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!

What Is A Niche Website For Affiliates?

What is a niche website for affiliates? Affiliates create niche websites to attract a specific sub-section of the online marketplace through organic marketing. By creating content in a specific topic, they can attract the attention of the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.

When your niche site starts ranking on the search engines, you can attract traffic for free. This traffic can be monetised either with affiliate marketing products or through advertising space.

So, a niche website is built with a specific destination in mind. That is, to generate traffic from the search engines and sell affiliate products. If successful affiliates can make a passive income from a niche website.

What Is A Niche Website For Affiliates?

Before building a niche website, you need to decide your topic/niche. Choosing a niche to build content around can be tricky. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and there’s lots of competition in pretty much every topic. So before you rush off and build a site around your favourite topic, it’s worth doing some research first. Certain topics are hugely competitive and therefore it will be much more difficult to obtain free traffic due to all the other websites competing within a popular niche.

Before you choose a topic ask yourself a couple of important questions:

Will I enjoy writing/creating content within this niche?
Can I sustain it for several months?
How competitive is the topic?
Can I monetise this niche?

A niche website can become profitable within a timespan of a few weeks or a few months. Certain competitive niches will take much longer. It really depends on how much content you can create in that topic and the relative competition on the SERPS. A busy niche will usually take longer than an uncompetitive one.

Choosing A Product To Sell

Another way to choose a niche, besides picking a topic you’re interested in, is through the product/s you choose to sell. There’s thousands of affiliate products available online and your product choice can be another way to help you decide on a niche.

Without a useful and valuable product to sell, your niche site won’t be profitable, however much traffic you can get to it. Some of the best products are digital products such as tools and software. Digital products also pay much more than physical ones too. Typically a physical product will pay between 5%-10% commission whereas a digital product will pay a lot more: between 30% and 40% commission. So even if you sell fewer products from your niche site, you can earn more with digital items to sell.

High ticket items are also worth a look. A typical high ticket affiliate product will pay at least ten times than of a standard affiliate product. So again you earn more even with fewer sales.

Subscription affiliate products are another consideration. They can let you earn recurring commissions from each sale.

Selling Affiliate Products From A Niche Website

A niche website is designed to attract traffic. This is generally done through content creation and SEO – search engine optimisation. But most website visitors don’t buy on their first visit to a site.

In fact, research shows that before making a purchase someone will visit a website 6-8 times! To help this happen, most niche websites will have an email opt in offer. This allows the website owner to collect email subscribers from their site and follow up with email messages.

Products can more easily be sold through email marketing because it gives you more opportunity to create more touch points with your visitors. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes. Most never return. Once on an email list, you can follow up with them for months, and even years and decades, promoting your products to them many times.

Choosing Your Keywords To Build Your Site

Once you have decided on a topic for your niche website, you can use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords around your subject area. Type your main keyword into the planner and look for suitably uncompetitive keyword combinations which would make a good match for your topic.

You can then use a specific keyword to build your site around. While this isn’t absolutely vital, a keyword domain name can help you rank a site. This site, for example, was built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing

What are the do’s and don’ts of affiliate marketing? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing but some ways are definitely more effective than others. Before I had much success as an affiliate I tried a number of strategies which didn’t work very well.

I sold products which hardly paid me andI built websites which didn’t get any traffic. I jumped from one thing to another, looking for the “easy” path. But none of it worked. It wasn’t until I got the right help and support that things changed.

In this post, I’ll share some of the affiliate marketing do’s and don’ts which I think have helped me the most on the affiliate journey.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing: Do Get Help

So my first “do” is to get help and support and even though there’s a hundred affiliates claiming that their’s is the “best” whatever, not every program is alike. I jumped from one program to another, many of which are no longer operating. But affiliate marketing is much more difficult alone, so whatever program you join, it’s always worth getting some kind of training and support.

Ideally find a program which offers a community of other like minded individuals who’s expertise you can tap into. (There’s one on this website – just sign up to my email list).

If you go it alone, you’ll have to trawl through numerous YouTube videos, many of which will be offering up conflicting advice. Access an online community and training resource here.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing – Do Build An Email List

I struggled for some time before I understood the power of email marketing. Without an email list you’re stuck trying to send traffic directly to an offer. This can be costly if you’re using paid marketing and also wasteful – since most traffic won’t buy. If you’re building content, it’s going to take time and most of your website traffic will leave without having taken any action.

With an email list, you can extend the time period with which someone can make a buying decision. On a website, most are gone within a few minutes. But once on your email list you can send out information and build a longer term relationship over months and even years. Get an email autoresponder for free here.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing – Don’t Send Paid Traffic To A Website

Using this same logic, it’s a good idea to send paid traffic to a landing page, rather than a website. If you are sending paid traffic to a website, unless you’re doing it very cheaply, and even so, you’re much better off sending traffic to a landing page.

Why use landing pages? A landing page is specifically designed to capture your visitor’s email address. Although not everyone who lands on the page will opt in, once you do capture their email, you’ve got a greater chance of converting them to a customer.

Since paid marketing is expensive, it’s well worth doing this. Get a landing page builder software here. With a landing page, you can test and measure and optimise for performance. This can help you get your cost per lead right down and your profits up. It’s much more difficult doing this on a website because there’s so many choices for your visitors. On a landing page, there’s only 2: sign up or leave.

Don’t Rely On Low Paying Affiliate Products

Low paying affiliate programs, such as Amazon’s, can pay affiliates as little as 1% commission! 1%! With low value products you’re going to need to sell a huge number of items to make your affiliate business profitable.

So although this kind of program can allow you to sell a variety of products, and is well trusted, it’s not the most profitable business model. Digital products pay much more than physical products (30%-40%) so they are going to be more profitable even with fewer sales. There’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products you can consider and subscription affiliate programs which pay you a recurring commission for each sale.

Amazon also has a bad rep when it comes to affiliates and it often slashes affiliates’ ability to earn. When I started out as an affiliate I use eBay and Amazon but both paid peanuts when I eventually made a sale.

Do Use High Ticket Products & Subscription Products

While Amazon can help you subsidise your income as an affiliate, it may not be the best way to earn online. Commissions are way higher with high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs. With a subscription sale, you can earn every month for the life of a customer. So a sale can bring in an income, rather than a one-off commission.

Good subscription products, such as business tools and software will likely be maintained by the customer. If so, you could be making lifetime commissions from making those sales. With business essentials such as email autoresponders and data tracking products, for example, a profitable business will definitely keep their subscription going if these tools are essential for online success.

Don’t Expect Overnight Success

While there are many affiliates who do incredibly well, their success comes after a lot of work and time invested. They build email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers and promote high valued and subscription products to their subscribers.

Over time, and through learning marketing strategies, you can create huge financial success with an affiliate business. But many affiliates quit even before they make their first sale online. In fact, the success rate for affiliates is very low – around 5%. This means around 95% of affiliates drop out. Make sure you’re not one of them by staying focused and motivated even when things are tough.

“Overnight success” comes often after many months or even years of hard work. So don’t expect too much too soon. It takes time to build an online business but it’s worth the effort if you want to escape the 9 to 5!

Don’t Expect Huge Traffic From A New Blog

Don’t expect a huge amount of traffic if you’re going after organic traffic from a blog or a YouTube channel. It can take a long amount of time and effort before you can attract website traffic organically.

Paid marketing is far faster and more scalable. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and around 51 million YouTube channels which means whatever niche you’re in, there’s going to be some competition. In a popular niche, expect to work for longer.

Do Learn From Your “Failures”

Without “failures” in affiliate marketing there can be no successes. Failures are really only learnings and unless you step into the unknown frequently, you’re never going to learn anything. All the affiliate marketing theory in the world won’t help you when it comes to affiliate marketing. You need to get your hands dirty and try a few things. Most of them don’t work! But see this as feedback rather than a failure.

Keep trying things and make a habit out of taking small daily steps with your affiliate business, however you’re feeling. Make sure you track everything and when you do make your first sale, you can see where it came from and repeat it without too much trouble. This is where you’ll gain traction. But without the initial effort, you won’t get to this stage at all.

If you’re ready to start, access a training resource here.

Why Most Affiliate Marketers Fail

There’s a few reasons why most affiliate marketers fail and quit! Only around 5% of affiliates actually go on to earn a living from the business. So what happens to the 95%? Affiliate marketing is a great business model in which anyone can earn money through promoting other people’s products online. It can give you a means to earn from anywhere and a potentially unlimited income source. Surely this is reason enough to overcome any difficulties involved?

But initially affiliate marketing can be incredibly frustrating. The ease of entry and low cost means anyone can “give it a go” too, from anywhere in the world. When those sales don’t quickly start popping into your email inbox, it’s frustrating. Especially if you’ve done a bunch of work, for which you aren’t getting paid. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means you don’t get paid unless you make a sale.

This is the crux of the problem for so many who try and quit in affiliate marketing. If only those people saw the bigger picture. If only they had the time, resources and patience to continue; they would see that they can earn passively, if they only stuck at it for long enough.

But for those juggling family and a full time job, it’s just too difficult and there’s no time left for themselves. They need income now, not in 6 months or a year!

Why Most Affiliate Marketers Fail – The Chinese Bamboo Tree

The Chinese bamboo tree offers a great analogy for affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo gestates under the soil for 5 years and during this time it needs to be watered and fertilised. But once it breaks the soil, it can grow 90 feet in five weeks. As with the tree, affiliate marketing has a gestation period. Depending on your method of marketing, affiliate marketing can take months or years before it bears “fruit”!

It is this gestation period where most will quit affiliate marketing. They work for a while and get frustrated with the (lack of) results. Most affiliates will give up before they even have built an email list to 1000 subscribers.

But it is when they numbers get up with either your website visitors, subscribers or sales that things get exciting for affiliates. Once they reach a certain critical point in their affiliate journey, they can use their activities to learn which actions create the most favourable results. Once they have data which shows which actions make the sales, they can do more of that, and create awesome results.

With subscription products you can earn recurring commissions, potentially for life. But you need to break through and make your first sale before anything tangible can happen.

Most Physical Businesses Fail Too

Most businesses fail, so affiliate marketing is no different. But because anyone can do it from a laptop, it is assumed that it’s easy. With a bricks and mortar business, there’s a huge failure rate too. The difference is that with a physical business there’s many more barriers to entry. You need a large investment for a physical business, business premises, staff, equipment. It’s a commitment. But with affiliate marketing this is much less so. You can even begin doing affiliate marketing for free.

The ease of entry and assumption that affiliate marketing is easy give people false hope. This quickly turns sour when things don’t go according to plan.

If there was a large barrier to entry, fewer people would try it and there would likely be a larger success rate for affiliate marketing.

Lack Of Experience

Without any experience in selling online, it can be easy to follow a flawed strategy. Low paying affiliate programs offer commissions as low as 1%, so even once you’ve made a sale, it’s very difficult to make a living with such low rates. I struggled for years trying to get traffic from a flawed strategy and didn’t know to build an email list.

Without a list, your traffic has to come from organic or paid sources, which are expensive or difficult to build. So you can spend a huge amount of time, or money, and without getting anywhere.

When you’re unsure of your direction, lack focus and don’t have anything to show for your efforts, it’s very difficult to sustain your faith and belief in affiliate marketing. So the likelihood is that you’ll quit sooner or later.

Trying Everything For Free

Trying to build a business completely on the cheap is another reason so many affiliates fail. I tried this for a long time too and did make some progress. But doing it all for free is very difficult. There’s free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. YouTube can be used for free too. But getting traffic to your website or channel organically takes a huge amount of effort. You’ll need hundreds of pieces of content to get anywhere and even though you may make an odd sale, it’s very difficult to get consistency through organic reach.

Paying for training, software, an email autoresponder and hosting your own website should be the minimum if you’re serious about making a success of an affiliate business. If you’re unable to do this, it’s going to be much more difficult.

Paying For Advertising

With any business you need customers and affiliate marketing is no different. If you want to build quickly, you’ll need to pay for advertising. Since advertising is expensive, it’s worth buying a high ticket sales funnel so you can recoup your costs more easily and of course make a profit. With low value affiliate products it’s going to be much more difficult.

Some marketers recommend starting out with a $20k marketing budget! So if you’re trying to build a business on a shoestring, you’re already at a massive disadvantage compared to those who can afford such a budget.

The alternative to paying for advertising space is to build content. But there’s also huge competition for this. So you’ll need to spend a lot of time building and sharing content just to get a slice of the pie!

Summary

So there’s a few reasons why most affiliate marketers fail. Lack of experience, lack of funds, unrealistic expectations and impatience are just a few reasons why the majority of affiliate marketers fail.

Affiliate marketing takes time to learn and you aren’t paid for that time. Rather you need to spend time in “learning mode”, pay for training and then turn your knowledge into action too. It can take months or years before you start to see sales and commissions coming in.

Most people aren’t expecting this because they don’t have a background in business. Most people come from an employee mindset which is very different from the mindset of an entrepreneur – which is needed for affiliate marketing.

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing?

How easy is affiliate marketing and can anyone make a go of it? With only a 5% success rate for affiliates, you can bet it isn’t easy. Lots of marketers selling their courses will tell you it is easy, to sell their courses. But the truth is that although you can make an easy sale, making consistent sales with affiliate marketing, and making a living from it is much more difficult than most are prepared for.

But, there’s a few things you can do to make your affiliate journey much, much more straight forward. Going it alone and jumping from one strategy to another is a sure fire way to struggle. Get the right help and support, and things can be easier. That’s not to say easy, but easier! See also the easiest way to start affiliate marketing.

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing – Different Routes To Success

Some affiliates will use paid marketing and build an email list. They can have success relatively quickly, especially if they use a high ticket sales funnel and sell a product range which gives them recurring and high ticket commissions. But if you don’t have a large marketing budget, or a high ticket system, it’s going to take a lot longer to arrive at the same level of success.

Another route is to create written or video content. Over time, your content can attract an audience and you can sell products from a website or YouTube channel. You can even build an email list organically too, although it will take much longer than with paid marketing.

It is in this interim phase that a lot of affiliates will quit. Why bother creating lots of content when you’re not being rewarded for it, right? Well it can take months or even years before a blog, for example, becomes profitable consistently. Not many people are prepared to put in that long term effort, to only reap rewards later, maybe or even never! There’s a lot of risk there.

If you haven’t chosen a path, affiliate marketing can be very confusing too. You can jump from one idea to the next and never really get any traction. This is frustrating, so it’s best to find a course and strategy which you can stick with for some time. Give it time and have patience!

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing – How To Make It Easier

To make affiliate marketing easier, follow a path and choose a direction. Use high ticket products and subscription products. This can make a massive difference and you’ll be earning a recurring income from any subscription products you manage to sell. High ticket items give you a massive pay day and this can help you sustain your marketing budget and give you more confidence and momentum.

Build an email list of subscribers. This puts you in control of your traffic. Without a list, you’re either paying for traffic or building endless content to attract it, which happens very slowly.

Get help and support. Going it alone makes the journey of becoming a success with affiliate marketing much more difficult. When you surround yourself with other like minded people, the journey is much easier and faster.

The “Easy Money” In Affiliate Marketing

Ask long term successful affiliates about the ease with which they earn and they will tell you to get started immediately! When you’ve actually sold thousands of recurring income products, you continue to earn from them month in month out. Money flows into your bank account without you having to turn up for work or do anything, if you don’t want!

The thing is though, most new affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. So they will never see this side of the business. The trick to getting to the easy money, is doing all the hard work which most people aren’t prepared to do.

It can take months of struggle, learning new skills and fighting with your laptop. But ultimately the result is a passive income which comes in whether you work or not. If you can keep this in mind while you’re learning, and not expect an income immediately, you stand a chance at joining the 5% of affiliates who build a passive income and can quit their jobs!

The First Sale

Getting your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone. You prove to yourself that it works and you’ve got some real world experience and data to back it up! You can then use this experience to sell many more products and focus on the activities you used to make it work!

The first sale can take months or it can happen immediately by chance. There’s really no exact formula and everyone has a different experience. Someone could post their affiliate link on social media and make a sale. Someone else could spend months creating content and sell nothing! To give yourself the best chance of success, you need to decide simply to never quit! It’ll give you more opportunities to eventually make that sale and learn from your “failures”.

If you don’t have this “die hard” attitude towards your affiliate marketing business, it might not be for you!

Access more information and online training and education here.

Easiest Way To Start Affiliate Marketing

So what’s the easiest way to start affiliate marketing? Before I had much success as an affiliate, I wrote many pieces of content, built many websites and ran a lot of adverts. But there were a few things I didn’t do at first. When I started doing them, they made a massive difference to my affiliate marketing business.

Want to know what they are? Sure, I’ll tell you. But first I’m going to tell you what I did wrong and what to avoid doing. What NOT to do is just as important if not more than doing the right things.

When you’re starting out as an affiliate, you’ve got lots of enthusiasm and motivation. You’re fired up and going to win. Wouldn’t it be a great if you also had all the knowledge of someone who has failed many times and learned a whole lot too? That’s the main problem when you start out. You don’t know what the “experts” know. Because of this, you’re likely to make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of time doing the wrong things.

Easiest Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – What NOT To Do

So what shouldn’t you do when starting out? Sadly there’s a bunch of programs out there selling you on how easy affiliate marketing is. Let me tell you that affiliate marketing is not easy. So if you’re not ready to hear this, click away now! Look for the “easy” programs which promise the moon and always underdeliver!

But if you’re serious about success with affiliate marketing, this knowledge will arm you for greater prosperity.

After joining my first “earn money online” program I wrote and wrote, determined to make money through the adsense program. I made peanuts. I joined another program and was told to build websites to sell affiliate products. I built hundreds of websites, most of which failed.

The problem wasn’t the program or the strategy. Rather it was my mindset. I was jumping from course to course looking for the quick win. I wanted the magic bullet and with this mindset you’re always going to fail. There is no magic bullet, but there’s a few things which will give you an advantage.

Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Stick With A Strategy

Sticking with a strategy for a while is tough, especially when you’re unsure whether it will work. You really only have your “mentor’s” word for it that a particular course of action actually works. The rest is on trust and faith. So when this break down and you decide it’s a scam, you’ll stop working because you don’t believe in what you’re doing.

“Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right” – Henry Ford

So your course of action needs to have some faith and belief behind it. Doubt will kill your faith, motivation and desire. So choose a course with heart and work really hard when you understand what to do.

Don’t give up too easily and don’t jump from one shiny object to another. You’ll lose momentum every time.

Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Subscriptions & High Ticket Products

Ok, so it’s easy for me to say this makes affiliate marketing easier, because I stuck it out. That’s why the previous paragraph is so important. No amount of “hacks” and “fixes” will make up for a lack of hard work and you can still fail even taking my advice on this. But things dramatically changed for me when I started to use subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

A subscription product pays you again and again for each sale. So even with only a few sales, you start to see the potential of affiliate marketing. This gives you more faith and motivation, which is why it’s important to make the first sale to give you confidence in what you’re doing.

A high ticket product pays you many times the commission you would obtain from a standard product. With a low value item from Amazon, you can even make as little as 1% commission! It’s almost a waste of time promoting these kinds of products unless you’ve got a strategy which gives you thousands of sales very cheaply, which is tough.

Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Build A List

This was something else I didn’t understand when I started out as an affiliate. So I wasted a huge amount of time trying to sell directly from a website. My traffic generation was pretty poor too (more on this in the next section).

From a website, it’s much harder to make affiliate sales. Most of your website visitors only land on your website for a few minutes. But get them on to your email list and your chance of selling is dramatically increased. That’s because you can build rapport with your subscribers, offer them value and build trust. On an email list you can make a sale even months or years after someone becomes a subscriber. Plus an email list puts you in control of your traffic, whereas you either rely on paid or organic traffic from the search engines otherwise.

Paid Ads Vs Content

The two main strategies to obtain traffic to your affiliate offers are content creation and paid advertising. The “easiest” one will depend on your own circumstances.

adwords - paid advertising for affiliates

If you’re on a budget, paying for advertising might be more difficult. But if you have no time, creating endless amounts of content doesn’t look like a good fit either! Content creation is much slower whichever way you look at it, so I’d have to say that the “easiest” route is to use paid advertising and send qualified website traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers. Then, sell a high ticket product “suite” with multiple products in it.

With a suite, you can earn from multiple sales from each customer, plus subscriptions. Whereas with a one-off affiliate product, you’re stuck trying to sell that one product again and again to make the commissions. So a product suite which contains subscriptions is the best option.

Summary

So that’s my rundown of the easiest way to start affiliate marketing. If you’re skipped to this section, shame on you! Here’s the run down of what I believe to be the easiest route for affiliates. That of course doesn’t mean that it’s “easy”. Affiliate marketing is still a challenge whatever way you look at it. So you’re going to need to pull out the big guns to make it work for you, and take full responsibility for it. But doing these things is recommended and knowing this years ago would have saved me a bunch of time and effort:

Use high ticket products and subscription affiliate products. This makes your journey easier by far
Build an email list and learn how to send emails out which build trust and help your subscribers
Use paid advertising, which is faster and scalable. I’m a content marketer, but it can take months or even years to get traction this way. So unless you have a passion and desire to create tonnes of content, paid ads is best!
Finally, join an online business coaching and mentoring course which gives you access to a community. With the right people around you, you’ll have a much greater chance of success. Join one here.

Best Way To Start Affiliate Marketing

The best way to start affiliate marketing, in my humble opinion, is to build your knowledge and get help and support. Starting affiliate marketing alone is fraught with difficulties. I did this, and spent years struggling as a result. I jumped from one course to another, tried one tactic then another, and struggled for a long time.

Without proper help and support you will likely fail, as do the 95% of newbie affiliates who quit. Another useful thing to consider is the products you’re promoting as an affiliate. When I started out, I used low paying programs like Amazon and eBay which paid only tiny commissions. When I eventually did make an affiliate sale, it was for a tiny amount. If you choose to promote high ticket and subscription affiliate products, you can earn a lot more when you do finally break through and start making those sales.

Before your first sale can happen, there’s a lot to do. You’ll need to learn a lot and start out with some kind of marketing strategy. This is the period where most will quit because there’s nothing (tangible) to show for your efforts until you make a sale – which can be weeks, months (or even years) down the line after starting – depending on your marketing strategy.

Best Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – Products

It can be helpful to start with a product to sell or a topic you’re passionate about. When you align with your passion, interest or cause, you will have a much stronger reason to continue with your affiliate efforts, than if you were chasing money alone. The kinds of products you choose to promote have a large say in whether you’re going to be successful too. With some low value products, you’ll only make tiny commissions. Amazon, for example, pays as little as 1% on some of it’s products.

With digital products you can earn a lot more – often 30% to 40%. Then there’s subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commission. With recurring commissions you can earn a monthly income from each sale. This goes a long way towards making your affiliate business more profitable and more quickly.

Things really changed for me as an affiliate when I started promoting high ticket affiliate products. High ticket items can earn you ten times the commission of a standard product. So for what’s often the same amount of work you can earn a lot more.

Best Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – Help And Support

Most people aren’t affiliates. Neither do they own their own business. Most people are employees which means they have a totally different mindset than business owners. If you’re surrounded by like minded people, you’re much more likely to succeed with affiliate marketing.

As motivational speak Jim Rohn said “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”. So if you’re surrounded by people who don’t “get” affiliate marketing, think it’s a scam or that success is unobtainable to the likes of you, they will subtly (or not so subtly) sabotage your best intentions. They don’t want you to be different in many cases, nor do they want your success to out-match their own.

To succeed in affiliate marketing takes more than most people are capable of (95% quit). So surrounding yourself with positive people who want what you want is definitely a good idea.

A Job You Love

In work you love, you’re going to continue for much longer than you would if you only had a vague interest in it. If you despise your work, it’s going to last even longer. When you can align your passion with earning an income from affiliate marketing, you can sustain the necessary efforts for a lot longer.

So finding a niche you’re passionate about can be a great way to start out in affiliate marketing. The work becomes a joy and you’ll out work anyone in the same niche who is half hearted about it.

Working on your passions is much less like work! So it’s well worth taking some time to think about how you’d like to work in your affiliate marketing business. Whether that’s building a huge email list and providing value to subscribers, or building a blog or YouTube channel, think about the type of things you would enjoy creating content around.

Learn From Your Mistakes

Mistakes are going to be made with affiliate marketing. You’ll likely do a lot of work before making your first sale. But that work is super valuable because it will teach you something, if you look on it as a learning experience. Once you’ve made a sale, you can track that sale back to the efforts you made. But until this point, you’ll largely be going off any training or coaching you have received. So make sure you’re getting good advice!

As time goes on, and if you don’t quit, you’ll get more and more feedback from the work you’ve put in. Ultimately you can make sales on complete autopilot with affiliate marketing from the work you’ve done beforehand, and the understanding you attain. But this is work and it often goes unrewarded! This is why so many affiliates quit. They don’t see that it is their “failures” which are the pathway to success! “Failing forwards” is a term used by coaches and mentors because it’s necessary to fail before you can succeed!

Summary

So what’s the best way to start out with affiliate marketing:

Get help and support
Choose a topic/niche you love
Use high ticket and/or subscription products
Keep going and don’t quit!
Learn from your failures.

If you’re ready to start your affiliate journey you can access training and support and a number of products (including high ticket and subscription products) here.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers

Wondering how to do affiliate marketing without followers? Not every affiliate starts as a celebrity or with millions of followers. In fact, most start with nothing; no celebrity status and no experience of online selling. One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that anyone can do it, from anywhere in the world! All you need is a passion to succeed and the ability and desire to learn something new.

Not all affiliate marketers do the same things either. Some of them build a blog, others start a YouTube channel and some use paid marketing and build large lists of subscribers. So whatever your interests are, there’s a way to make it work for you! The key is to find a way which you like to work. That way, you’re much more likely to succeed with it because you’ll enjoy what you’re doing.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers

Most affiliates start with no followers. They build a following by either creating content or buying traffic, which they send to a landing page. From a landing page they can build an email list of subscribers, and from their list they sell affiliate products.

Not all affiliates use a list, but most of them do (and especially the most successful ones). An email list is one of the best and most cost effective ways to build an audience. On a website, or a blog, most of your visitors will leave within a few minutes. But on an email list, you can build a relationship with your audience over weeks, months and even years and decades.

Before starting as an affiliate it’s a good idea to decide what product you want to sell and how you can offer value through your messaging. Affiliates are essentially third party sales people who refer products and services online. They only get paid when someone buys a product they have recommended and sold through their affiliate link. Because there’s often a lot of work to do before this can happen, there’s a large drop out rate in affiliate marketing of around 95%.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers – Why Most Affiliates Quit

Most affiliates will quit because there’s so much to do (before you get rewarded) and a clear path isn’t always apparent. By finding a strategy you love, and can keep at for some time, you’ll give yourself a better chance than most. Blogging, video marketing, email marketing and marketing through social media are all ways you can attract an audience to sell products to.

But just selling for the sake of selling is hardly inspiring to most people. If you really want to succeed at affiliate marketing, find a cause to get behind and a way of helping and giving that lets you earn while you work at your passion.

A good example of a successful affiliate website is Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert website. MoneySavingExpert.com is an affiliate website which helps people manage their money. It offers advice on borrowing, cheap utility companies, debt management and delivers a whole host of other useful needs which help people. The site makes money through its recommendations, but the driving focus of the website is to help people with their needs.

When you can build a profitable website and help at the same time, you’re way ahead of the struggling affiliates who are more likely to quit.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers – Monetise Your Passion

Affiliate marketing is a versatile business model in which you can promote almost any product or service you can find online. As long as your product has an affiliate program attached to it, you can benefit from referring customers. If you can tap into a passion or interest which you have, so much the better.

Many affiliates struggle when it comes to choosing their niche. A niche is the topic in which you can create content to attract an audience. So if you have a particular interest or hobby, you can usually monetise it with affiliate products and build content in your area of interest.

Over time, as more and more people find your content, they can sign up to your email list and find your products. This can take some serious time and effort because you’re starting out with zero followers. But over time your work compounds and eventually you can create an email list into the tens of thousands of subscribers from only a few simply basic tactics.

List Building Tactics

You can build an email list in a number of ways:

Content creation – such as this blog post, for example or a video uploaded to YouTube
Giveaways – lists are often built with a giveaway. When someone signs up to your giveaway ebook, for example, you capture a subscriber.
Paid ads – paid advertising platforms are the fastest method of building an email list. Send paid traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers.
Social media accounts – offer both paid and unpaid marketing strategies you can use to attract your audience.

Initially, a small list won’t amount to many affiliate sales, and you’ll need to learn as you go. Over time though, once your list gains traction and you build over 1000 subscribers, you should start to see sales dropping in. Some affiliates build their lists into the tens or hundreds of thousands. You can join my email list by finding a form or popup on this website. You’ll get email messages daily and you can unsubscribe at any time!

Get Started

Anyone can become an affiliate without any experience or any following. You will need to be committed and disciplined with your approach because most affiliates will quit! Ideally get help and support and learn from those who have already succeeded. Access an online business system and community here.

How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing

Getting organic traffic for affiliate marketing is much more difficult than simply paying for traffic. With paid traffic, you can turn your visitors on, almost immediately. It’s like turning on a tap! But with organic marketing you will need to do a lot more work. If you want organic traffic from the search engines, such as Google, or on YouTube, you’re going to need to create a lot of content.

With a lot of content on a blog, for example, you should start seeing some of your content getting indexed on the SERPS – search engine results pages. You will than appear on the searches and people will start visiting your website. But, this is often after a lot of work. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, and around 51 million YouTube channels. So you’re up against it – especially if you’re starting out. Before Google will index your content, you will need to have proved yourself. Unless you are regularly publishing high quality content on a blog, or YouTube channel, (and sharing it) it’s going to be difficult to get found.

How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Getting Found

One strategy to help you get found more easily is to create content for which there is less competition. Since the highly competitive terms are going to have a tonne of competing websites, it makes sense to find low competition long tail keywords. You can do this by using Google’s keyword planner which is a free tool.

Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives which have less competition on the SERPS.

How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing

The keywords which have large search volumes are typically much more competitive. To find those with less competition, look for lower search volume keywords. You can do this by clicking on the Avg. monthly searches tab until the search volume changes:

Next, head over to the Google search bar using a laptop and look for the numbers under your search query. Do a normal search for your keyword and a phrase match search too. You should see a number under your search:

Once you find a suitable keyword which isn’t too competitive, you can create some content for it and publish it on your blog.

Using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

To optimise your content, you can use an SEO plugin. I use one called Yoast SEO which helps me write search engine friendly content. You can also build back links to your content and publish your posts on social media. The more you do this, the more likely people are to visit your blog.

Keep posting content and over time Google will notice and reward you with a ranking. This can take some time, but it’s worth the effort because you can ultimately bring free traffic to your blog. Once you’ve got a large volume of free traffic you should start to see affiliate sales happen if you’ve set up your website correctly.

Targeting The Right Audience

Keep in mind before you set off creating a tonne of content that not everyone is going to be interested in your affiliate products. Most of the online marketplace is totally uninterested in what you’re selling. So if you’re going to make a bit effort in attracting a free audience to your site, make sure it’s the right audience for your affiliate products.

This all starts by knowing who you’re attempting to target with your content. The right content will have buying customers coming in in their drives. The wrong content will attract people who aren’t going to buy. An example might be a product review.

With a review you attract someone who is actively looking at a specific product. So they are much more likely to buy. Conversely, “how to” guides are less effective when you’re selling from content. People are looking for free information with how to guides, so they’re less likely to buy than from a product review. See also how to know your target audience and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Turning Organic Traffic Into Affiliate Sales

To turn your organic traffic into sales, you need to build an email list. Email marketing is super effective from a blog. On a blog, most of your visitors are going to leave within a few minutes. But once on your email list, you can build a longer term relationship with them.

To build a list, offer something for free to your blog visitors, such as an ebook. Once people start opting in to your list, you can offer them free information and lead them to your affiliate products. Built trust by offering value.

You can sign up to my email list on this website. Just find the form or popup and enter your details.

Organic Traffic From YouTube & Social Media

YouTube is another option to get organic traffic for affiliate marketing. You can use a similar strategy and upload multiple videos to build a channel. Again, you’ll need to upload a lot of videos to start getting organic views. By finding the keywords which have less competition, you’ll likely make faster progress.

Facebook is another option for organic traffic and there’s plenty of other platforms you can use for this too. With Facebook, you can create a group or a page and target specific keywords with your content. When people look for something specific which relates to your affiliate product, your page can show up.
Here’s an example of a page I created on Facebook which attracts traffic organically (check out my page here).

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing

If you’re wondering how to create an audience for affiliate marketing, this one’s for you. As an affiliate you need to sell products and one of the best ways you can do this is to build an audience of raving fans! Not everyone will like you in the online world, but if you can offer value and help people with a specific problem they might have, you can sell them products and they’ll not only love you for it, but thank you when they buy!

When you can put helping people in front of the sale, you’ll be doing your customers a service. If you try and sell first, you can easily repel them instead. What happens when you enter a store and the salesperson comes up trying to make the heavy sell? You are repelled by them! The same thing happens online. People don’t want the hard sell. They have plenty of time to shop around, especially online. So by helping them by giving value, they are attracted to you instead of repelled by you! This is what’s known as attraction marketing!

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Law Of Reciprocity

The law of reciprocity works online very well. When you give, there’s an almost irresistible urge to return the favour. Not everyone will buy from you, but this law is an important thing to know when you’re selling online. If you’re building an audience, you want to deliver value to your people.

That way they will get to know, like and trust you. Trust is a pretty important commodity online because everyone is trying to close the deal. When you’re giving instead when everyone else is trying to get, you set yourself apart and stand out to the online marketplace.

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Have A Point

What’s the point of you? Really? When you’re selling an affiliate product, you need to place yourself in-between the customer and the product. To do this as an affiliate, you need to offer something of value yourself.

When you have something to offer – such as information, insight and advice, you can use it to to attract your audience and sell them affiliate products at the same time.

Once you know your point, you can start building an email list of subscribers. Here’s the practical nuts and bolts of doing this.

Building An Email List

An email list is one of the simplest ways to build an audience for affiliate marketing. There’s many ways you can build an email list, such as from a blog, a YouTube channel, or through using paid advertising.

One of the quickest ways is to send paid traffic to a landing page and collect email subscribers. Here’s an example of a landing page I built which I use to build my email list:

create an audience for affiliate marketing

A landing page lets you optimise to give you a lead cost at the lowest possible price. Whereas sending traffic to a normal website would mean you’ll lose a lot more valuable subscribers. On a website visitors can browse around and click through your content. But on a landing page, they only have two options: sign up or leave.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the “ace” up the sleeve of an affiliate marketer. On a website, people only browse for so long. After that they are gone forever. But once on your email list, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign which helps you build trust and get your subscribers to know, like and trust you.

The key being to give value to your email list first, rather than just sell, sell, sell! If you learn how to do this well, and put helping before selling, your subscribers will know and trust you because of it. Then, if appropriate, they’re more likely to buy from you when you suggest an affiliate product.

Too many affiliates just spam out links to their list. That has always turned me off and eventually I stop opening the emails. Stand out by giving value driven messages. Give value, entertain and deliver on the promise you made when your subscribers signed up to your email list in the first place.

Building A List From Blogging

This blog helps me build my email list and the list is where I make my affiliate sales. Blogging can be a great way to help you build an audience through an email list. It’s much slower than paid marketing of course, but if you enjoy a certain topic, people will be attracted to your blog posts and you’ll get a few subscribers if you offer a great giveaway on your website.

You can checkout the offers on this site and sign up to my list. You’ll probably have noticed a pop up and some banners leading you to my list. Feel free to sign up and check out my emails; you can always unsubscribe if you’ve had enough of me!

How To Make Content For Affiliate Marketing

Wondering how to make content for affiliate marketing? Content marking is one of the best ways to make money though affiliate marketing. You can create content in written form through a blog or through video or images. But before starting your blog, or YouTube channel there’s a few things you should know if you want to make money from your content.

Not all content you create will make you sales. In fact, content marketing can be a bit of a “slow burn” for affiliates. With paid marketing, you can see traffic appearing straight away almost immediately. This lets you focus on adverts which are working, bring in sales, and cut off those which don’t. But with content marketing it’s different. You can spend weeks, months and even years creating content before you start getting sales. So it’s worth doing your homework before you set out writing or shooting videos.

How To Make Content For Affiliate Marketing – Set Out Your “Stall”

Content marketing is the “long game” in affiliate marketing. You can generate a passive income, but in all likelihood you’re going to need to build a lot of content first, before this can happen. To give yourself the best possible chance of success, it’s valuable to choose your monetisation method and look at the type of audience you want to attract.

Not all of your content will lead to sales, so you’ll be spending time and effort creating stuff that isn’t going to sell. To give yourself more chance of success with each piece of content you create, learn about your target audience or customer avatar. Before you do this, choose an affiliate product which you can get behind and wholeheartedly promote from your content.

Once you’ve chosen something to sell which floats your boat, you can start to get specific on the type of person you want to attract. This will help you create content with the sale in mind. Creating content without this strategy in place will likely result in a lot of wasted effort, and time, and perhaps money too!

How To Make Content For Affiliate Marketing – Customer Avatar/ Target Audience

Your target audience is the type of person who will actually want to buy whatever you’re selling. Most of the online marketplace won’t be interested in buying your affiliate product/s. That’s why it’s important to differentiate between those that do and those that don’t.

When you can get very specific about who you want to attract, you can create content specifically for those people. This gives you much more prospects of making those sales when they visit your website. See also how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Content Creation – Choosing Your Passion

Once you have chosen your affiliate products and defined your customer avatar, you’re in a much better position to get started creating content. It’s also a good idea to choose a topic you have some knowledge about or at least an interest in.

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s plenty of competition plus around 51 million YouTube channels. So if you’re going to attract an audience for your affiliate products you’re going to need to stand out. The best way to do this is pick a topic you can stick at for the foreseeable future.

Many would-be content creators drop out because they don’t get anywhere. That’s because they’re not passionate about their topic and the sole purpose of their content creation is financial. So if you can choose a topic which aligns with a bigger reason, you’ve already got a head start on many who will drop out.

Building Content

I’m a blogger and on this website alone there’s over 700 blog posts. Even so, I don’t make sales every day and it’s taken a long time before sales were dropping in on a regular basis. One of my main strategies is to create content targeted towards my customer avatar. For me, that is struggling affiliates or people looking to become affiliate marketers.

Once you know your target audience, look on Google’s keyword planner and type in your main keywords. You’ll then get a bunch of ideas for blog post titles. The same strategy can be used for a YouTube channel for video content. Because there’s a lot of competition for most keywords in this niche, I look for the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. That way, there’s more chance of me ranking my material on the search engines.

As time goes on and you create more and more content, you’ll build up authority with Google and they should give you better rankings. At first this can be tough, because there’s so many other people doing the same thing. But this is why you should align your topic with a passion or interest. That way, you’ll stick it out for much longer than your competition and have more chance of breaking through.

Still Wondering?

If you’re still wondering how to create content, you have probably not ironed out your particular niche in which you want to work. Think about your interests and passions. Look for a topic you can stick with for several months or years. Look for affiliate programs which interest you in that particular topic/niche.

As you gain experience in something, you have some information to draw from. I joined a number of affiliate marketing programs and wrote about what I learned. If you keep learning in a particular topic/niche, you’ll never run out of things to create content about.

Product reviews are a good place to start since you can talk about a particular affiliate product. Reviews work well for sales too because they attract people looking to buy that particular product.