Affiliate Marketing Mentors – For Your Success Online!
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!
Affiliate marketing is simple – just get people to your affiliate link! Well, ok it’s a little more complicated than that. But that makes for a good starting point. Once you learn how to get more people to your affiliate link, and more of the right type of people, you will understand how to make money with affiliate marketing.
It’s easy to complicate things. You procrastinate on your direction, your marketing method or you want everything to be perfect before you start. You spend hours straightening out your desk and tidying your room. Then, when it comes to actually doing the work, you hesitate. Suddenly the house needs tidying. Or you need to do some other urgent activity, such as sorting out your sock drawer!
If you’re ever finding yourself in procrastination mode, just remember: get people to your affiliate link!
Get People To Your Affiliate Link
I’m no stranger to procrastination and have recently been through some life turmoil which has thrown my affiliate habits into disarray. But the one thing I know which will help me climb back up into productive action steps is to get people to my affiliate links.
Fortunately for me I’ve already made some sales. This means I have some habits and evidence to back up my beliefs around the topic. If I were a complete beginner, I would have all sorts of conflicting beliefs holding me back – see goal setting and identity shift if that’s you.
But once you have cleared the mental baggage, it’s time to roll your selves up and do the work. That’s much harder when you’re in some kind of mental conflict over it, which incidentally I have been for some time.
People Only Care About WIIFM – What’s In It For Me
Here’s an important point when you’re attempting to get people to your link. They only care about themselves. Not to judge, but that’s just how people work. You don’t care about a blog post you’re reading and whether an affiliate makes a sale from you. You only care about what you can get from it. When you’re trying to sell something online, this important fact is worth bearing in mind.
So before you promote your affiliate “link” you need to know who is serves the best and how you can help them. People don’t buy from “links” because there’s a link there. They buy when there’s something in it for them. So don’t sell the product sell the outcome. This is what affiliates mean when they say focus on the benefits rather than the features.
A feature of the program I promote, for example, is that it lays down step by step video tutorials which are easy to follow. The benefit is that it can help you to make a living online.
People don’t care about features, so don’t talk about them. Focus on the benefit to the customer because that’s the reason they buy from you.
How To Get People To Your Link
There’s lots of ways to get people to your affiliate link and here’s just a few:
Use email marketing – promoting affiliate products through links in email messages
Use pop ups on your website to offer some giveaway (lead magnet) which encourages someone to sign up to your email list
Blogging – this blog post is being used to attract potential customers (I’ll share this on social media and send it out to my email list)
PPC – pay per click advertising gives you a fast way to generate traffic to a piece of content, and email list or some kind of offer.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is a way to rank content online and find traffic from the search engines
Of course different methods produce different outcomes and paid advertising is much faster than SEO for example. But the main thing to focus on is some activity which produces momentum you can maintain and add to over time, even if it’s only a small action daily (such as writing a blog post).
Finding Motivation For Daily Action
To get more and more people to see your offer, and therefore click on your affiliate link, you need to create momentum. It’s so easy to lose this by focusing on the negatives. You mind harbours beliefs around many things. The ideas you focus on will either drive you towards action or away from it fuelled by the thoughts you are giving energy to.
So make sure the content you absorb is giving more weight to the actions you need to take to build your affiliate business. If you’re focused on bad news, endless conflict on social media, it’s not going to help. But focus on positive content and you’ll soon shift you thinking and therefore actions.
Small daily steps you take are much better than grand ideas which never happen! When you take these steps daily, it becomes a habit. This is hard to break over the long term the more established it becomes.
As Bruce Lee once said, “long-term consistency trumps short-term intensity“.
One Step
So write down one thing you can do now, today which will attract more people towards your affiliate link. Even if it’s only one person, just make the commitment to do that one little thing.
Do it now!
Did you do it?
When you do this rather than procrastinate around the large things which are much further from your grasp, you begin to create momentum towards your goals.
What To Expect With Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is a means of turning online action into cash! You don’t need any products of your own and you don’t need any experience. In fact almost anyone can do affiliate marketing. You only need an internet connection and a laptop.
But what can you expect from affiliate marketing? How much can you earn and when do you start earning from it?
I chose affiliate marketing after trying out several “online earning” strategies. Although making money with affiliate marketing isn’t a walk in the park, it’s definitely one of the simplest ways to do it. I tried other things such as Forex marketing, eBay and Adsense (earning through advertising clicks). I even tried to sell my own ebook, without much success.
But it was with affiliate marketing where the success seemed to come easiest for me.
What To Expect With Affiliate Marketing
That’s not to say affiliate marketing is “easy”, although it can be at times. The “ease” tends to come after a lot of work. I believe this is often the reason why so many quit too early. Unlike a job, you don’t get paid as an affiliate for “time served” but rather for results. If you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid. So if you put in a certain amount of hours, and expect to come away with a pay packet just for showing up, you’ll be disappointed.
On the other hand you can get lucky. In principle you could join an affiliate program, post your link online and make a sale instantly.
Some people seem to have faster results than others. It really depends on you. That’s why affiliate marketing is best suited to entrepreneurial types who want to be their own boss. They’ll work much harder for their own money, than they would in a job, for example for a pay packet.
If you’re highly motivated to be financially independent, affiliate marketing might be the ticket!
What To Expect With Affiliate Marketing – Hurdles and Personal Growth
I definitely wouldn’t have stuck with affiliate marketing as long as I have if I wasn’t interested in personal growth. In fact it was one of the main reasons to attempt such a challenging career.
I have been through periods of not earning from affiliate marketing and then earning large sums quickly. Then, it goes back to not earning much again. Each month is different when you’re getting the wheels spinning and in the beginning you can expect a lot of work for not much reward. While that’s not terribly inspiring, it’s the freedom it gives later.
You can earn passively from affiliate marketing and that’s one of my main reasons for doing in. Even after some time out, those recurring commissions still trickle in. Plus you can be your own boss. This means taking time off when you want, not when you boss allows it.
If you remind yourself of the reasons like these for doing affiliate marketing it inspires you to keep going through the rough patches.
How Much Can You Earn?
I’ve known affiliates who earn 6 figures and above from affiliate marketing and my income has always been sporadic with it. Still I’ve had months where I earn over $5,000 and months where I’ve earned nothing! But the sky is the limit and if you’re ambitious you can earn a high income if you choose the right program to promote and go about it the right way.
How long it takes to earn consistently depends again on the program you choose and your advertising methods. Some affiliates who use paid marketing have seen amazing results in less than a year. If you’re blogging, or using some other organic marketing strategy it will of course take much longer.
The benefit of a longer term strategy such as content creation is that you build up a “bank” of content you can use later. This content attracts the attention of the search engines and people will link to it – especially if it’s useful. This means over time you can benefit from passive traffic and therefore passive income from sales. But organic traffic is definitely a longer term and slower strategy than paid marketing.
Paid Marketing Versus Organic
Paid marketing also has the benefit of being scalable. So when you hit upon a strategy which is profitable, you can easily get more sales simply by increasing your marketing budget. With organic marketing this isn’t so easy. But the advantage or organic marketing is the slow burning trickle of traffic which keeps coming and you don’t pay for it.
Ideally you should definitely use some paid advertising, even if only a little. It’s much more difficult to get traction from organic traffic alone. Plus, if you’re in a competitive niche there’s a lot more competition.
It’s also definitely worth finding a product which has some kind of membership product attached. With a membership product you benefit from residual income from repeat custom. This piece of advice is worth a lot and it’s something I didn’t know or understand as a beginner affiliate. I choose to sell low cost items from Amazon and made tiny commissions.
Instead, choose high ticket items with subscription products which give you higher commissions and recurring commissions. It’s much easier to build an online business this way.
If you’ve liked this post please share it! Thanks and good luck!
Simplifying the complicated is much more difficult than it might seem! An online business, for example, is complicated really. There’s multiple things to consider when building an income online. But once you have set up your marketing funnel and have products to sell, it’s fairly simple. The only thing you need do is focus on your marketing strategy.
When you’re in the beginning phase though, there’s lots more to think about. You wonder about what product/s to sell and how you’re going to sell them. You consider using paid marketing or whether to create content instead. It can all get completely overwhelming in the first instance which is why so many affiliates struggle to make any money online at all!
Dealing with overwhelm is done a small thing at a time. One of the best things you can do for your online business, and your life, is simplify it somehow. That’s done by taking a step by step approach.
Simplifying The Complicated – Step By Step
When you decide to take on a big project such as building an online business, you need to focus on the next step and only that. It’s too easy to get bogged down in indecision and overwhelm. Just recently I’ve found myself in a near constant state of overwhelm. Nothing has got done, nothing! In fact I’ve procrastinated for months because I’ve simply been juggling too many ideas in my head, and trying to do too many projects all at once!
The deadly social media platforms had me sucked in too. That’s what they are designed to do – suck you in. They are like an evil vortex and they’ll completely suck away your life if you allow it!
Of course the last few years haven’t been typical either and they’ve brought more of their fair share of anxiety to even the most grounded of people. But when the dust settles it’s back to the “grindstone” as the saying goes – although there’s probably a more positive spin on that! For me that means picking up my blogging again, which I have to say I have neglected for some time due to stress, a break up, a house move, money worries and various other things I’ve been juggling to keep mind and soul together!
Simplifying The Complicated – When Calamity Strikes, Start Again!
There’s no way of stopping calamity striking. When it does, sometimes the best thing you can do is to start again. Only this time, you’re better prepared and better informed. In my best moments with this online business I was writing posts I was passionate about. I enjoyed the process. But having been under fire financially lately I wasn’t in a fit state to do so! I had to find work and blogging took a back seat.
I’ve known other online business owners have problems too. It’s definitely not all plain sailing. In a business you have to do the work first, before you get paid! So the passion has to be the driver. When it’s not there, your business is dead in the water!
What inspires me about this online business journey is that it isn’t easy. I always get bored in a steady job because there’s no risk! Big rewards come with risks. As the SAS (Special Air Service) motto says, he “Who Dares Wins” – and also Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses (A UK sitcom)!
When Life Knocks You Down – Get Up Again
When life knocks you down, you can only get up again. The Japanese have a saying that looks like this:
Since 8 is more than 7, the expression conveys a really strong will to get up after the fall. It means never give up!
I had a martial arts teacher once tell me that “most people’s minds are a mess”. There’s a lot of truth in it. After a fall, your mind is a mess. To get clear is the beginning. Then you only need to take a single next step. You can’t figure everything out all at once when you’re in a state of flux. So take some baby steps forwards and do only what is necessary when you are struggling. When you’re running on all cylinders, things can run more quickly when you know which direction you’re travelling in!
Summary
This post has been a bit of a rant but the purpose for me was to get back on the “horse” writing my blog posts again, which I used to enjoy so much! After a lot of confusion and flux in my life, I struggled to get back to the daily tasks which I had set myself. My good habits completely died.
I was confused and anxious about the future. The result was little to no effort on my behalf as I watched my online business dwindle! It just shows how important your mental health and well being are in life. The last few years have thrown a lot of curve balls at many people, me included.
The conclusion I would like to draw is to keep your head, above all things. Focus on the things you can control, and not the things you can’t! Simplify things in your life, but in your head first, since that’s where all your activity starts!
“Simplifying the complicated” really means keeping a focus on what’s important. In the last year I have forgotten this and became distracted with too much other stuff I can’t control.
Unless you keep your head, you’ll complicate everything. Particularly in business, you need your head to be in a good, focused state of being. This is something worth nurturing and avoiding distraction is one of the main things you can do to help with this, particularly in the internet age as we are being bombarded with contradictory messaging.
Is AI changing the face of blogging? There’s a massive increase in artificial intelligence being used online even by many bloggers themselves. So does this mean making money from blogging is becoming more difficult? I certainly think so. With over 600 million blogs on the internet and more arriving all the time, is now to time to throw in the towel if you’re a blogger?
I’ve definitely seen a decrease in my own traffic and other bloggers have said the same. Google now uses it’s own AI at the top of the search algorithm for many searches. This move for starters means hard working bloggers are sifting down the rankings more by the day – that’s if they had a ranking in the first place, which many don’t!
Is AI Changing The Face Of Blogging?
Despite the overreach of AI changing the SEO (search engine optimisation) space for bloggers, there’s still hope. Many bloggers attest to using AI at least in part when it comes to writing their posts. I personally enjoy the process of writing and coming up with ideas. However, AI can help you both write content and come up with ideas. You literally don’t need to think any more because the machines will do it for you! Much like the main stream news outlets (I’ll probably pay for that!).
I’ve also noticed a change in the paid for advertisements on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). They don’t appear at the top as frequently. Here’s the results at the top of the page for the search “making money online”:
The search term used to be full of paid ads but now there’s almost zero! I only found one of them at the very bottom of the page for this search term. AI is dominating at the top of the page followed by the organic results (high domain authority websites with millions of backlinks). There’s zero affiliates ranking anywhere near the top. Of course this is a super competitive term.
Blogging Versus AI
Writing a blog post of 1000 words can take a couple of hours. When AI can do the same job in a few seconds where’s the incentive to write? There isn’t any. When you see your hard work being corroded away by AI, and your rankings drop, it’s pretty tough to continue unabated as a blogger. There are of course other avenues to get eyes on your blog posts. You can post on social media, backlink from other sites and build an email list of subscribers to showcase your content to.
In an untapped niche, you’re going to have an easier time of it than in a very competitive one too. There’s still people who would prefer to read human written blog posts over AI written blogs. But when you can’t tell the difference, it gets tricky maintaining blogging as a viable living.
AI is here to stay and I know a number of people personally who have been massively affected by AI already. One of them made their living writing and has had her job completely replaced. Nobody wants to hire someone for $50 a post when AI can do it for free!
I’ve always enjoyed blogging but have to admit that I’m looking for alternative ways to connect with people online (such as video) due to the changing landscape!
Summary
AI is changing the world and to get ahead you need to be prepared for this fact. It’s coming for jobs in every sector and in the next 10 years a lot of people will need alternative income sources to maintain independence.
Blogging is definitely a sector that is being massively impacted by AI and I don’t see this changing for the benefit of bloggers anytime soon! If you’re a blogger and have been affected I’ve love to hear from you. Please leave a comment with your experience.
A few years ago I bought an ebook on eBay to help me earn some extra money online. The book taught a system of how to buy and sell from eBay using the misspell tool to find bargains and sell them for a profit. But what struck me about the purchase of the ebook was the simplicity of it. I paid online (through Paypal) and the ebook was delivered automatically over the internet to my laptop.
It was a completed automated transaction.
Of course now in 2024 we are all pretty familiar with these transactions. But how many of us are using them to make money as opposed to spending it? We have all pretty much bought something online by now, from Amazon, or eBay or some other online store. But how many of us are actually earning through these online transactions?
A Digital Vending Machine Business
After a while of buying and selling on eBay I turned my attention back to the ebook I had bought. I wondered if I could sell my own ebook from a website and earn from each download. If so, I thought, I could create my ebook once, and sell it multiple times. I wouldn’t need to recreate it because it would be held as a digital downloadable product which was self multiplying!
I created the website and ebook and attempted to sell it by posting it on social media. However, I had some problems and the main problem was getting people to find my ebook. So I joined a course which taught me how to get more traffic. My hope was to learn this skill and then sell my ebook with it! However, I discovered a much easier method of making money online and that was to sell other people’s products instead.
During the course I realised that I could sell the course I had just bought and make more for the referral than through selling my own ebook (even at 100% profit for my own book)!
A Digital Vending Machine Business – Affiliate Marketing
My ebook was selling for around $10, and the course was $100, of which I could earn 40% ($40). So even though the product wasn’t my own, I could earn much more from referral selling online than with a product I had created myself!
The business model is affiliate marketing and it’s surprising how few people are aware (even now) of this incredibly simple business model. With affiliate marketing you get paid for referrals. So if you find a product you would like to promote, you can earn an extra income simply through online referrals. You don’t have to deal with customers and you don’t have to personally handle products either.
It’s effectively a digital vending machine business where you use online content to send people to other people’s products. When you make a sale through one of your links, you earn a commission based on the sale.
Why Use A Digital Vending Machine
I always liked the idea of vending machines. They deliver products automatically to customers. At the end of the week/month, you collect the cash in the machine and top up the products. What’s better than an automated cash making machine which makes you money on autopilot? I’ll tell you – it’s a digital vending machine which doesn’t need filling up or the cash collecting. You get paid directly for the work you do online.
So what’s the catch? Why isn’t everyone cashing in on this digital gold rush? Well not everyone knows about affiliate marketing so there’s that. But there’s also a high drop out rate in the business too. There’s a lot of competition too, so that means it’s not that easy! You can’t just throw up a website, get automated traffic and make sales. It’s a little more complicated that that!
However, once you understand how to make a single sale online, you can repeat your efforts and automate the process. Think about an automated online vending machine selling for you over and over!
Why People Become Affiliate Marketers – Freedom
One of the main driving motivators for people when they become affiliate marketers is the freedom it can offer. Once you have a profitable campaign running with your affiliate business, you can leave it running potentially forever. It generates sales for you and pays you for the referrals. No dealing with customers or products. You only job is to refer online sales and there’s several ways you can do this:
Running ads – paid advertising is one of the best ways to generate sales online and it’s also globally scalable
Creating content – creating content can take many forms such as blogging or video blogging, for example
Social media marketing – some marketers use social media to post their content and others run ads on their social media sites.
Email marketing – most affiliates build a list of subscribers who they can promote products and services to.
If you’re interested in learning more about earning an income online through the sale of other people’s products/services checkout this video to get started.
How does sharpening your axe relate to building an online business? Abraham Lincoln said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. It’s a useful analogy to remember whenever you’re attempting any large task or undertaking. The “axe” in the case of building an online business is your mind, or better yet your intention.
With a strong intention, clear vision and an awareness of your most likely obstacles, it is much easier to drive towards your goals and aspirations. But if you harbour doubt, are insecure about your mission or vision, or you are unclear about your path, you’re already inhibiting your intention with the seeds of doubt.
Doubt will kill off your ambitions pretty quickly as will uncertainty and even fear of failure. There must be no doubt in your mind. If there is, you might ask for someone’s approval, which is the surest way to add more doubt and uncertainty. Most people aren’t interested in your aspiring beyond their own goals and ambitions, if they have any. So keep things to yourself, set yourself a clear objective and fuel your intention with belief. Here’s how to do it!
Sharpening Your Axe
A little while ago I found a video online of a guy talking about building an online business. It seemed so magical to build a business online which could give me a life of freedom and flexibility. Little did I know the journey up ahead. After a few early sales online I thought I was on my way. But I found my “inner” world would get in the way of success for me.
My old patterns of thinking meant that I quickly spent my earnings, rather than re-invest them into the business. I soon found myself back at square one, with little marketing budget and this further fuelled my feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty. In turn, these inner demons cycled me into procrastination, doubt and depression. In such a state, it’s pretty near impossible to build something, especially if you don’t have a roadmap with which to do it.
But this cycle was a typical pattern for me, and I was well familiar with it. What I subsequently learned was the opposite pattern was what I needed.
Sharpening Your Axe – What Successful People Do
The habit of being down on yourself, talking yourself out of things which will improve your life might sound familiar. This pattern fuels inaction, doubt and procrastination. Ultimately it leads to more of the same. What successful people do is the opposite to this.
They inspire themselves with positive self talk, take action and use positive feedback to further install the positive self image which they build on over time. This is the cycle of belief which either leads you downwards or upwards. At any given moment, you’re either going up or down with your self talk, feelings and emotions.
You can “hijack” this unconscious tendencyif you make it conscious, and focus on the things which will encourage and support a new self image and new course of action. Successful people tend to have this pattern “installed”, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Identify The Negative “Triggers”
Negative triggers can lower your emotional state. These are events or mental “triggers” such as a disagreement, situation, or a bad experience. Even small things can trigger negative emotions from experiences which happened years ago.
It’s well worth getting therapy if you have some childhood trauma, for example, which can help you clear and overcome this. Over time you can become entangled with negative triggers which lead you into a negative emotional state unconsciously. If this becomes your default state, you are literally feeling low most of the time. It can be very difficult to get out of this if you start identifying the state with who you are! See also goal setting and identity shift.
If this is happening to you, you might be dealing with grief, or triggering feelings of loss or grief which you haven’t dealt with properly. If you have deep grief from experiences in your life, it is these you experience when you come up against issues within your business. So, even a small hiccup in building your business can send you down into a pit of depression.
Identifying these triggers can help you avoid them and create a less painful experience. If you don’t identify them, you’ll likely come up against them and project their cause as the current issue, rather than the old, painful trauma.
These can be the likely hurdles to building an online business. Identifying them will help you keep from running into them again and again!
Set An Intention And Write It Down
Intention setting is a great way to clear out the debris, focus on what you would like to achieve and set it out clearly in a way your subconscious mind can understand. A good, clear intention should be written out a number of times and adjusted to fit a specific criteria:
You really, really want it
You 100% believe you can achieve it
Once you have your focused intention, you can write it out and repeat it over and over to yourself. As you do so, certain feelings/emotions will likely surface. As they do, pay attention. This is your subconscious mind communicating how it feels about your goal.
These are likely the blockages which you might use to excuse yourself from the task ahead! They are feelings of inadequacy, or doubts and fears. Notice them and pay attention. Are they justified? Perhaps your goal is too lofty for you to believe? Or you’re talking yourself out of it because you don’t really care about the goal?
Pay attention to these feelings as they arise and re-write your goal to align with the two main criteria:
You really, really want it
You 100% believe you can achieve it
If you don’t really want your goal, you’ll soon abandon it. If you don’t believe you can achieve it, the same will happen. When you align the two you will find a goal/intention which aligns all parts of you. When this happens, it’s much easier to overcome any feelings of doubt and internal resistance to your intention.
Cybernetic Transposition
A MIT professor named Stuart Lichtman wrote a book on a subject called cybernetic transposition. This is the best book I’ve found on the topic of dream realisation/goal and intention setting. See Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition.
On a trial of 50,000 participants 81% achieved a seemingly impossible goal on their first attempt using this strategy. In short, you write your goal out multiple times over and over. This hardwires the goal/intention into the subconscious mind and it gets to work on it.
You also must listen to your intuition and re-write your goal so that it aligns with the principles:
You really, really want it
You 100% believe you can achieve it
If a goal brings up doubts, it needs re-writing so you fully believe it and really want it. If you don’t really want it, you’re not going to do the exercise and write it out hundreds of times!
Sharpening Your Axe
When you fill your mind with doubt, fear and scepticism, you create circumstances and situations of a like mind. But when you do the opposite, and focus on your intentions and goals, your subconscious mind delivers ideas and insights which can help bring about the results you want in life.
“Sharpening your axe” when it comes to building something like an online business refers to this principle. Without a clear intention, a roadmap for success, and a strong desire to realise the outcome you want, small, relatively insignificant problems are enough to derail your plans. Small problems become big problems. If you are harbouring negative ideas and inner demons and problems from long ago, they will surely surface when problems arise.
Sharpening your axe means uncovering your inner shadow and facing the inner pains which you may have pushed away and avoided. The grief from long ago will surface when faced with difficulties. By becoming aware of it, you loosen its grip on you. You become free from troubling emotions and can focus on your dreams and aspirations without fear, doubt or scepticism.
It is these negative emotions which are the biggest obstacle to overcome because they rear their head when something goes wrong which on the surface is superficial, but underneath causes a lot of emotional pain.
Mindset and affiliate marketing go hand in hand. There’s no doubt, if you want success as an affiliate marketer, you must conquer your mindset. But why is mindset so important? Why can’t someone succeed by just following a step by step “formula”? As a beginner in affiliate marketing I was sceptical of all the “mindset” training, as it was called. Why bother, I thought? Why not just crack on, do the necessary and make a great income from affiliate marketing?
So I attempted to do just that – follow a step by step “formula” to make money in affiliate marketing. But there were obstacles. Your first advert might not work, for example, as many of mine didn’t at first. That first article you write, with keen anticipation, doesn’t get as many visitors as you had hoped. Attempts to build your email list are met with problems. I had so many problems as an affiliate in so many areas. If I wasn’t so stubborn, I would have quit years ago. But here’s why mindset is so important. 95% of affiliates will quitjust like most businesses fail within their first 3 years.
It’s not the fault of the business, because people succeed in many businesses. It’s always the fault of the person doing the business.
Mindset And Affiliate Marketing
That might seem a little harsh, and there’s plenty of reasons why someone might fail with an online business. Most of all the reason is that they quit. Quitting guarantees failure. Those who succeed online are a small percentage of those who try and they meet with plenty of (short term) “failures” on their journey. Those with a good mindset, see these “failures” as stepping stones rather than absolutes. It is their mindset which determines whether they quit or whether they continue, and learn from their short term “failures” if they see them that way.
Mindset is so important because it determines how you see setbacks and how you approach your business in the first place. Without optimism, you wouldn’t even try to build an income online. A pessimistic outlook would stop you even taking action in the beginning. When met with difficulties or problems, most see this as a reason to give up, rather than alter course or change tact in some way.
As Henry Ford is quoted as saying “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”
Your mindset determines your outlook, and it is your outlook which determines your approach and reaction to the unfolding events as you move forwards. No one who even accomplished anything significant did it without experiencing setbacks.
Mindset & Affiliate Marketing – Working On Your Mindset – Beliefs
If you don’t believe you can achieve something you wouldn’t even try. Therefore action comes from belief. Belief can change too when met by numerous setbacks. But it is the die hard fanatics who overcome the difficulties and make things happen, not the sceptics and doubters. Take a look at the image below showing the belief cycle. Actions come from your beliefs which determine your experience and re-affirm your beliefs.
If you’re experiencing difficulty, in any endeavour, it is your beliefs which need work, not necessarily your actions. That’s because your actions are a result of your beliefs. If you keep the same beliefs, your actions will be the same and therefore the outcomes will be the same. This is why behaviour doesn’t change very often.
The famous Einstein quote is “The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result”.
To change beliefs we need to get “under the hood” of our core and most of our unconscious beliefs were “installed” before we were 10 years old. We accepted the “reality” presented by our parents through their behaviours and suggestions. They became our own and those suggestions are buried deep in our subconscious minds, often acting against our best interests because they’re so deeply engrained in our psyche.
A good first step is to observe our core beliefs when approaching change. When we can “see” our limiting beliefs, we become conscious of them. They become easier to change when we bring awareness to them. For example, we might have some deep seated beliefs around the subject of money:
Money is the root of all evil
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18:25)
The rich are greedy/corrupt
I’m no good at /not good enough…..
I don’t deserve…..
It’s nobler to be poor than rich
There’s many beliefs you may hold in your subconscious which hold you from the life you desire. Only by changing them will you be successful. That’s because they are core beliefs from which your thoughts stem. So how could you achieve success, for example, if you think that it would make you corrupt, or if you think it would make you less noble?
When you have an inner conflict like this, you naturally sabotage yourself in order to resolve the conflict and find a resolution which exonerates you from (your own) judgement. Core beliefs often come from our parents, who we love deeply. So resolving to become rich if a parent disapproves can create a conflict between wanting to earn a good income, and receiving love from your parent. This controlling mechanism can last internally even after a parent is no longer around.
Creating Change & Resolving Conflict
The issue of money is a powerful one and you may have received very strong emotive suggestions around the topic as a child. As such, these emotions control how you see yourself and money even years later. To change them you can do a number of things:
Use affirmations to re-install more positive suggestions (e.g. mantras)
Use hypnosis to uncover the most controlling beliefs on the topic you struggle with
Avoid giving more energy to the old, limiting beliefs (become more mindful of your thoughts and words)
One of the most powerful ways to shift old, limiting beliefs is to create a new belief through repeating a mantra. So for example, if a parent used the mantra (unconsciously) “money doesn’t grow on trees”, you might have that particular belief “installed” in your subconscious mind. While it may be true, it’s also a limiting idea around the subject of money, which can cut you off from the ability to generate money abundantly. A mantra which might be more helpful could be “money comes easily and frequently”, or “I enjoy making money doing what I love”.
Summary
Your mindset is an intricate part of your affiliate marketing journey and an important piece of the jigsaw. If you haven’t had much success with affiliate marketing, it might be something worth working on, in addition to building your business through your marketing efforts and the daily steps you would normally take.
As a mentor of mine once said “the thinking you bring to your business is the limit of it“. So unless you’re actively working on improving your thinking, your business will always have a glass ceiling which it can’t grow beyond.
If you’re wondering how to get website traffic without spending any money, this post is for you! There’s a few reasons why you wouldn’t want to run paid adverts to bring in traffic. There’s the expense for one and the unknown return you may or may not receive. You can spend a fortune and simply just lose money with paid advertising. So it’s a risk and if you do use paid advertising you should start with a small budget you’re happy to lose while you learn.
On the plus side of paid advertising you can scale up a paid campaign once you’re profitable. That’s much more difficult when using free strategies such as blogging. But there’s upsides to blogging too – such as it’s free! Free traffic means whatever you earn from your blog is yours – it’s 100% profit, (minus your time of course).
But if you have the time, blogging is a fun way to turn it into readies! It’s cheap and if you have a well targeted affiliate product on your blog to sell, it’s a great way to turn your spare time into cash!
How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – Blogging
Yes blogging is a simple and cheap way to generate website traffic. Once you have decided on the topic of your blog, you can easily find keywords which are suitable for your niche and which can also bring in targeted traffic. To find these, head to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main keyword. Look for long tail derivatives. These are the keywords which you have the best chance of ranking on Google for.
While you still may not rank on the top of Google for them, having them on your website will increase your overall authority with Google too. They are also a good place to start to attract the kind of person you want as a website visitor. Attracting the wrong audience isn’t going to help you make those sales, so it’s key to determining your audience first before you start out. Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet to get clear on this topic.
Once you know who you are writing for, things get a lot easier as a blogger. You can write to attract the people who are most likely to be interested in your product – your target audience.
How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – Plugins
You can also get an SEO plugin which helps you write SEO friendly content. I use one called Yoast SEO. It allows you to balance the correct number of keywords throughout your blog posts to give you the best chance of ranking your content. See also my post on best free WordPress plugins for bloggers.
There’s a few other plugins you can get which will help you as a blogger:
Social media share plugin – lets visitors easily share your content on their social media
Push engage software – allows people to get notified when you re-post
Content syndication software – automatically syndicates older content on your social media
Pop up plugins – allows more visitors to subscriber to your email list
Plugins can make your life much, much easier as a blogger. They help you share your content more easily and even automatically. Since it’s traffic you need, the more people who can find your blog the better. Not everyone who finds your content will buy from you, but you can stack the cards in your favour with an email list.
How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – The Email List
The email list is an important factor in turning your traffic into affiliate sales. Without one, you’re relying on people who visit your content buying from you. Since most visitors only stick around for a few minutes the chances of that happening are pretty low. Especially since statistics show most online consumers need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website before they buy something.
With an email list you have multiple opportunities to re-engage your visitors via email messages. So make sure you start building an email list from the get-go. It will save you a heap of time and effort. You can access a free autoresponder here, which you need to build an email list.
Patience
Sadly with blogging you need to be super patient because it’s a long, slow process. But if you stick with it, over time you should see exponential increase in your traffic.
There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s plenty of competition in pretty much every topic you can think of. So standing out and getting known is going to take some time. However, as your volume of content grows, you should pick up some backlinks from other websites and from people sharing your content on social media. Plus, if you install the various plugins you can automate a posting campaign throughout your social media which is running in the background.
Ideally pick a topic you know about of have some kind of passion for. That way, you’ll be able to keep going far longer than the rest in your niche!
Summary
To get traffic without paying takes time and a bit of dedication. There’s a lot of content out there, and AI is taking a lot of the organic space now with Google’s own AI dominating the top of the search results pages. In a competitive niche, you can expect to see paid advertising at the top of the Google results pages too.
Take a look at the image below which was a search I did for “affiliate marketing” – a super competitive niche. It had multiple paid adverts and then Google’s AI machine is at the top (where organic search results used to be!)
So if you want to make a go of blogging today, you’ll definitely need the tools I suggested in this article:
How to build an affiliate business through blogging? Blogging is a cheap way to build an affiliate business by creating written content. Building an affiliate business means selling other people’s products and services. There’s various ways you can do this and blogging is only one of them. Blogging is a slow but cheap strategy of building an audience and providing them with value. Over time, your audience will get to know you through your blog posts and eventually trust you (hopefully at least)!
When this happens, they are much more likely to buy something you recommend, (if it serves their needs). Blogging is a strategy I’ve used over the years to build my affiliate business. There’s been times when things weren’t going as expected and times when the sales were simply flooding in. The key to making blogging work for you is to be consistent with it. Over time, with enough effort in the right direction you’ll start generating traffic. Once you get visitors in large enough numbers you’ll start seeing sales dropping into your inbox.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having made a sale online through blogging. When you make it work, it’s truly inspiring. But before this can happen there’s some work to be done. So here’s how you can build an affiliate business through blogging.
How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – Your Topic
There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and this means that in nearly every niche there’s a tonne of competition. Some niches/topics are less competitive than others of course and this can give you an advantage. However, I would suggest that the most important decision to make is the topic of your blog. Your topic will determine a number of other things such as how you will monetise your blog, what you’ll blog about and how long you can sustain the efforts needed to become profitable.
Choose a bad topic and you could be blogging for a long time with no way to monetise it. Or, worse still pick a topic you’re not that into, and you’ll end up throwing in the towel! There’s nothing worse than trying to come up with ideas for your blog when you have no interest in your topic! I once built a website around the subject of mushroom harvesting and I lasted about 6 months before I threw the whole idea in the bin!
For one, it wasn’t a profitable niche. I couldn’t easily monetise it. Another reason my blog failed was because I didn’t care about mushroom harvesting! I just wanted a profitable website and the topic came up and filled a need. I learned a valuable lesson though from choosing a niche I wasn’t that interested in. Don’t do it – at least not as a blogger. If you’re a blogger, you need to keep creating new content over and over. So if you don’t care about your topic, or you don’t at least have an interest in it, you’re not going to last very long. Someone more passionate will soon take your place and take all your traffic too!
How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – How To Choose Your Topic
So how can you choose a topic you’re passionate about if you’re not sure of your niche? Well start with you. Ask yourself what you’re about and what kind of interests you have. Look at products you have bought online and things you’re interested in. You can also find products you’re passionate about and that can inspire your interest. There’s millions of affiliate products you can use to generate an income online. So look at the kind of products you want to promote as a way in to your niche.
It took me a long time to find my niche and even start this website. I built hundreds of websites in various niches before this one came about. But it shouldn’t be so much hard work really. If you can imagine yourself writing about your topic for several years, you’re probably on track for the right topic.
Once you have found your ideal topic to write about, it’s worth looking for an affiliate product you can promote from your blog. There’s other ways you can monetise a blog too, such as with your own products or through advertising (Google Adsense, for example). You can even create your own ebook and sell it from your website.
How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – Choosing A Product To Sell From Your Blog
Ideally find a good affiliate product to sell from your blog. Adsense is a difficult way to monetise a blog and you’ll need a tonne of traffic even to make tiny amounts with it. Selling your own ebook can be tricky too because most bloggers will offer ebooks for free. So selling one can be difficult. But with the right affiliate product/s it can be much easier to make blogging pay, especially if you find high quality products which pay recurring income.
A recurring income product you can sell from your blog is worth it’s weight in gold! Subscription products which offer high value, such as software and training products are a good idea. They give you more ability to create a sustainable income quite quickly. However, it’s more important to choose a product which aligns with your topic. That way, more of your visitors and followers will be interested in it. Ideally find a product to sell which ticks multiple boxes: high value, subscription, high ticket, aligned with your topic.
Blogging is a long term affair. I like the analogy I often use which is to compare blogging to the Chinese bamboo tree. With the Chinese bamboo tree, the plant has a five year gestation period before it even breaks through the soil. So if you were unaware you have a Chinese bamboo tree, you would likely believe it to be dead, and throw it away before it’s had chance to come to fruition.
The Chinese Bamboo Tree
The same can be said of many bloggers. You have to put in some time upfront before you can benefit from the fruit of blogging. This is why I started this blog post with the blog topic as being the most important thing. If you don’t love your topic, you’re hardly likely to keep going for long enough to see the benefits.
More likely you’ll quit before anything much happens. But choose a topic you’re passionate about and you’ll enjoy the process. It will be a much more enjoyable journey and you’ll stick with it because you’re enjoying it, not only because you want the “fruits”.
After 5 years of careful watering and fertilising the Chinese Bamboo breaks through the soil. Now I’m not saying it will take 5 years of blogging to earn money from it, it will likely take less time. But it might take several months before you start to see the “shoots” of your “plant”.
After the Chinese Bamboo breaks the soil through it can grow 90 feet in only five weeks. Blogging can be incredibly lucrative if you take the time and keep going with it. The results are linear according to your efforts, but will grow exponentially over time as you keep putting effort in.
Building An Email List From A Blog
The main key to making money from a blog, once you have found your niche and a good product to sell, is to get your blog visitors to join your email list. From a blog post, someone only has a few minutes to sell their product. After that they have left your website, potentially forever.
But if you can capture their email address, by offering something valuable in return, you have a potentially unlimited amount of time to re-engage them with your products and content.
People can buy from you years after joining your email list but the same is simply not true for someone who has landed on your blog and left. So the next step in building an affiliate business from blogging is to build an email list. See also the power of email marketing.
To build your email list from your blog offer something as a giveaway to your visitors. Make sure every visitor can see your offer. I use (an annoying) popup on this website to show people my ebook, for example! While it can be annoying, people can clearly see what’s on offer so if it’s a good fit for them, they will often opt in to your email list.
You can offer free video courses, ebooks, pdf downloads and the like. The main key is that your offer is free and automated to encourage visitors to join your email list. If you don’t have an email autoresponder (used for list building) you can get one here.
Getting Traffic From Blogging
Getting traffic from blogging is one of the major challenges of it. There’s a few ways you can get people to visit your blog posts:
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation allows Google’s search “spiders” to index your content and rank it (potentially) for certain keywords on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages
Social media – by sharing your posts (and getting visitors to share) you can build quite a following simply from the various social media sites you use
Paid advertising – if you want to get faster traffic, simply buy some. You can direct traffic based on keywords or even your blog posts (using dynamic advertising which crawls your blog and creates a suitable advert)
Email list – the email list is vital for the growth of a blog because it allows you to be in control of your traffic. Send new blog posts to your email subscribers.
Referral traffic – you can get referral links from other websites and people sharing your content. You can also guest post to build links and blog comment on other people’s websites.
Creating Content
But before any of that can happen you need to create content for your website. Blogging is simply writing on a website. Blog comes from WeB Log. It’s a log on the web!
Before you start creating content it’s worth thinking about your product/s that you’re going to sell. Ask yourself what kind of questions your prospective customers might have. What are they looking for and why would they visit your website. Your blog should attract people who are going to show an interest in your product ultimately. Otherwise you won’t make any money from blogging.
So start with the search intent of your “perfect” customers – or customer avatar. A customer “avatar” is the kind of person you want to attract who is likely to buy from you. By creating high quality content (which stands the test of time) and which targets those kinds of people, you have a greater chance of becoming (and staying) profitable with your blogging.
Start by using Google’s keyword planner to “zone” in on long term keywords which might be used by your target audience. There’s more on this strategy in my post finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Also see my post best free blog plugins for WordPress. SEO plugins help you write SEO friendly content which have more chance of ranking on Google (and other search engines). You can also find plugins which allow visitors to share your posts on social media – giving each post another boost, both for traffic and SEO!
Summary
So that’s a short guide of how to build an affiliate business through blogging. It’s a great way to earn some extra income in the beginning and if you’re serious you can even replace a full time income through blogging if you stick with it for long enough!
For a step by step training and online business course you can check out my recommended course here. I would definitely recommend getting some training and educating yourself about the best products to use to build a profitable affiliate business.
Blogging is just one strategy to do so but there are others too. Paid marketing tactics are a much faster way to build a profitable online business from scratch through using affiliate products and email marketing.
Small shifts vs large leaps, which is better? While we would all rather make giant leaps in any endeavour, it’s the small shifts which can be maintained over the longer term. A good example is joining the gym with the goal to get a “perfect” body and fitness level in just a few months. The shift from lying on the couch to working out every day is too much! Most will quit within a month or two. Old habits are engrained and the new habit is too much to contend with.
Gyms know this when people join in January. That’s why they will ask for a 12 month contract! Most will stop coming by March!
The same can be said for building an online business. In theory we would like to be super profitable in no time at all. So we set a goal of making 10K a month in the first year. When this doesn’t happen, we are disillusioned and quit! What we often don’t realise is that all our old habits, thoughts and behaviour patterns are working against us. They don’t support our new ventures. In order to change our behaviour for the long term, we need to start with something small.
Small Shifts Vs Big Leaps
I teach martial arts, Wing Chun Kung Fu to be more precise. Checkout my Kung Fu class in Leeds here. One of the goals for a lot of people is to attain a black belt in martial arts, and often students will start with this in mind. However, this can work against you because a black belt requires years of practice, and dedication. What if you don’t like the class? When the reality doesn’t live up to the fantasy, most will drop out. Only around 1% will keep going and attain this level of achievement.
I recently started learning Kung Fu from a new teacher (from a different lineage). It was a lot different from what I had done previously. If I had aimed at getting my black belt, or similar achievement in this new style, I would have dropped out by now! Instead, I only focused on turning up to a class every week. I’ve managed to keep up this habit for 3 years now, with only the odd week missed.
It is the small things we can do on a daily basis which create change, not the large leaps we think we need to make. As Bruce Lee said “long term consistency trumps short term intensity”.
A fad is when you think you can suddenly change your life with some new, instant inspiration. While inspiration can help you change, it’s consistency which makes the difference.
Small Shifts Vs Large Leaps In An Online Business
In my online business, I haven’t always been consistent. In the first instance, I blogged for a while. Then I stopped, looking to see whether my blogging would “work” to create the income I wanted. It didn’t! So I stopped! I would spend several weeks procrastinating about what I should do, without doing anything of note! Then, a sale would drop in from the blogging. I would be inspired again and get busy blogging every day.
Some time would pass, and I would look for more sales, which didn’t come! So I would stop again! Look at what I was doing and wonder if it was actually working! Then, after another few weeks of procrastination, another sale would drop in! Back to blogging! This pattern continued until I built up my belief in what I was doing. Once my blogging became habit, the sales started flowing again.
It is this approach which happens in everything. We work at something we want to achieve, look for results, and hesitate. The same is true of the gym analogy. When we work out regularly we feel better and look better. But as we look for the results and don’t see them (because we look too soon), we doubt whether our efforts are being rewarded.
Working out every week for 3 weeks in a row will seldom bring about the long term change we desire. Much like learning a musical instrument for 3 weeks won’t make us great at it, either! Or, learning a martial art for 3 weeks will enable us to defend ourselves.
But the power of habits over the long term is much more powerful.
The Stop Start Habit
Most people are hardwired in the stop start habit. They see some results and celebrate, loosening their good habits and falling back down the curve towards “failure”. Or, worse still, they look for results, don’t see them, and quit their good habits (as with the gym analogy).
The comfort zone is a psychological phenonenum which exists throughout life in many facets. Look at how this works in your own life. At what stage do you tidy your house? Perhaps once it reaches the lowest acceptable standards which you set? At what stage do you consider changing your job/income? When you have had enough of not having enough money, or when the stress of it easts into your happiness.
The above curve shows how we aspire for something in life, but then lose our motivation when it appears, dropping back into our comfort zone (and our old habits).
To shift this curve upwards we need to raise both the lines of our dreams/goals and of our lowest acceptable standards.
Summary
While slight changes in your behaviour can seem almost irrelevant, over time small shifts can have the largest impact. Imagine how much difference working out for 30 minutes a day will make over 10 years. Compare a version of yourself who has done that (for 10 years) with a version which hasn’t. The different will be quite dramatic. Or a version of you which drinks alcohol for 10 years compared to one who doesn’t. Apply the same to anything whether it be learning a musical instrument, a martial art of building an online business.
Small shifts can make dramatic differences over long periods and are much easier to sustain than large monumental leaps. A large change is harder to sustain due to your pre-existing habits, thoughts and self perception. But small changes are less likely to interfere with your self image, identity and existing beliefs and habits.
Small things matter. Small habits matter. So if you want to make a permanent change in your life somehow, start with something small. Small shifts vs large leaps is the answer.
