out. I was willing to make much less on my own terms as an affiliate than I could make as a stuntman. After all, if I could earn even half as much from my laptop, without a long distance commutes, that would be great, I thought.

Why An Online Commission Is So Much Sweeter Than A Wage

A dream job such as that of being a stuntman is hard to beat. In my 20’s it was a dream come true to work on movies and in television. But by the time I was in my 40’s the glossy veneer had worn off. My relationships had suffered and I was tired of the long commutes and the sporadic nature of work had left me feeling uncertain of my finances and demoralised.

I couldn’t foresee being happy in a 9 to 5 job of any kind and affiliate marketing was the answer. As I became better at it, the sales would drop in ever more frequently. My decisions were no longer based on financial necessity. I found myself making better choices and becoming happier.

With affiliate marketing you can work how you like. Choose your hours and learn around an existing employment. It gives you complete flexibility. If you commit to the journey you can ultimately replace your existing income, live anywhere and plan your day as you choose. This just isn’t possible in most careers and jobs. The job always has to come before friends and family in most cases.

Having time and financial freedom is a total game changer. If you’re interested in learning about affiliate marketing you can get started here.

Summary

Here’s why an online commission is so much sweeter than a wage. An online commission, even if it’s only a tiny one, represents something much greater. It represents the potential to create a life completely on your own terms.

This is a scary proposition for many because we are conditioned to think in terms of working in a job, for a boss, and commuting as par for the course. But if you’re hating your boss, struggling with a long commute or simply looking for a different way of life, or more time with friends and family, affiliate marketing can offer the answer.

Learn more and get started here.

Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics

Are you ready to learn affiliate marketing basics? The better your understanding of the basic fundamental principles of affiliate marketing, the greater your chances of success. There’s a huge drop out rate within the business of affiliate marketing and around 95% of those who attempt to build an income from affiliate marketing quit completely.

But there’s various reasons for this. Affiliate marketing is super easy to start, but not so easy to master. There’s a very low barrier to entry and almost anyone can “give it a go”! You can start completely for free and there’s no cost to join most affiliate programs.

Most businesses fail within their first few years so the fact that most affiliates quit shouldn’t come as a surprise. Once you understand the main concepts of affiliate marketing well, you’ve armed yourself with some insight and knowledge which many fail to learn.

Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Your Customer Avatar

One of the main principles to learn is that of your perfect customer, or customer avatar. This is super important. Once you understand that the internet is full of people who don’t really care about what you’re selling, you can focus in on those who actually do.

When I started out online I had no clue either. I threw up websites in the hope that people would just come and buy my affiliate products. They didn’t, and I was disappointed more times than I care to remember.

A website thrown into the digital world online is like a barren desert. No one sees it unless you market it. To market to the people who actually want what you’re offering is the main key to success with affiliate marketing. Knowing your customer avatar is key to this.

Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Customer Avatar?

Most people aren’t interested in buying online. Only certain searches will lead to sales. It’s these searches which you want to understand. For example, someone looking online for “how to fix a blocked drain” aren’t going to be standing by with their wallets open. They are looking for information as is the larger percentage of online users. The internet is an information gathering tool, after all.

A search for a product review on the other hand is a much more targeted online search. This type of user is more than likely looking for something specific to buy. These are the searches you want to focus on if you’re going to make sales online with affiliate products.

Who is your ideal customer? How old are they? Where do they hang out online? How can you tell them about your product in an automated way? More on customer avatar here.

Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Marketing

It’s in the name: affiliate marketing. But despite this it can be easy to think that products sell themselves. Many affiliate “guru’s” will exaggerate the ease with which online selling is done. It can be easy, of course, but generally it’s not so for a beginner, hence why so many quit.

The right products do sell themselves but as an affiliate marketer you need to put yourself between the customer and the product. Any point of contact between you and the customer can be termed “marketing”. A user landing on your website gives you a point of contact to communicate your marketing message. Someone opening your email message gives you another point of content.

Most online buyers won’t buy on their first point of contact, especially with someone they don’t know. It takes typically 6-8 points of contact before someone will buy online, unless the website is already well known to them – such as Amazon, for example.

This means you need to create multiple touch-points in many cases, before you can sell online.

Email Marketing – A Fundamental Marketing Tool For Affiliates

It’s very difficult to create multiple points of contact only from a website. This is why successful affiliates will always have an email list. An email list allows you to build trust and create multiple points of contact with potential customers. On a website, most visitors only hang around for a few minutes. This gives you little chance of making that affiliate sale. But get them on your email list and this timeframe is dramatically extended. I’ve had subscribers from my email list make purchases even years after they joined.

People often never return to a website they once “happened” upon, but once you have someone’s email address you can set up an automated marketing campaign which keeps them in the loop – potentially for decades!

By delivering useful marketing messages, which help your subscribers in some way, you build trust. Once you have someone’s trust it’s much easier to sell them your affiliate products. The online shopper today is pretty discerning. They won’t fall for the hard sell and have plenty of time to shop around. But give them value and build trust and you’ll become their first port of call if they decide they want your particular product/service.

This is where the email marketing tool comes in. With an autoresponder, affiliates can collect email addresses and build a large list of subscribers to promote their products to.

Choosing A Niche & Product You Love

Choosing your niche is an important decision for affiliates. Your niche is the topic or interest which which you can build your affiliate business around. For example, if you’re interested in fitness, you could choose to build around gym workouts. If you’re interested in cooking, it could be recipes which you build a website or resource around.

A niche you love is much more likely to succeed than one you’re only half interested in, or not at all interested in. If your marketing method is going to be content creation, you’ll need to build a lot of content. If you run out of ideas after a couple of months, it’s likely to fade away. But if you’re bringing a lot of passion to your topic, you can create in it for months and even years.

Likewise with the affiliate product/s you choose to promote. If you’re only interested in the end result – making money, it might not be enough to inspire you take consistent action in your affiliate business. So choose a niche and a product you’re proud to promote and which you genuinely believe in. I made the mistake of picking a niche I had zero interest in at one point. I spent 6 months building content on a website and eventually ran out of enthusiasm for it!

Mindset

This post wouldn’t be complete without a mention of your mindset. I always scoffed at mentors who talked about mindset because I only wanted to learn the strategies for making money through affiliate marketing. Little did I know how important mindset really was.

Your mindset is paramount to success with affiliate marketing and you need to learn the strategies for keeping yourself in an upbeat mentality. If your beliefs don’t support your affiliate business, sooner or later you’ll come a cropper. If you’re surrounding yourself with naysayers and you allow friends and family to talk you out of building your affiliate business, they will definitely do so!

Don’t have a “give it a go” mindset when it comes to affiliate marketing. Have a “never quit” mindset instead. Remember each “failure” is no failure at all with affiliate marketing. It’s only feedback with the right mindset. If you see each problem you encounter as a failure, it will soon or later dampen your enthusiasm. Keep your spirits high and keep reminding yourself of your goals.

Here’s another post I’ve written on affiliate mindset and here’s another on developing entrepreneurial mindset.

Summary

If you’re read this far congratulations. You’re definitely more likely to succeed as an affiliate with this knowledge. I’ll also add that I was pretty much failing before I found some affiliate marketing mentors who helped me. Having subscription products to sell and high ticket items is also a complete game changer. You can sign up on this site to access the same help and support I found over 10 years ago when I found a group of coaches and mentors.

Good luck!

Stop Wasting Time On The Internet!

Are you ready to stop wasting time on the internet? Most of us are consumed by the internet in some way or another. It’s a modern day disease! The algorithms running such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are designed to keep you on them. They show you more and more content of the kind you like; to suck your time away and keep you engaged!

Time enjoyed wasting isn’t wasted time! Still, hours on your phone or laptop each day equates to years of your life lost over time. So what’s the answer?

One solution is to remove distracting apps such as Facebook and YouTube from your phone. At the very least turn off notifications. Once your apps are popping up with little red icons, and you’re jumping to attention at them, your phone is using you, you’re no longer using your phone!

Stop Wasting Time On The Internet – Build An Online Business Instead

Building an online business has made me super aware of the time suck-age which happens when you’re online. Once you get into habits of checking social media, replying to messages instantly and checking your email inbox constantly, you’re no longer in control. You’re reacting to stimulus rather than choosing purposeful pursuits.

So one of the best ways to put yourself in control of your time is to choose a purposeful activity. Don’t log online unless you have a specific reason to. In Tim Ferris’s 4 hour work week he suggests strategies to control your time online. Avoid constantly checking emails and designate only two specific time slots daily for doing so. This free’s up your time and mental energy, which can be used on more productive pursuits – such as building an online business, for example!

Stop Wasting Time On The Internet – My Daily Average – OMG!

Looking at my daily average time spent on just my phone is horrifying! 4 hours and 20 minutes spend looking into my screen!

Admittedly some of that time is to look at statistics and reply to emails I receive for the online business. But I would hazard a guess than most of it is spent browsing social media and sharing amusing memes! This definitely isn’t the best use of my time!

One of my productive habits however is creating content such as this post.

Strategies To Organise Your Time

There’s several strategies you can use to fight big tech. Those algorithms are run by artificial intelligence – so it’s your brain against AI when it comes to getting addicted to social media. You will lose unless you deliberately take back control on your time.

You can set app limits using your phone or remove the apps altogether. Spend time digitally detoxing completely for at least a day a week. You’ll probably find the itch to grab your phone at some point, especially if you’re hooked. Place your phone in another room from your bedroom and remove the desire to grab your phone first thing in the morning.

Here’s a great video from Tim Ferris on how to not let your phone use you:

Be Productive Instead – Build An Online Business

Now you’re more aware of the massive suck-age of time your phone creates, why not use that time to build an income online instead. If I spent as much time as I do on my phone actually working on my online business I would surely be much more successful with it by now!

If you’re ready to start, join a step by step course which shows you exactly how to get started, even with no products or experience.

Low Cost Affiliate Strategies

I started out doing affiliate marketing without much money – so I looked for low cost affiliate strategies I could do for very little financial investment. In the very beginning this meant totally for free.

I used blog websites such as Hubpages.com and free website building programs such as Weebly.com. The blogging platforms you can use are many, and you can choose from sites such as Blogger.com, Medium.com, WordPress.com to write posts completely for free.

My very first affiliate sale came from Hubpages after writing a review of a software product I had purchased. But I had some problems after that and my account was shut down. Free blog platforms have their problems and one of them is getting traffic to your content.

As time went on, I realised it was worth building my own websites and hosting them on my own domain. This gives you better standing both with the search engines and your visitors. Your own domain name gives you a greater authority than a free blog site. Plus, gaining approval from the search engines (particularly Google) is much more difficult on a free blogger site.

Low Cost Affiliate Strategies – The Niche Website

The niche website has definitely been the best low cost affiliate strategy I have used. I’ve written a post on how to build a niche website but I’ll explain a little here too. The way I build niche websites is to start with some keyword research. I research keywords that I would like to rank my website for first.

Of course the most competitive keywords are generally well over subscribed. It’s difficult to rank for them and the domain names are usually gone or incredibly expensive. So instead of going after those top (more competitive) keywords I look for the diamonds in the rough – those keywords which are less competitive but which still give the opportunity to sell affiliate products from.

This niche website has been built around the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors” and is an example of site which has generated free traffic and sales.

Back in the early 2000’s you could throw up a niche website with only a few pages on it and rank at the top of Google for your chosen keywords. Today this is much more difficult to do. You’ll usually need to show Google that your site is worth a listing at all – let alone a top place. In a competitive niche (such as affiliate marketing) it’s more difficult to rank a website than a less popular one.

Low Cost Affiliate Strategies – Blogging

Blogging is a fine compliment to building a niche website. A niche website can easily fail too and I’ve built many of them which simply didn’t work. The key factor to making your niche website a winner, I believe, is to choose a topic you can continue to enjoy working on, despite of the money.

Many of my niche websites failed mainly because I only wanted the end result of them – sales on autopilot. I threw them up and they offered little in the way of value for their visitors. Some made a sale or two, but it was hardly worth the effort really, for all the work I put in. But when I found a niche I could put some love into – like this one, things changed because I enjoyed working on it! This meant I could out-last others in the same niche who wouldn’t put the same love and attention in.

Checkout my post best niche for blogging for more on the topic of choosing your niche.

A Lesson Learned

One of my blogs was on a site built around the subject of mushroom harvesting! I knew nothing of this topic, but I was trying to rank a website on Google and this keyword had very little competition.

I did manage the rank the site, but it was difficult to monetise. After a few months I ran out of love for writing on the topic. Because I knew little on the subject I had to research every blog post I wrote! This made it much more difficult to sustain the effort needed to keep building content.

After a while another (more passionate) blogger overtook my place on Google and mine fell away. I simply couldn’t sustain the effort needed to maintain my place on Google. After several months of unrewarded work on this site, I eventually let it die! But it was a lesson learned. Choose a topic you can monetise, and choose one which you are passionate about over the longer term.

Low Cost Affiliate Strategies – Facebook

Another low cost affiliate strategy I learned was through using Facebook. Although I didn’t pursue this strategy as much as the blogging, I did find it to be effective. The strategy involves setting up a lead magnet on your Facebook page. Then join groups where your customer avatar will be likely to hang out.

Chat with people in those groups and help them out with problems. Don’t spam, simply chat. Spend a bit of time each day leaving comments and interacting in group chat. Over time, some people from those groups will visit your profile and notice what you’re offering.

It’s a simply free strategy to encourage people to visit your Facebook profile and therefore notice your affiliate offering. You can read more about this strategy in my post unpaid social media marketing.

Quora

Quora is another great resource for low cost advertising if you’re prepared to make a daily habit out of posting on the site. I used Quora.com quite effectively to build traffic back to my various websites.

Start by opening an account on Quora and answering questions in your niche. If appropriate, you can link to content on your website in your answers. Providing those links are repeated multiple times, and they are relevant to the answers you are giving, they are allowed. Directly affiliate link posting isn’t allowed however. If you do this you’ll get a warning and then you’ll get banned!

Make sure you are posting value in your answers as shorter answers with links to your content are likely to be removed. For more on this strategy visit my post affiliate marketing on Quora.

See also 22 ways to promote affiliate links for more strategies both free and paid.

Failing Forwards In Affiliate Marketing

Failing forwards in affiliate marketing is a concept I learned from the community of online affiliates I joined. You can access them through signing up to my email list on this website. It’s a simple idea. Unless you try something out with affiliate marketing you won’t know whether it works or not. Despite whatever training and coaching you have received, you won’t get anywhere with affiliate marketing without getting your “feet” wet. Much like the saying you can’t learn to swim without getting in the water, failing forwards means trying (and most likely failing) with some kind of marketing efforts.

For me, I had already failed many times with affiliate marketing when I found coaches and mentors to help guide me. I was well versed in “failing” at least! Just not succeeding! But the act of placing an advert, writing a blog post or uploading a video are all examples of how you can step out of your comfort zone and learn something.

One of the most difficult aspects of affiliate marketing is actually getting started with some kind of marketing strategy. But unless you fail, (usually many times), you’ll never learn to get good at any particular marketing tactic.

Failing Forwards In Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

For me it was blogging where my first online success landed. I made my first sale through a review blog post on a free blogging site (Hubpages.com). It was a short lived success, but a success none the less. It motivated me to keep going with affiliate marketing and the reason I’m still doing affiliate marketing today.

I figured that if I could make a single sale online, I could make many more. Before this happened I had written many posts and they all amounted to absolutely nothing (in terms of sales). But in reality, they had all helped me to overcome my reluctance to get started and actually take some “baby steps” towards building an income online.

I had failed forward so many times than one of my posts actually worked! This gave me faith and of course the data which proved not only that affiliate marketing did in fact work, but that I could make it work for me!

Without faith that affiliate marketing can work for you, you’re hardly likely to even try. But without falling and getting up many times, you likely won’t find a strategy you can run with.

Failing Forwards In Affiliate Marketing – Running Ads

I was at first very reluctant to run paid ads and in the early days of being an affiliate I had my Adwords account shut down by Google. Back in the day this was pretty bad and I couldn’t get it reinstated. But before I got shut down, I was running ads and making affiliate sales. I was about to start increasing my budget and bam – no more account! This made me switch to a purely organic method of marketing using video and blog posts to build authority from a website.

Organic marketing is tough and you need to work relentlessly (often without reward) in order to get free traffic and eventually make sales. Paid marketing on the other hand is different because ultimately you can have an advert which works consistently. Once you “arrive” here you can simply leave it running to make sales and profit.

You can easily scale up too, which is why many affiliates use this method. However, most people will experience a lot of ads which don’t work, before they find one which actually brings in the profit. Again this is where failing forwards matters. Unless you’re prepared to learn from these “failings” you can’t expect to win in the end.

Failing Forwards – Niche Websites

I’m a big fan of building niche websites of which this is one. But my success with niche websites was hard won. Before I had a website which actually worked, bringing in sales consistently, I built hundreds of the suckers! Most of them failed miserably! One of the first ones I built was called tedssheds.net and it actually ranked for the keyword from which it was built. I sold a Clickbank product from it – shed plans.

In all the time it was ranked on Google, I made one lonely sale – netting me a grand total of $40! But it was a win at the time. It showed me that organic marketing could work. I also built websites for many other Clickbank products in my early days as an affiliate – most of which, I might add, simply didn’t work at all!

I had followed some early course I found back in the early 2000’s which taught niche website building. After literally throwing up several websites (none of which ranked), I pretty much threw in the towel. It was only circumstances which kept me going ( I was struggling to make ends meet as a stunt performer).

Not Quitting

95% of affiliates will quit so the answer is to be one of the 5% who doesn’t! Not quitting might just be the winning formula for success in affiliate marketing. But not only not quitting, but also looking to your results as “feedback” (whether you deem them “good” or “bad”) is the sign of the thinking entrepreneur.

That feedback simply isn’t possible unless you attempt something which you haven’t yet tried. Failing forwards means to keep trying new things until you find something which works for you. As the saying goes “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford

Failing forwards therefore, is a good strategy for life in general, and not just in affiliate marketing. If you’re serious about earning an income online, join an community of online entrepreneurs by signing up on this website for the free video series.

Summary

When a toddler first tries to walk, they stumble over and stand up again. They don’t think “ah well, I guess walking just isn’t for me”! They get up again and again until they are trotting around happily by themselves.

The same can be said for anything new which we attempt. Just like the toddler, as newbie affiliates we are learning a new skill. We can’t expect to be experts without falling over a few times and we can’t fall over unless we first try and stand up!

With affiliate marketing, standing up means getting help, joining a course, running an advert for the first time, building an email list, or writing a blog post. Take the first step and get help from a group of online mentors and coaches here.