Category: Affiliate Marketing Mentor Blog

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to affiliate marketing mentors!

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic

There’s some free tools to increase website traffic which anyone can use. I use Yoast SEO which I believe is one of the best tools for free traffic. It helps you write SEO friendly content on your blog which is one of the best ways to build up your readership. Checkout my post on how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Long tail keywords are much less competitive than shorter terms. So if you use them and the Yoast SEO tool to help you write SEO friendly content, that’s one way to increase your traffic.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Autoresponder

If you don’t already have one, you should definitely use an autoresponder to collect emails and bring subscribers back to your content. Get a free account with up to 500 subscribers here.

The power of an autoresponder is immense. Most of your website visitors won’t return unless you capture their details and add them to your email list. Once you do, you have your own traffic supply. Most people don’t buy immediately on their first website visit either. Most will need multiple touch points before they become a customer, email marketing is a great way to do this. By sending out useful and informative emails, you can link back to new content on your website as you publish it.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Google Keyword Planner

As I mentioned above, writing content targeting long chains of keywords can give you a greater chance of getting a ranking on Google. Short tail keywords are super competitive in most niches. But long chains of keywords on a given topic in your niche can give you a nice stream of traffic if you can rank on the first page of the SERPS – search engine results pages.

To find these little goldmines you can use Google’s free keyword planner tool. You’ll need an Adwords account to use it but it’s completely free. Type your main keyword into the planner and browse for long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty on Google.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Push Engage

Push engage offers a superb option for getting more traffic to your website. It lets your website visitors opt in to receive updates on your latest posts. They will then get “push” notifications when you publish new content which brings them back to your site.

You can get a free account here which gives you up to 200 subscribers.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Icegram

Icegram is another favourite tool of mine which is completely free and gives your visitors more options to opt in to your email list. You can use Icegram for popups, drop down banners and other form types on your website.

The more options someone has to opt in to your email list, or notice your giveaway offer, the more likely they are to do so. On this website I have a couple of options to join my email list. There’s a form, a drop down banner and a popup form – annoying I know but they work and give visitors more chance of opting in! Once on your email list you can bring them back to your site through your email marketing campaigns! Hey presto more traffic!

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Revive Old Posts

While it takes some time to create content which is share worthy, it’s also a very good idea to promote your content as you publish it. This can be a vital step which is often neglected by bloggers. I was never very good at promoting my posts until I found a plugin which automated the process called Revive Old Posts.

This plugin lets you automate the sharing of your new and older posts on your blog. It’s a no brainer if you’re a blogger! There’s also other plugins which do a similar job such as Postplanner.

Social Media Share Buttons & Feeds

Social media share buttons are definitely a good idea if you want to encourage more people to visit your website. You’re going to be working hard to get people to your site, and in crafting your content! So if you give visitors the option of easily sharing your posts to social media, why would you miss this important step! There’s many social media share plugins but here’s one I use called Ultimate Social Media Share Icons.

Social media share feeds can also be a good idea and help with your SEO. They connect your social media account with your blog and give you more social proof that you’re an active site.

Cloudflare – Web Speed Optimisation

There’s various plugins you can find which will speed up your website. Google loves speed! Many website visitors will click away if your website doesn’t load quickly enough. If this happens on your website, Google will notice and start to downgrade your content on their search algorithm accordingly. It doesn’t want to send people to slow websites which take ages to load!

With sites getting ever faster to load, it pays to keep yours optimised. Cloudflare’s plugin lets you optimise your site for speed automatically.

Quality Content

While many of these tools will help you either bring back visitors to your site or get your visitors sharing content, they won’t do that unless you are offering some genuine value in your content. Google’s algorithm is pretty intelligent and they will know if your visitors are clicking away, sharing and linking to your blog posts. They won’t do it if they first can’t find it or if they don’t see your content as valuable or helpful. So the first place to start is with creating some awesome high quality content on your site.

The tools listed here will help you bring back visitors or get your content found. Building a lot of quality content is a good idea first, since that’s the foundation of what you’re building on a website.

As you build more and more quality content, it should start getting found on the search engines. But don’t rely on this, especially if your website is new. Build an email list, drive traffic through social media and pay for traffic too if you can. With multiple streams and sources for your traffic, you’re less likely to get caught out if something dramatic changes using only one strategy!

Many a website owner has lost much of their traffic overnight when Google changes their algorithm and downgrades their site. So diversify your traffic sources and build quality content!

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing

Wondering how to make money using email marketing? In this post I’m going to share the nuts and bolts of email marketing and explain some of the best ways to make money through sending out emails.

On a website, visitors come and go in a matter of minutes. When they go, they’re gone forever! But once you get your website visitors onto your email list, you can keep in touch with them for months and even years. This is one of the major benefits of building an email list. Not only can you build an email list into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but you can also build relationships with your subscribers over a longer period than is possible from a website.

When you have something useful to share with your audience, you can build trust by delivering value in your email messages. When you tie a specific purpose to something you can sell, you’re on to a means to make money on autopilot. Here’s how it’s done.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing – Affiliate Marketing

To build an email list you need an email autoresponder. An autoresponder lets anyone collect email addresses from a website or landing page. Marketers do this so that they can sell affiliate products through email messages. What’s an affiliate product you might ask? Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone sell someone else’s product for a share of the revenue. Affiliate products can be found online in almost every topic. This makes them perfect to sell through email marketing.

Once you join an affiliate program, you can choose a product and sell it through an affiliate link. Sales are tracked back to your referral link and you earn a commission for any referrals. To sell affiliate products online affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and promote products to their list. You can earn a full time income from selling affiliate products through email marketing messages.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing -Your “Target” Audience

Since there’s so many people online, it’s a good idea to start with your target audience. Your target audience for affiliate marketing is the small sub-section of the online marketplace who is most likely to buy your product. Depending on what you decide to sell you’ll need to research your prospective customer base. As an affiliate you can choose to sell pretty much anything you can find to buy online. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can sell it and earn commissions from sales you generate.

But to find “your people” for a certain product, you need to understand your customer avatar. The customer avatar is the type of person who is most likely to want or need your particular product. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf. Once you understand who this is, what their online behaviour is like, you’re in a much better position to find them online with your marketing and send them to your email list.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing – Building Your Email List

Get yourself an autoresponder and access the dashboard. Here you’ll be able to find a form which you can place somewhere online – such as on your website, if you have one. If you don’t have a website, you can build a free site using Weebly.com to put your form on.

To encourage website visitors to join your email list you need a “lead magnet”. A lead magnet is any kind of free giveaway which you can use to encourage visitors to join your list. Typically marketers will use an ebook, free pdf download or some other form of value add. I use a free video series on this website where you can learn about how to build a from scratch online business.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing – Driving Traffic

Now you have a form on your website, you can send targeted traffic towards your site and attract people towards your form. This can be done in several ways but the main two are through content creation and paid marketing.

With a paid marketing platform, most marketers will use a landing page software so that they get the most out of their marketing budget and they can optimise their landing page. Why use landing pages? With a normal website there can be a lot of visitors who don’t take action and sign up to your form. So they’ll leave without having joined your list. With a landing page software you can optimise for performance by cross testing your pages against other similar ones to find the best performing page for list building.

The other method of driving traffic is through content creation. This blog post for example is an example of content driven traffic. With a lot of content on a website (or video channel) affiliates can drive traffic by being found on the search engine results pages of Google (and other search engines). Free traffic is notoriously more difficult than paid traffic. Paid traffic is fast, and much more scalable. But you will need a marketing budget to learn and build up your campaigns to make them profitable.

Sending Out Email Messages On Autopilot

One of the main advantages of email marketing is that it can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. With affiliate products, you can sell to anyone from anywhere in the world. By queueing up email messages in your autoresponder, you can deliver messages for several months (or years) on complete autopilot. As new subscribers are added to your email list, messages are delivered according to the queue you have previously set up.

Once you’ve built a list of messages appropriate to the needs of your subscribers, you can leave it running without having to do much. With the right marketing engine, messages, subscribers and of course the right products, you can make sales in your sleep and scale up your online business to a global audience.

Delivering Value To Your Subscribers

Still, many of your subscribers won’t open your email messages and to get the most out your email marketing you’ll want to provide a valuable service. If you don’t, your subscribers will stop opening your emails, and you’ll make fewer sales!

If you can add value through your email marketing messages, your subscribers will continue opening emails for a long time period. You’ll be able to build more trust with them. Once your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they will be more are likely to buy.

But this might not happen straight away through your emails. Particularly if you are only trying to sell them something! If you’ve ever been put off buying by a pushy sales person in a shop, you’ll know the reason why! So instead, offer value and give. Help your subscribers with a specific problem first, and sell later!

Affiliate Email Marketing For Beginners

What is affiliate email marketing and how does it help beginners? If you’re a beginner affiliate, it’s definitely worth getting an email autoresponder which lets you collect subscribers and build an email list. What is email marketing and how does it help affiliate marketers?

Affiliates promote affiliate products using their affiliate links for a commission on any sales they make. An email list lets them do this very simply. TheA affiliate collect targeted subscribers who are likely to be interested in whatever it is they’re selling. By placing products in front of them, (through email messages), they can sell to a growing list of subscribers.

This whole process can be automated and you can grow a list into the tens or hundreds of thousands plus.

Affiliate Email Marketing For Beginners – The Form

To collect subscribers from a website, you can offer something of value to your website visitors. Here’s an offer from one of my landing pages:

By entering your details into the form on a website or landing page, you join my email list. You’ll start to receive automated messages which deliver information on building an online business. You can see the landing page here.

To get your own form, you can access an email autoresponder for free here. Sign up and once inside the back office, you can create a form using the step by step instructions.

Once you have built your form, you can place in on a landing page, website or even a free blog platform. The form is intended to capture your visitors email address. To encourage your website visitors to enter their details and join your subscriber list, you can offer to give something away – such as an ebook, pdf download or a video course, for example.

Affiliate Email Marketing For Beginners – Queue Up Your Email Messages

Once you have designed and built a form, you will need to create a follow up sequence of messages. These email messages are triggered to be sent out when someone subscribers to your list. Here’s what it looks like in the back office of the autoresponder (my queued up messages):

Long term affiliate marketers will build huge email lists of subscribers. With thousands of people on your email list, you have a much better chance of making an affiliate sale.

Email lists are used to build trust with people over longer periods of time than is possible from just a website. On a website, a visitor will only stay for a few minutes. On an email list, you can stay in touch for months and even years with your subscribers.

Building Your List

There’s many ways in which you can build an email list as an affiliate marketer. You can use a blog to attract traffic and place an offer on your site. Or, you can use a landing pages and send paid traffic directly to it. Landing pages are typically used with paid marketing. With paid marketing, you want to collect email subscribers because you’re spending money getting traffic. That traffic is worth much more if you can turn it immediately into subscribers for your email list.

On a normal website, you can attract traffic through blogging. This is a slow method but over time your traffic can grow exponentially once you have a large volume of content. For the best results, make sure you are targeting the right kind of people. Not all traffic is equal and most of the online marketplace won’t be interested in your product.

Make sure you align your giveaway product with the interests of your visitors and your product. Focus on the benefits of your offer not the features. This will increase the opt in rate of subscribers from a website.

Access A Step By Step Tutorial

If you’re ready to get started with an affiliate business – access a step by step process here. You’ll learn how to set up an email list with pre-written emails and products ready to sell. Your main hurdle then as an affiliate is to generate traffic to your email marketing capture form. This is done either with paid marketing or through content creation. You can also access training and support with this online training resource and all in one business system.

Access an email autoresponder here which is free for up to 500 subscribers.

Summary

An email marketing autoresponder is one of the best things you can get as an affiliate marketer. It lets you collect email subscribers from a website and build a list of potential customers.

It also puts you in charge of your traffic. Whether you are buying traffic using a paid platform, or building content for traffic, it takes either time, effort or money to get it! So building a list can save you heaps of money over the longer term and put you in charge of your visitors.

Trying to sell directly from a website is tough too. Most customers won’t buy on their first visit to a website. Most will need several touch points before they make a buying decision.

Email marketing lets you keep in touch with your potential customers for months. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes, never to return.

Best Digital Products For Affiliate Marketing

The best digital products for affiliate marketing are those in high demand which sell and which pay high ticket and recurring income. But there’s a few things you should consider when choosing the products you want to promote. Firstly how are you going to promote them?

If it’s with a free strategy, it’s worth being aware of the competition in your niche. In a saturated market, it can be very difficult selling in-demand digital items from a blog, for example. If there’s too much competition for your particular product, you’ll struggle getting people to your item. So despite the high demand of a particular product, it’s no use to you unless you can actually sell it. So you could argue that the best digital products for affiliate marketing are those which you can successfully sell!

All things being equal, I would definitely say to use high ticket products which pay recurring commissions. However, these kinds of products are typically promoted by a lot of other affiliates. So you should expect a lot of competition.

Best Digital Products For Affiliate Marketing – Software Products

Software products are definitely one of the best kinds of products you can promote as an affiliate. Affiliates need certain products, since they are vital for the operation of online businesses. An example is Aweber. Aweber is an autoresponder service which lets affiliates collect email subscribers from a website or landing page. Affiliates who succeed tend to build email lists and send out automated email messages promoting their products. So anyone who is serious about becoming an affiliate will get an autoresponder.

Another benefit of this service is not only can you use it to build your affiliate business, but you can promote it and earn recurring commissions from your referrals.

There’s many affiliate programs with recurring commissions and this is especially useful in building your affiliate business. Since most affiliate products only pay you once per sale, you need to continually find new customers. But with recurring commission programs, you can earn more from fewer customers.

Best Digital Products For Affiliate Marketing – Training & Education Products

Training and education products are another win win for affiliates if you can sell them. Especially if there’s a high ticket product or products attached to them. A high ticket product will typically pay much more than your average item. You can earn $500 and above from a single sale when using a high ticket product. To earn the same from standard items you’ll need to sell them in high volume, so your effort for reward can be much higher when using high ticket.

When it’s often the same effort required to sell both a low value and a high ticket item, it’s definitely worth considering the high ticket option. Here’s an example of some high ticket items you can promote for larger commissions:

However, most online shoppers aren’t looking for submarines worth $300,000! So finding customers can be difficult. But with education products, especially for learning and study of online businesses, there’s greater interest from a larger audience. Learn more about these kinds of products here.

Best Digital Products For Affiliate Marketing – Your Niche

Choosing your niche is often the thing you’re recommended to do when you first become an affiliate. Your niche is an important decision which effects your success as an affiliate. In a very competitive niche, it’s going to be more difficult and/or costly to generate traffic and make sales. So despite high ticket items and recurring commission products paying more, that doesn’t necessarily help you unless you can actually learn to drive traffic and make sales.

So your choice of product may reflect your interests and passions rather than the bottom line of how much a sale actually earns. This is a good idea too because in a niche you’re not bothered about, it’s going to be much more difficult sustaining the necessary effort to make your affiliate business profitable. Whereas when you love your topic, that will make the process of learning and growing your business much more enjoyable and therefore sustainable.

You can find digital affiliate products in almost any niche. Checkout Clickbank.com and JVZoo.com for a huge range of digital products you can promote as an affiliate.

Summary

The best digital products to promote from a financial point of view are those which pay the most: high ticket and recurring commission products. However, to actually make those sales, you’re going to want to find a niche in which you can create a meaningful business.

This is much easier if you’re aligned with your business in some way which floats your boat! In a niche you don’t care about, it’s much more tricky maintaining your interest. But if you find a topic you are passionate about, the journey can be a long more enjoyable. Ideally find a product or products which you genuinely believe in and are passionate about. That way, you’re much more aligned and authentic in your marketing.

For more information and access to an all in one training and education program, tap here.

How To make Your First Affiliate Sale

Wondering how to make your first affiliate sale? Your first sale as an affiliate marketer marks and important milestone. Once you’ve made a single sale, you’ve proved your strategy to work.

Once you’ve made one sale, you can make many more. Before the first sale can be tough because you’re finding your feet as an affiliate. You’re no doubt encumbered by scepticism and doubt. Making that first sale gives you momentum and belief which are two important factors in success in affiliate marketing. Without belief you don’t even try. Without momentum you’ll dawdle and stagnate.

So how do you do it? Are you going to create a blog, use a YouTube channel or build an email list using paid marketing? Are you using banner ads or a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords, Bing, or YouTube? There’s so many ways to promote affiliate products it can be overwhelming for a beginner. So here’s a guide to get you on the right track.

How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale – Choosing Your Niche

Your niche is the topic, area or category in which you want to talk about or promote your product/service. You can do this on a blog or create video content on YouTube for example. Or, you can run adverts and send people to a landing page where you collect their email address and follow up with email marketing.

Your niche is important because you’re going to spend some time creating content in it. Whether you’re running paid ads, doing email marketing, blogging or creating videos, you’ll have more success if you choose a topic you have some interest or passion in. Making a sale online can take some time and dedication, and you’ll have greater staying power if you’re passionate about your topic and product.

If you’re going to create content as a means to drive traffic, choose a topic which you love and which isn’t too competitive. See also how to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing.

How To make Your First Affiliate Sale – Choose Your Platform

There’s multiple platforms you can use for affiliate marketing. Some of them are free and some are paid platforms. There’s pro’s and cons with each method of affiliate promotion. With paid marketing, you can get traffic very quickly. But you’ll need to pay for advertising and this can get costly, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. The best advice is to tread carefully as paid marketing platforms can swallow up your money very quickly.

Free blog platforms such as Hubpgaes.com and Blogger.com let you create written content to attract your target audience. They are free, which is the upside, but the downside is that it can take a long time and a lot of effort to start getting free visitors to your blog posts. YouTube and TikTok are two free video platforms you can use to create and upload video content to attract your audience.

How To make Your First Affiliate Sale – Join An Affiliate Program

There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join. Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and JVZoo.com are some of the most popular places where affiliates go to find affiliate products. You can find products in almost any niche you can think of too. Simply do a web search for “{your niche} affiliate program/product” and you should find a program with a suitable product to sell.

Ideally find a product which you would personally buy yourself. If you wouldn’t but the product yourself it’s probably not a great fit for you to promote it. But if you can rant and rave about a product, because you genuinely love it, it’s going to be much easier to promote it genuinely and authentically.

As a beginner affiliate I promoted many products I didn’t care much about with not much success. Nowadays I only promote products I personally have bought and use myself because it’s a much more genuine and heart-felt to sell affiliate products. I would definitely recommend using products you love, not just choosing products because they pay well or fit in with your niche.

But saying that it’s worth understanding how much each program pays. Checkout my post on affiliate marketing commission rates for more on this topic.

The Power Of Email Marketing

Depending on your marketing method, and there’s lot to choose from, you should definitely consider using email marketing. Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products online. With an email list, you can gain much more control over your traffic.

Whether you choose to become a blogger, or use paid marketing, you’re at the whim of your advertising budget or the latest Google algorithm to get traffic. But once you start generating your own email list, you can send messages to your list at any time, helping subscribers with a specific problem and promoting your products to them.

As your list grows, you should find it easier to generate affiliate sales once you understand the best ways to generate traffic and collect email subscribers. See also the power of email marketing.

Product Reviews & Target Audience

One of my very first affiliate sales came from a product review I wrote about a website building software. It’s long since obsolete now, but when I started out it was a useful product which helped me build my websites.

So I wrote a review on Hubpages.com and got a sale! I was over the moon. Reviews are good because they attract people who are looking for your specific product, or one like it. With “to do” articles, like this one, you attract a different audience and it can be more difficult to sell from them.

One of the best uses of your time as a new affiliate is to get to know your target audience. Your target audience is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is most likely to want your particular product. Once you understand them really well, you’re in a much better position to create content (or run advertising) which attracts them specifically, and not the millions of online people who are not looking for what you’re selling.

Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf to learn more about your target audience.

Making Money Is A By-Product Of Creating Value

Another way to think about selling affiliate products online is as a by product of creating some useful and amazing content. With the 95% of new affiliates who drop out, you’re going to need a strong reason to keep going and make your first sale.

For some affiliates it comes easy and happens within a few months. But for others it can take years to make a break through. So one of the best ways to guarantee your first sale is to choose a topic and strategy of marketing online which is aligned with your values and fulfils a need in the marketplace outside of only trying to sell.

When you align yourself with a larger vision for your affiliate business which you enjoy, you’ll go much further than most. This gives you a huge edge over those who only want the outcome of selling affiliate products – profit.

A Case Study

Take a look at one of the most successful affiliate websites online: Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert.com. Yep, that’s an affiliate website and money is made from product recommendations. But the site offers huge value to consumers and this is the primary reason for it – the money is a by product of helping people save money from their utilities, mortgages, credit card bills and a whole host of other advise, help and support.

So being successful as an affiliate can be a by product of helping them solve certain problems. When you align your affiliate business with a market need and successfully solve problems with your products, you can create an affiliate business through helping.

This is much more rewarding and satisfying than simply selling products for the sake of monetary gain!

Summary

So hopefully you have some ideas about how to make your first affiliate sale online by now. There’s many ways in which affiliates sell products online. Checkout my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products for some ideas. But before setting off on a long journey, such as affiliate marketing, it’s wise to create a plan.

Make sure you take the time to consider your niche. In a niche you love, you’re going to keep going much longer than in one in which you have no interest.

Once you have made your first sale, you can repeat the process to make many more. But building a successful affiliate business can be rewarding in so many ways, and not just financially. If you align your affiliate strategy with a purpose, vision and mission, you’re much more likely to stay the course for long enough to start generating sales and making your business profitable.

Learn more about starting an affiliate business from scratch here.

How To Convert Leads To Sales

In this article I’m going to discuss how to convert leads to sales. You might also want to check out my previous article “converting traffic into leads“. Before we get into the leads to sales bit, it’s worth reiterating the importance of your target audience which I covered in the previous article. Your target audience is the section of the online marketplace who is most interested in your products or service. They are the ones who will become your best customers. So before you write any content on a blog, or set up an advert to send traffic to your website, you should do some work on your customer avatar using the customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Your customer avatar is that person who is going to buy your products. Get to know them by looking at your existing customers who already buy from you. Or think about who is best served by your products or service. When you clearly “see” and identify your perfect customer (customer avatar), your advertising budget will go further (and so will your content) because you’ll be targeting the right kind of people and bringing them to your site.

When the people landing on your website are super well targeted, you’ll have more success turning them into leads. But if they are the wrong type of visitors, it’s going to be more difficult.

How To Convert Leads Into Sales – Returning Visitors Buy More Often

Most visitors landing on your website won’t buy anything on their first visit. Studies show that online visitors will need between 6-7 touch points before the sale is made. This means that despite all your marketing efforts, most of your visitors won’t buy from you straight away. This can get expensive if you’re running paid advertising, and frustrating if you’re a content creator. To help with this issue there’s a number of tools you can use to get your visitors back to your website after they first arrive:

Email marketing – set up an autoresponder and collect subscribers by offering a high value giveaway on your website in exchange for their email address.
Push notifications – works in a similar way to email marketing. Visitors opt in to be notified of new content and are sent back to your site when you publish it.
Retargeting – retargeting offers a means to track visitors who have landed on your site and bring them back with targeted advertising.

Ideally set up all three of these strategies on your website. The retargeting adverts you run will bring them back. The push notifications and the email marketing will keep them coming back. These tactics allow you to build on the touch points that the typical visitor would have with your business.

How To Convert Leads Into Sales

So you have your marketing strategies set up and you are now successfully building an email list of subscribers from your site. See my previous article for more details on converting traffic into leads. You’ve put everything in place to attract your target audience to your website. You’re going to have more chance of converting a lead who is a well targeted one than one who might not be interested in what you are selling.

Once someone signs up to your email list, they hand over their email with the expectation of getting something in return. This is your lead magnet. It might be an ebook or a video course, for example, but it should be congruent with your target audience and your product/service.

Make sure you deliver on this promise and give huge value in your email follow up. But you can also send your visitor directly to an offer just after they opt in to your email list. This is often the best opportunity to catch your subscriber at the pique of their interest.

how to convert leads into sales — Checkcut this thank you page here.

For example, when someone signs up to your email list, you can send them to a sales page, or offer them something of value. The thank you for subscribing landing page is a good opportunity to build trust and/or promote your product/service. Don’t waste it with a generic landing page (see below). This is sometimes known as a tripwire funnel. When a subscriber takes a certain action, it triggers another offer/sales page.

How To Convert Leads Into Sales – Email Follow Up

Most email marketers have a follow up email series which delivers on the promise they make at the sign up point. If you don’t deliver on this promise, or you deliver something which is of little value, your subscribers won’t pick up your emails in the future and you’ll soon drop into their spam basket! In fact only around 40% of your first email messages will even get opened!

This is why it’s so important to use your thank you page as an opportunity to engage your subscribers at the moment they enter their details. They may never open your emails!

With the right email follow up series you can engage your subscribers, offer them value and build trust. Don’t go for the hard sell on your every email or you risk pushing people away. Build trust first by offering value in your emails.

If your emails are useful and informative, your subscribers are more likely to open them in future and you can build trust with your subscribers over a longer time frame, bringing them back to your website and showcasing your products and services.

Law Of Reciprocity

In the online world we are in a buyers market. If you’ve ever left a store because of a pushy sales person, you’ll know how off putting it can be.

To build trust offer value instead of pushing your products. Let the subscribers decide whether your product is right for them. Use your email messages to build rapport and help subscribers better understand your services and products and what they can do for them.

“Few people would be surprised to learn that, as a rule, we prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like” – Influence Robert Cialdini

The law of reciprocity, sometimes also known as the norm of reciprocity, refers to a social phenomenon when people feel obliged to give back to someone who gave them something. So give value in your emails first to build trust.

Email messages can also be used to bring your subscribers back to your website. This reminds them of their interest in whatever it is you do.

Email Marketing Vs. A Website

On a website most visitors will leave without having taken any action. This is the power of email marketing. Once you get a website visitor to sign up to your email list, you can continue to send them emails over a much longer time period than is possible on a website.

An email subscriber can buy from you weeks, months or even years or decades after they signed up to your email list. This is why it’s important not to forget those people who have been on your list for a long period of time.

Make sure to keep in touch with them. Send out regular emails informing them of your products/services. It can also be a good idea to create a re-engagement list. This is used with an old email list. Ask long term subscribers to sign up again to stay informed if they are still interested. You can also clear out those subscribers who no longer open your messages.

You can get an email marketing service here and try it out for free!

Converting Traffic Into Leads

One of the best ways to sell online is by converting traffic into leads. Research shows that most website visitors don’t buy from their first visit to a website. In fact, most visitors will return several times before making a buying decision.

For affiliates and business owners, this is useful to know so that you can create many touch points with your potential customer. With only one visit on your website from most of your visitors, it’s going to be much harder to sell. But when you can get visitors to see your content (and products) again and again, they are more likely to buy from you.

This is just one of the many reasons you’ll want to convert your website visitor into a loyal email subscriber! Once on your email list, you can continue to follow up with useful email marketing messages which build trust with your subscribers and lead them back to your products many times. On an email list, you can extend dramatically the term with which a website visitor can buy from you.

Since most visitors leave a website within a few minutes, it’s a good policy to offer something of value to give to visitors in exchange for their email address.

Converting Traffic Into Leads – Targeted Traffic

Where do you get your traffic from? Whether you buy traffic or build content for it, you need to make sure you have the right visitors coming to see your website. Without the right targeted audience landing on your website in the first place, you’ve much less chance of getting them on board with either your email list or your product/service. What is your target audience? Your target audience is the section of the online marketplace who is going to be most interested in what you are selling.

If you create content (or run ads) which deviates from this focused intent, you can waste a lot of time getting the wrong people on your website. To make sure you get the most highly relevant traffic coming to your site in the first place, is the best place to start when considering how to get them on your email list.

To do this, consider who your customer avatar is. The customer avatar is the type of person who is going to buy your product. to find them, look at who you’re already selling to.

What are their interests, where do they hang out online? Where do they live and what is their location? The more information you can gather on your customer avatar, the better able you are to target advertising (and content) towards them specifically and obtain the most targeted website traffic possible. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Converting Traffic Into Leads – Create An Enticing Opt In Offer

Once you have a nice flow of targeted traffic coming to your site, you’re off to a good start. The next step is to create an enticing offer which would be suitable for your target audience.

Ideally your offer should give huge value to your subscriber and also tie in with your product or service which you intend to sell. You’re going to give away your “freebie” in exchange for your website visitors’ handing over the precious email address. So it will need to be something valuable! Since more and more website owners are doing this, website visitors are becoming more hesitant at handing over their details.

To get your website visitors to subscribe to your email service, you need a great offer which will help them overcome this hesitancy. You can offer an ebook, a video course or video or email training, for example. On this site, I offer a free video series to help people start an online business from scratch. You can join my email list through any of the forms or opt-ins on this website. Sign up here.

Converting Traffic Into Leads – Benefits Not Features

One of the easiest mistakes to make when you set up your opt in offer, is to talk about your offer in terms of features. For example, I offer training and education to help affiliates get better results. But website visitors don’t want to know about the features of your offer. They only care about WIIFT – What’s In It For Them! So creating a benefit driven offer isn’t always as simple as you might expect.

For example consider the two headlines I might use to encourage visitors to opt in:

“Access tools and training to learn affiliate marketing from scratch” and compare it to this one:
“Earn Money In Your Sleep”

One of the titles talks about the features and other one benefits. Which one is most appealing? The second one is because it explains the end result which people want and is easily understood. The other talks about features; affiliate marketing is the business model which can get you the benefit, but most people don’t really care about this! Look at the two images above and decide which is most appealing. This can give you some idea about how to position your offer to get more subscribers!

Using A Landing Page Software

A landing page is worth a mention here too. With a landing page, also known as a “squeeze page”, you “squeeze” your visitor into entering their details to join your email list. This is done by sending a visitor to a page specifically designed to capture their email address. On a normal website, there’s a lot of distractions and more choice for your visitors. They can browse around and it’s easy to miss your opt in offer. But on a squeeze page the offer is the only thing they see. They only have two options: sign up or leave! They can’t browse around like on a normal website.

Because of this landing pages can be optimised more easily for performance and you can get more subscribers per visitor than on a generic website. Here’s an example of a landing page I built for my email list:

cross testing landing pages — Visit this landing page here.

Why use landing pages? Landing pages are particularly useful if you’re driving traffic to a website using a paid advertising platform. You’re more likely to get a subscriber sending someone to a landing page than a normal website and your marketing budget can go much further. Plus, once on your email list, you’re more likely to turn a subscriber into a customer, since you can continue communicating with them over a much longer time frame than is possible only from a website. Access a landing page software here.

Testing And Cross Testing

With a landing page software you can also cross test your pages against other similar ones. After a while of doing this over thousands of visitors, you can understand which landing pages are the most efficient and turn the most visitors into subscribers.

Ultimately cross testing landing pages allows you to get leads into your email subscription service for the lowest possible cost. Sending an equivalent number of visitors to a blog post won’t have the same effect because most website visitors don’t take any action – even with a pop up or subscription form.

But with a landing page more people will sign up. A good landing page can have a sign up rate of 40% and above if you get the elements right in terms of your offer and target your visitors according to your customer avatar. By cross testing different headings, images, form position (to the right is the best), and other factors, you can optimise your landing page to get the best bang for your buck!

Converting Traffic Into Leads On A Website

You can convert traffic from a blog website into leads too. Ideally have a few ways to give some kind of value from your website. You’ve probably already seen my popup offer and drop down webinar bar. I also use banners in my text and have a sign up form on the side of this website. By having multiple ways in which your visitors can subscribe to your email list, you increase the likelihood with which they will sign up!

Make sure the benefits of your offer are immediately apparent and they visitors can see them clearly on every page of your website. Although popups are annoying, they work! Otherwise so many website owners wouldn’t use them! Popups can be set up using an autoresponder. Here’s the one I use. I also use a drop down plugin called Icegram which lets you setup offers on timers to showcase your offer.

Summary

Turning traffic into leads is one of the best ways to monetise a blog website. But you’ll need a lot of traffic first. Before you start looking for traffic, research your target audience. The target audience is the cross section of the online marketplace who is most likely to want to buy your product or service. Once you understand your customer avatar thoroughly, you’ll get more out of your advertising and/or blogging, depending on what traffic strategy you use.

With a nice steady flow of traffic to your website, you can offer a freebie giveaway on your website and/or create specific landing pages so you can optimise your ability to turn website traffic into leads. A landing page is a webpage built to specifically turn visitors into leads. On a website, only a few visitors will opt in to your offer. But on a squeeze page you can increase this amount dramatically by cross testing your offers against similar pages.

If you’re using a website to turn visitors into subscribers, use multiple opt in offers. On this site, for example, I use a popup, a drop down, multiple banners and static opt in forms.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing

Just how do you get sales in affiliate marketing? And how come some affiliates make hundreds or thousands of sales while many struggle? There’s a couple of reasons why newbies struggle while long term affiliates thrive! Long term affiliates have some battle scars. They’ve often failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Because of this they know what they’re doing!

The other reason long term affiliates can make hundreds or thousands of sales easily is because they already have an audience.

As a beginner it takes time to build your confidence and time to build your audience. But for a seasoned affiliate with an email list of over 10,000 subscribers, for example, it’s another story.

A single email sent to an engaged audience can result in a number of sales, so for the long term affiliate making sales is easy. But a newbie who has just learned how to build an email list doesn’t have this power yet! They need to figure out who their audience is, what product/s to sell and how to get traffic to their offers.

So if you’re new, and have maybe just joined an affiliate program, you’re probably wondering how to take your affiliate link and turn it into cash! Heads up!

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Your Audience

You can’t make any sales without an audience. You need someone to actually click on your affiliate link and make a purchase. Spamming it throughout your social media isn’t the best tactic and although you may get a lucky sale, it’s not a great tactic without some planning.

Understanding your target audience for affiliate marketing is one of the best things you can do as an affiliate. Your “target audience” is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is going to be most likely to want what you’re selling.

So if you’re selling a Yoga course, you might want to find people who fit that particular demographic. How old are they? Where do they hang out online? Where do they live and are they mostly male or female? Once you have gathered more information on your most suitable customer avatar, you can spend your time more productively in finding them online. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this.

You can’t hit a target if you can’t see it. So dissecting who you are going after with your product is some of the best spent time you must find as an affiliate. When you intricately know who you’re selling to, finding them with your marketing becomes easier.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Marketing

The clue is in the term “affiliate marketing“. Without marketing, you’re not going to be able to put your product in front of customers. Marketing can be defined as any interaction with your potential customer. That could be through an email message, a paid advertisement, a blog post or a YouTube video. Or it could be from all of the above.

The more marketing points of interaction with your chosen customer avatar, the better. These are known as touch points and studies have shown that most online customers won’t buy from a single “touch point” alone. They need more like six or seven touch points before they will make a buying decision – especially from a website they don’t already know and trust.

So as an affiliate, your job is to create many points of contact with your potential customer to make the sale. While this can be tricky at first, you can automate this process through the use of building an email list, or running a re-targeting campaign on top of your standard marketing strategy.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Building The Email List

Building an email list is one of the best things you can do for your affiliate business. Whatever products you sell, having a list of email subscribers puts you in charge of your traffic and allows you to build trust and increase the number of touch points you have with your audience.

From a website, it can be much trickier to make an affiliate sale. The visitor only has a few minutes on a website after which they leave, potentially forever. But if you can get them to join an email list you can send them marketing messages over a much longer timeframe.

Making affiliate sales from an email list is therefore much easier than selling directly from a website, hoping your visitor will purchase on their first (and perhaps only) visit.

The Lead Capture Page

To build an email list you can either build a blog website (and create a lot of content), or pay to send targeted visitors to a landing page. From a website, you can offer something of value (such as an ebook) in exchange for your visitor’s email address.

Here’s an example of a landing page:

Why use landing pages? Simple. A landing page gives visitors a simple choice: sign up to your list or leave the page. With a blog website, there’s much more going on. So it’s much more difficult to “squeeze” a subscriber because they’re more distracted by all the options and content which they can browse. Landing pages are also known as squeeze pages because you’re attempting to squeeze a decision out of your visitors!

When using paid advertising, it’s much better to send visitors to a squeeze page as you’ll get more people joining your list than through sending them to a website. Once on your list, you have more opportunity to make an affiliate sale because you have a longer time to build trust with your subscribers through your email messages. Get a landing page software here.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Multiple Touch Points

Email marketing is just one way to get your marketing message in front of your potential customers more than once. You can also use other tools such as PushEngage.

Push engage is a push notification software which lets you automate update messages when you post new content on a blog. I use Push Engage on this website and if you accept notifications, you’ll be updated when I publish new content.

Another strategy used by affiliates is retargeting. Retargeting lets affiliates set up advertising campaigns which target people who have already seen their content somewhere before.

So if you have a YouTube channel, you can target people who have seen one of your videos before. With a blog, you can “follow” your visitors around the internet with an advert and bring them back to your site.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Mindset

Your mindset as an affiliate is a pretty important but often neglected key to online success. To get sales as a beginner affiliate can be much more difficult than for longer terms affiliates. Long term affiliates have gained experience as well as built a larger audience.

For the beginner who is full of doubt and scepticism, there’s a lot to overcome. Not only do you need to overcome your own fears, but you also have a large period of learning to get through before you can start taking some action in building an affiliate business.

At the very beginning, you won’t have any website traffic or email leads. This means you have a lot less leverage than a top affiliate with a huge list of subscribers. But remember they started there too (with nothing)! So if you’re struggling with no sales, remember to keep going and don’t quit! It’s easy to quit but harder to keep at it, especially when you don’t see any results from your hard work!

Your Choice Of Product

There’s all kinds of products which you can sell as an affiliate. Some products pay more than others and some sell better than others. If you’re going to make sales in affiliate marketing it’s worth choosing products which are going to be around for some time and which are super valuable.

A small shift in trajectory of a space craft can send it miles off course over a long journey. The same is true with your choice of products. Using low valued physical products will only give you small “one off” commissions. But choose to sell high ticket affiliate marketing products, and those which pay recurring income and your whole journey can be totally different.

The same amount of work can result in a completely different experience depending on your choice of what to promote as an affiliate. Choose wisely! One of the best way to get sales in affiliate marketing is to choose a program which has a build in sales team and a range of products (including high ticket and recurring commission). Learn more here.

Summary

There’s many ways to get sales in affiliate marketing and it’s a good idea to think big! After all, as affiliates you can market your products globally from your laptop and sell to people anywhere in the world.

One of the best ways to connect with an ever growing audience is through using email marketing. Get an autoresponder here for free and learn how to build an email list. Promote high value products to your list which offer high ticket and recurring income commissions.

With a range of high value products, you can more easily access the more expensive (and better) marketing platforms. But of course depending on your situation, you might also want to use a cheaper marketing solution such as blogging or video blogging, for example.

Access a training resource here for more info.

Best Hands Off Business

What is the best hands off business you can start? Drop shipping, print on demand, information publishing and various other businesses are far more accessible today because of the internet. Many business models even allow you to sell products you don’t even own!

While there’s many business options today which anyone can use, my personal favourite is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products and you can “piggy back” the sales of other people’s products. You only need to learn how to put yourself between the product and the customer to benefit from the huge rise in online e-commerce sales.

Best Hands Off Business – My Story

Back in the early 2000’s I bought an ebook from eBay and it struck me as the simplest business model. Anyone can purchase an ebook and the seller doesn’t have to lift a finger.

An automated downloadable product would be sent once they completed an online checkout – which is also automated. The whole process is hands off! I knew that with a global audience (with the internet), and digital downloadable products as your inventory, you have the model for the best hands off business available!

But after building my automated online “shop” I struggled getting people to it! So I put myself on a marketing course to learn how to sell my own ebook. This led me to a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you sell other people’s products for a share of the profits. I was trying to sell my ebook for around $10 and the course I bought was around $100. By selling the course I could earn 40% commission ($40) for each sale. This was four times as much as I would earn if I sold my own product!

So I went to work promoting the course I bought and started making sales.

Best Hands Off Business – Affiliate Marketing

But that’s the beginning of the story not the end. I struggled after getting my Adwords account shut down and went on a long journey of learning affiliate marketing the hard way – using only free traffic!

My struggles eventually led me to join an affiliate marketing mentorship group who helped me with more personal training and tuition.

But it was the business model which was the biggest factor. Before, I was promoting low value affiliate products from eBay and Amazon, since I was most familiar with using these platforms. But they only paid tiny commissions. With my free marketing strategy of niche website building and blogging, I only made the odd sale (in the beginning).

With my tiny commissions from eBay and Amazon, this didn’t amount to much – certainly not a living. But I learned to use subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products instead. Each sale was worth either a much larger amount or a recurring income.

Best Hands Off Business – The 6 Figure Sales Funnel

It was ultimately the six figure sales funnel which I found to be the best hands off business! The principle is the same as the sale of an ebook. Since digital products pay more than physical ones, 30%-40% compared to 1%-10%, it made sense to focus on these. But with also using high ticket recurring income products within a sales funnel, it was much more lucrative.

High value sales means you have more revenue coming in (more quickly) which also means you can access the more expensive (and better) marketing platforms.

While blogging is free it’s also very slow. You can’t control the traffic with blogging. PPC – Pay Per Click (paid marketing) is much faster and much more scalable. Having a sales funnel which includes a product range gives you much greater earning potential as an affiliate.

With a single product to sell, which only pays once, you need to sell a lot of products to keep the money coming in. But with high ticket items and recurring income products you can continue to earn from long term customers and you can earn more from each customer.

Summary

The best hands off business I’ve found is the affiliate marketing business model which includes a high ticket and recurring income product range. Your only job as an affiliate is to figure out your marketing strategy and send qualified, highly relevant subscribers into your sales funnel, which you can learn.

While this takes some time an commitment, it’s a skill you won’t regret learning! Ultimately you can automate an affiliate business and potential earnings are unlimited. You can work from anywhere and all you need is a laptop and internet connection to start!

Access a high ticket sales funnel system, full training and resources through this link.

Affiliate Marketing Free PDF

In this affiliate marketing free PDF I’m going to discuss (you guessed it) affiliate marketing! I’ve been an affiliate for over 10 years now and it wasn’t always an easy ride for me. But that rollercoaster has given me some valuable experience of the pitfalls and benefits of one of the world’s most popular online business models.

Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties get paid on a performance basis for selling other people’s products. Although affiliates can use any form of advertising, it’s mostly done online. When someone uses my affiliate link to purchase something from my website, I earn a commission based on the sale. The sale is tracked back to me as the affiliate and I get paid by the “vendor” (product owner).

Anyone can learn how to do this and can make money from their laptop from anywhere. So long as they have an internet connection, they can make money through the selling of other people’s affiliate products. However, it’s not all plain sailing being an affiliate and around 95% of affiliates will quit. If you want to be in the 5% of affiliates who make money with affiliate marketing, I suggest you read this article in full!

Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Why So Many Fail

So why do so many affiliates fail? This can be for a number of reasons and it’s a testimony that affiliate marketing is not easy. Pretty much anyone can become an affiliate marketer simply by joining an affiliate program and learning how to promote their unique affiliate link to sell a product. This is perhaps one of the main reasons for the high drop out rate – the low barrier to entry. All you need is a laptop and internet connection and you can become an affiliate.

What most don’t have is the mindset of a business owner. With affiliate marketing you only get paid if you make a sale through your affiliate link. It’s therefore a performance based business model. Unless you “crack” a strategy to make this a reality, you won’t make it as an affiliate. This can take some serious dedication and hard work, even before you make any money.

Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and learn for several weeks or months before you can even earn anything? Most people aren’t!

Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Discipline & Commitment

Affiliate marketing takes some serious dedication and commitment and those who stick at it are the ones who reap the rewards. If you’re looking for a quick win or a “get rich quick” scheme, affiliate marketing definitely isn’t it!

There’s some high earning affiliate marketers for sure, but they typically didn’t hit the big time over night. Rather they stuck at it for months or years before they understood how to scale up their businesses and sell products to an ever growing audience.

But there’s also many ways to do affiliate marketing which is one of the reasons it can be so confusing for beginners. If you flit around with affiliate marketing, jumping from one strategy to another, it’s likely you won’t gain any traction in any given method.

Sticking to a single method for long enough to generate regular sales requires commitment and belief. So for a beginner who is unsure of their direction, this presents a lot of problems. How can you commit to a strategy you don’t believe in, or trust will work?

Here’s another reason why so many new affiliates become dismayed and drop out. If you want to succeed, you need to keep going when you’re at the point of quitting!

Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Strategies

There’s many strategies used by affiliate marketers to sell online. This article is an example of a piece of content. Content creators (like me) build a lot of content to attract their target audience. While content marketing is a slow method of building an audience for affiliate marketing, it’s also a cheap one.

With lots of content you can attract an audience for free through the search engines (Google search). Or, if you’re using YouTube to build a channel of video content you can attract free traffic from YouTube.

PPC – Pay Per Click marketing is another strategy used by affiliates. Paid marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, YouTube, and Facebook can be used to target a specific type of person to sell affiliate products to. Paid marketing is fast but you need to be careful with it. An ad platform can suck your budget very quickly. The benefit of using paid marketing to sell affiliate products is that it’s fast and you can easily scale. Once you find a profitable advert, you can simple spend more to make more sales.

There’s many other free and paid for strategies affiliates use such as email marketing, social media marketing (paid and free), SEO (search engine optimisation) etc.

Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Types Of Products

Many affiliates will flock to platforms such as Amazon and Clickbank when they start their affiliate marketing journey. Depending on your training and influences, this might be suggested as a course of action. However, Amazon has one of the lowest paying affiliate programs in the industry. Physical products tend to pay lower levels of commission to affiliates.

So it’s well to be aware of this before you start out doing affiliate marketing. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% on most of its products. Clickbank.com, on the other hand will pay more (often between 30% and 40%). Thats because Clickbank is a marketplace for selling of digital products. With digital products you can earn considerably more than with physical products.

Digital products need no manufacturing costs, handling or delivery costs. This saving can be passed on to the affiliate who does the advertising.

The best kinds of products to promote as an affiliate are those which pay you larger amounts and more than once. Subscription affiliate programs allow you to earn multiple recurring payments from each sale. So you can even earn more (over the longer term) from fewer sales than you would from a physical product of similar value.

High ticket affiliate products pay more than the average in commissions. They carry higher price tags and/or commission levels.

Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing

One of the most important things you can understand as an affiliate marketer is your target audience. The “target audience” is the small cross section of the online marketplace who you are most likely to serve with your choice of affiliate product.

Remember that with affiliate marketing and the internet, you can choose who to place your marketing message in front of. With a global audience, you can waste a huge amount of time and resources trying to sell to anyone and everyone! Most people don’t want what you’re selling.

So trying to sell everyone simply doesn’t work for affiliate marketers. When you get clear on your “perfect customer”, that is, the types of people who would value what you are offering, you can target them more specifically. This means you’ll waste less time and be more productive in whatever marketing strategy you decide to use. The “perfect customer” is also known as your customer avatar. You can learn more in the customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Choosing Products You Love

Another top tip for beginner affiliates is to choose a product to sell which you genuinely align with on a deep level. I spent years trying to flog any old product and to my dismay, nothing much sold. That’s because I was only trying to get the end result and I didn’t understand that I needed to be aligned with my activity in order to be congruent and authentic and of service.

Although you can simply refer customers to products as an affiliate, this isn’t very satisfying over the longer term. If you can align your values with your affiliate business, and genuinely work on something you feel is meaningful to you, beyond the obvious monetary gain, you can have a lot more success, both personally and professionally.

As an example, Martin Lewis built his website MoneySavingExpert.com and it’s hugely successful. But his site is also providing a massive service and genuinely helping people. When you figure out how to help people genuinely with your products/service, you’re on to a winner!

Summary

So that’s my affiliate marketing free pdf guide! I hope it’s been useful. If you’ve enjoyed it please share it! Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models you can do. You don’t need any product of your own and you can do it from anywhere. However, the best thing you can do if you’re serious about making money as an affiliate is invest in your education and keep learning and growing.

95% of affiliates quit which means if you do so you’re giving yourself a much better chance of success.

Access an online training resource which offers all the tools and training you need to succeed here.