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!

The Importance Of Goal Setting

What’s the importance of goal setting? Well, if you don’t have a target, you’ll never hit anything! A goal should motivate you and drive your behaviour towards some future attainment which you desire. I’ve found goals have kept me going when I was unmotivated, even if they were only tiny goals. As time has gone on, I’ve become better at setting goals which are meaningful to me.

Earlier this year, I set myself the goal of achieving 1000 organic website hits by the end of this month (today). I even wrote a post on my strategy “how to get 1000 websites hits in one day without paying“.

Here’s my stats for this week:

The Importance Of Goal Setting

Yesterday my website had 860 hits on it. That’s a slight short fall of the 1000 hits goal I set for myself. Still, today isn’t over and I’ll share my stats at the end of this post.

The Importance Of Goal Setting – Did I Fail?

I really don’t consider this a failure, even if I don’t make it to 1000 hits today. The thing is, when I set this goal, my daily hits were around 200 a day. The goal inspired me to aim for a higher figure, something I had never achieved before.

My mindset at the time too was slightly distracted and whimsical. I was feeling a little demoralised and uninspired. I was also wondering whether blogging would actually make much difference in terms of my sales. This mindset, (the uncertain kind), is the kind that leads back into procrastination and inaction.

The goal served to fire me up on all cylinders again. Rather than wonder about whether the action would “work” and spend needless hours on procrastinating on a new method of marketing, I simply focused on the goal.

The goal got me thinking about ways to achieve it. So my mind filled up with creative ways to accomplish it, rather than dawdling, and then doing nothing, which I often do!

The Importance Of Goal Setting – Breaking A Goal Down

I had never before hit 1000 website hits on my website organically, (and still haven’t – yet)! I have achieved this before, but through using paid advertising. By setting this goal, I stretched myself and have proved that goals do in fact work. However, I’ve “failed” many times in the past with goals. Partly that’s because I wasn’t very good at following through, or setting good goals. I would set a goal, and then forget about it. Many times I’ve found my goals on pieces of paper, even years later, laminated lines of text which were long forgotten!

The Importance Of Goal Setting

In a recent house move, I found one from years ago about making £1000 a month from my online business! It was from 2010! The thing is, I didn’t keep track of my goal once I had written it. I forgot about it, and therefore it forgot about me too!

This time, I wrote my goal out and reminded myself of it every single day. That way, I couldn’t forget it. I also made sure I worked towards my goal every single day and that my daily routine was aligned with my goal. In terms of my blogging, I’ve kept up a blog post a day (at least) for the last several weeks! I also made sure I was posting my articles to my email list, and posted them on social media – every single day! The result is a compounding effect. Not every post gets huge interaction, but the compounding effect of doing these small daily actions means an upward tick of my traffic over time.

Why I Never Stuck With Goals

I have a scatter brain, I’ll admit it. So I would write down a goal, and then go and do something different, and totally forget about it. But a good goal is something that keeps you engaged. You want it so bad, you can’t stop thinking about it! It stretches your comfort zones and you believe in it, even if you don’t yet know how to achieve it.

A good goal needs to be a 10/10 for belief (meaning you totally believe it can be done) and a 10/10 for desirability too (you really, really want it). Unless these two parameters are met, you’ll likely forget about your goal, put it to one side, or dismiss it as unachievable. If your goal only scores a 5 out of 10, on either parameter, it’s not going to motivate you.

I used to write goals that I didn’t believe in. No wonder I discarded them. Or I would write goals I believed I could achieve, but didn’t really care about! A good goal is one you believe in, care about and really, really want.

The Importance Of Goal Setting – Summary

The Importance Of Goal Setting

With an online business, it’s important to keep setting goals which drive you forwards and stretch you. With my affiliate business I’ve had periods where I’m running adverts, shooting videos, writing blogs or sending emails.

There’s so many things you can be doing, it can be easy to waste a lot of time, and still get nowhere. A goal ties it all together and keeps you motivated and taking consistent action. Without a goal, your mind can wonder about all the possible actions you could be taking, but end up taking no action, because you’re so confused.

I’ve not always been such a strong advocate for goal setting, because I haven’t always known exactly what I wanted! But if you can set a goal which is specific for you, which motivates you and inspires you into action, it’s never going to be the wrong goal!

the importance of goal setting

The current hits today on this website are 235 but it’s still morning here in the UK! So I’ll update the web count once the day is passed to see if I hit the magic number of 1000! Please share this post because I need all the help I can get!

Update:

Here’s yesterday’s stats and it looks like I only managed to reach 746 hits on my website – a shortfall from my 1000 target of 254!

Still, I have learned a lot from this exercise and I don’t see this as a failure. Yesterday I pushed myself more, asked for shares, and some subscribers even said they would share my post for me!

The thing is, when I send an email out to my list, some people pick it up days later. So there’s a delay. The same is true from sharing some content on social media. Growth with blogging is incremental, and consistency is the name of the game!

Setting a goal of 1000 website hits (organically) has helped give me focus and commit. Without my goal, I wouldn’t have done as much. That’s the importance of goal setting. It gives you a target which helps to motivate you and inspire you! I’ll now set a contingency goal for the upcoming month! See my post what are contingency goals.

I set the goal of hitting 1000 website visitors (in a day) by the end of the month, but I only set this goal mid July! Take a look at how it impacted my traffic compared to other months:

What goal could YOU set which would make the biggest difference in your life for the better?

Give First, Receive Later

One of the best pieces of advice I got as an affiliate marketer was to give first and receive later. When I first became an affiliate, I simply wanted to get those sales! Make the money! I didn’t really consider how this would happen. But affiliates succeed with an exchange of value:

Acquisition, conversion then value delivery are the main first principles of online selling.

affiliate marketing for beginners

As affiliates we send traffic to offers, but to build trust, acquire leads and convert them into customers, we must have some kind of value first. This didn’t occur to me as a beginner affiliate. I thought I could simply set up and advert, send traffic, and make money. While it can work like that, it’s what you give that attracts your customers, and builds trust.

If you’re running an advert, you attract customers by giving value and meaning. By creating content, or emailing your list, you give understanding and insight. If you do this enough, and to the right people, they will buy from you because they trust you, and because you’ve already given them the value they will exchange in monetary terms.

Give First, Receive Later – Example

Over the last few years I’ve been teaching martial arts and initially, I struggled with building up my school. I sought the help of an online “guru” who I found online. His name is Mike Massey. Now I didn’t have much money to go buying his stuff, and I didn’t know whether he could help me in any case.

law of reciprocity

So I signed up to his email list to learn more about what he was offering. His emails alone helped me enormously. He taught me to use online advertising, offer more courses and teach summers schools etc., how to retain longer term students and a whole bunch of other useful stuff!

I didn’t want to do some of the things he recommended, but after several weeks of reading his emails, I felt like he’d given me huge value – and completely for free!

power of giving

Guess what? In his emails he sells his book and I bought it. I realised there and then that this was how to sell online. Nobody wants a pushy salesman shoving their wares at them. But once you’ve already given the value, the law of reciprocity kicks in. It’s a commonly known sales technique and one which works really well in the online space.

The online space is a buyers marketplace. But if you continue to deliver value and build trust, your subscribers and visitors will buy from you if your products are a good fit for them!

Give First, Receive Later – Example

Another example of the give first, receive later principle is Martin Lewis’s website moneysavingexpert.com. In it, he gives financial advice and links to companies and services through affiliate links. Money Saving Expert is a hugely popular and successful website which helps people with their finances by showing them the cheapest utility companies, credit cards, discounts and offers.

give first receive later

It advises on mortgages and other financial matters, such as getting out of debt. The point is that the site is built on the principle of helping people first, making money second. You might not even be aware that the site makes money from referrals (affiliate marketing).

Without having built the huge amount of helpful content on the website, Moneysavingexpert.com wouldn’t have gained the brand awareness and readership it has today.

Be A Producer Not A Consumer

We often don’t think in terms of producing or consuming, but if you look around you’ll see that most of us are in fact consumers nearly 100% of the time! We consume entertainment, blogs, videos, food and goods and services.

Most of our days are spent consuming something, whether it is food, goods, entertainment or a service. To shift this relationship and earn from affiliate marketing, you need to become a producer.

When people are consuming your information, your courses, ebooks and downloadable content, you have their attention! Use the content you produce to lead people to products which will help them, by giving them useful information which is of service. This can be done through blogging, through video or through your own ebooks, or email messages.

Be a producer, not just a consumer!

Delayed Gratification & Patience

As an affiliate marketer, it’s important to realise the importance of delayed gratification and patience! If you focus only on the getting, you might scare away your potential customers by being too keen! If you walk into a shop, and the salesman is too needy for the sale, it pushes customers away! The same is true in the online space.

give first receive later

But if you give through your content and email messages, you build trust over the longer term. Continue to do so, and your subscribers will know you are consistent and therefore reliable. But if you get frustrated and drop off, you can’t serve anyone over the longer term.

As a beginner affiliate I was definitely focused on the getting, rather than the giving. I was looking for the quick wins, the easy buck! But it didn’t work because I didn’t provide any value to anyone.

I recently had a sale drop in from a subscriber who had been on my email list for 5 years! Such is the power of email marketing and of course of patience and delayed gratification!

Why Counter Intentions Hold You Back

Why counter intentions hold you back in life? A counter-intention can be a subtle thing, such as the need to maintain an old habit, keep someone happy, or hold on the certain lifestyle you once wanted. Because these subtle counter-intentions are often unconscious, they sabotage our other intentions of attaining something important to us, such as a career goal, a relationship or an achievement.

Are counter-intentions holding you back in life?

Here’s a quick example of a counter intention. Say you join a gym and decide you want to get fitter, and shift some belly fat. You set a goal to drop a stone in 6 months and trim down and get yourself in better shape. While writing out your goal, and thinking of it, you become motivated and start feeling good about it. You join a gym, and start eating better. Things are looking good!

But two months in, you start getting bored of the regimen. You go out for a few drinks one night and the next day you don’t feel much like training, so you skip them gym that day. Pretty soon, you’ve forgotten about your best intention and fallen back into your old lifestyle habits. What happened? Old counter intentions took over. Those old habits which were your previous lifestyle habits took over, and you fell back into an old pattern.

Why Counter-Intentions Hold You Back – Old Habits

Are counter-intentions holding you back in life?

Your life is made up of intentions and counter-intentions which make up your “comfort zone”. Somewhere in-between your highest goals and your lowest acceptable standards is where you reside in your life.

Sam Ovens “We are not the highest version of ourselves that we can imagine, we are the lowest version of ourselves that we can accept”

Are counter-intentions holding you back in life?

When you set a goal for yourself, you change some habits in order to achieve it. But you’re working against inertia – that inertia which has built up in your life already, and runs the show from behind the scenes.

Here’s a few possible other counter-intentions, or “mini-contracts” you might have made which keep your best intentions in check:

  • I want to lose weight, but I can’t give up ice cream and pizza
  • I’d like to earn from an online business, but I don’t have the time/ my friends don’t support me
  • I’m determined to find that relationship, but I’m afraid of the rejection
  • I’d like to travel, but my job never gives me the time/space

Our prior commitments are often the reason we don’t follow through with a goal or an intention. In this case, it’s useful to decide what is really important to you, rather than continue down a path because you’ve always been on it. This is a strong case for contingency goals.

Why Counter-Intentions Hold You Back – Contingency Goals

“If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got!” – Jim Rohn

Most people are living lives of quiet desperation and part of the reason is that they never re-examine their life’s choices/set new goals. They continue down a path they chose years ago! Since they have put so much energy into it, their lives are often built around their past choices.

Are counter-intentions holding you back in life?

But there’s always a choice to change your behaviour, if you want to. The problem is that there’s an inertia behind your previous choices which have led you to your life as it is right now!

Contingency goals are re-alignment goals for when you have either achieved a goal/intention or if you have changed your mind about a particular direction in life. If you’re changing direction in life, or have set a new goal, it’s useful to know that your past behaviour will act as a hand break for your new intention.

Imagine an oil tanker changing direction and doing a 180 degree about turn. It doesn’t happen quickly. So if you’re setting a new intention, this is worth remembering. It will take some time and effort to change something in your life. The longer you have been running an old habit, the harder it is to shift.

Re-Aligning With A New Goal

So if you have a new goal or intention, it’s well worth examining your counter-intentions to it. Will friends/family support you? Does your previous habits/lifestyle support this new direction? Are you fully aligned with your goal, or do you need to change it? Do you really want your goal, or is it influenced by someone else?

You can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by examining your intentions and getting clear on them. When you’re clear, you can align yourself much better. When some kind of block comes up, such as the need to have a beer when you’re trying to lose weight, you’ll have already made preparations for the eventuality.

To do this write out your goal several times, examining how you feel about it as you do so. If the goal doesn’t give you a 10/10 for desirability and a 10/10 for achievability (i.e. you don’t think it’s possible), you may need to alter your goal a little so that it is better aligned with exactly what you want.

For example, if you want a better body and to lose some weight, but you also want to have a pizza now and then, and a few beers, you can accommodate for this in your goal setting. See also the power of intention journalling.

You may have to alter your goal to accommodate for a lifestyle choice, such as eating! But if you don’t want to give up the old behaviour, you may have to realise that you don’t really want the outcome enough.

Why Counter Intentions Hold You Back – Summary

Counter-intentions conflict with our goals and halt our progress towards them. But often, we don’t really want the goal enough, and our old behaviour is preferable to achieving what we say we want.

It is often only when we are resolute that we must create change, and have had enough pain that we will set an intention which we follow through on. If our goals are whimsical and we don’t follow through, it’s often because of a counter-intention:

  • Our friendship circle doesn’t support us and we prefer to have their blessing
  • We are too addicted to our past behaviour, can’t give up the cake!
  • We don’t want it enough to sacrifice our old patterns
  • Out lifestyle takes the front seat and we only want our goals when life gets dull again

It’s worth re-examining our goals and intentions from our past regularly and making contingency goals – both for when we are out of alignment or changed our mind on a goal, and/or have achieved a goal we desired previously.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent

Why it pays to be consistent with affiliate marketing? Consistency allows you to build momentum, without which, you’re likely to stall. If you’re an affiliate, one of your best advantages is consistency. If you’re inconsistent in your actions, it will take much longer to achieve success. In the beginner stage of learning affiliate marketing, you’ll need to be consistent at learning. You’ll be going through videos and training materials. This can take some time to get to grips with. If you only work sporadically, it’s going to take much longer to get set up with your website, marketing funnel and sales materials.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent

Once you have completed some training, you’re going to need to choose a marketing method of some kind. This next “phase” of affiliate marketing is arguably the most difficult. Marketing is where the “rubber meets the road” in terms of making sales online. Without a marketing strategy, and consistent effort, you won’t make any headway with affiliate marketing.

It’s difficult learning a marketing strategy as a beginner because much of the effort you put in initially doesn’t lead to the outcome you want – sales. But your focus should be on mastering a marketing method here, and learning still. But rather than learning from training videos, you’re learning from your own trial and error marketing methods.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent

Again, if you’re inconsistent here, you’ll slow down your progress. Inconsistency also means you fail to gather any momentum. If you spend time every day on some form of marketing, eventually you’ll break through and get some insights, whether that’s a sale, a lead, or a website hit. These insights will drive your future behaviour as you figure out what actions are going to bring you the best results in your affiliate business.

Consistency with your marketing method gives you clarity and momentum and eventually insight. If you’re inconsistent, each time you come to set up an ad campaign, or write a post, or create a video, it’s much more difficult getting started. You lose the “flow”. But if you’re in the way of doing something each day, it’s much easier to keep up with that activity over the longer term. This is pretty difficult in the early days because you’ll wonder what actions you should be doing.

Choose a strategy and stick to it for at least a few months, before deciding whether you should change route. It will usually take at least this long before you can effectively judge whether a particular course of action is the right one, or not. Without consistency, expect this to take much longer.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent – My Journey

If it takes longer to start to gather information and glimpse some insights into your course of action, you’re going to stall all the more. You’ll doubt and procrastinate, leading to further inaction. It’s a downward spiral which leads to quitting. Conversely, once you have gathered momentum with some affiliate strategy, your actions lead you to more actions. Eventually if just feels wrong NOT to take a daily action step towards your goals.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent

I’ve been blogging for several years now but I wasn’t always consistent with it. I would write a few posts and then start looking for results. I would sit on the sidelines, wondering whether my blog posts had been found, whether they would be found by Google, and I would sit and wait, looking for evidence that what I was doing “worked”.

Let me tell you this isn’t a good idea and although it’s worth gathering data and looking at your websites hits, leads and “feedback”, inaction isn’t going to help you! It’s actually your enemy! After a few days of looking for my website to suddenly make a sale for me, I would become disappointed. This led to my state falling downwards towards inaction again, through the thought processes of fear, scepticism and doubt.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent – My Blogging

A month or so later, a sale would drop in from my previous work. I’d finally have some positive feedback and this would fuel my belief again. So I’d start blogging again, sure in the knowledge that I was on track in my daily regime of blog post writing! A month of blogging might pass, and I’d start to doubt my path again, looking for those sales! Doubt crept in, and I’d stop taking daily action because I doubted my strategy.

It took a long while for me to realise that it was my pattern of behaviour which led to my lack of sales. I was always full of doubt. Only when a sale dropped in, did I pick up again and start writing.

This is why belief is so important for success with an online business/affiliate marketing. Without belief, you won’t do the work. You won’t even try:


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

Instead of looking for results, before you’ve done the work, (like I used to do), find a way to fire up your belief and focus on what you can do every day, to drive your affiliate business forwards.

Summary

Consistency is one of the keys to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. In the beginning, you need to consistently study a course or education program. Then you need to pick a marketing tactic and stay consistent with applying it, whether that is paid advertising or content marketing.

Why It Pays To Be Consistent

As you stay the course, you’ll experience some feedback, which will allow you to find tune your efforts and become better at it. While some will see this “feedback” as a lack of sales, or as “failure” those who use these insights to make better decisions are those who succeed at affiliate marketing.

If you’re not consistent, you will slow this process down and you’re much more likely to get stuck in procrastination and inaction without the momentum you build from consistent action. Consistent action will give you more momentum, which you must keep up. When you commit to the affiliate journey, stay the course and build momentum, that’s where the magic happens and you start to see sales coming in faster and faster.

Overcoming The Upper Limit Problem

Are you struggling overcoming the upper limit problem? The upper limit problem is a mechanism of self-sabotage and is the brain’s subconscious way of keeping us in our “safe zone”. You see the upper limit problem occur in celebrities often at the peak of their career. They have a huge success, but then they self sabotage; getting arrested or into a car accident, for example.

Millionaire lottery winners create similar effects too. Many lottery winners experience a massive fall from grace. They lose friends and even all of their money shortly after their big win. Often it can show up in other ways too. For example if one area of your life is going really well, another area suffers; your business is booming, but then a relationship fails.

the big leap

This can happen for a number of reasons but often it’s simply because somewhere in your subconscious mind you don’t believe you are worth all the good. How many times have you heard the phrase “it’s too good to be true”, for example?

Our limits for feeling good about our lives keep us experiencing pain and discomfort. But if we identify this feeling with “who” we are, the payoff is comfort and consistency.

Overcoming The Upper Limit Problem

So what’s the answer to overcoming the upper limit problem then? How can we avoid self sabotaging when things are going the way we (consciously) want them to? Firstly it’s useful to identify the issues which may be blocking our good feelings and the ability to expand those good feelings so we can have more of them.

If we identify as someone who “struggles”, is “a failure” and is “never good enough”, for example, how will we react when we achieve success, if we ever do? It’s very likely that we will fail, (if we have these beliefs about ourselves) because it lets us maintain our consistent world view – that we are “a failure” and that we “aren’t ever good enough“.

A good thing to observe about yourself is how you talk about yourself when in the company of others. Do you put yourself down at all? How do you think of yourself? If your view is slightly negative, this will have ramifications on the subconscious self sabotage which comes with the upper limit problem.

Overcoming The Upper Limit Problem

sam ovens

“We are not the highest version of ourselves that we can imagine, we are the lowest version of ourselves that we can accept” – Sam Ovens.

Our dreams and aspirations lift us up and carry us forwards, but when our motivation and energy wanes, it falls to our lower limits, our lowest acceptable standards. The “space” in between is our comfort zone where we spend most of our lives! Here’s how this looks on a graph:

overcoming the upper limit problem

One way we can affect change is to observe our patterns of behaviour in terms of our success. The “highs” we aim at lift us up, but it is also the “lows” which are determined by us too. Only by shifting the two levels (upper and lower) can we make consistent positive change, like this:

overcoming the upper limit problem

Overcoming The Upper Limit Problem – Awareness

Bringing awareness to your subconscious behaviour patterns is a good place to start if you are experiencing this.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will control your life and you will call it fate” – CG Jung

One simple way to bring more conscious awareness into your limiting ideas and beliefs is through meditation. With meditation, you become the watcher of the mind, observing your inner dialogue dispassionately, without judgement. As you practice this, you can bring a similar awareness to your spoken word. Listen to what you say in conversation, particularly in regards to yourself.

What do your close circle talk about? As you become more observant you can notice limiting ideas which are likely to cause conflict in your life, in the areas of success, wealth, happiness and well-being.

The Upper Limit – Gay Hendricks

Gay Hendricks first coined the term upper limit in his book The Big Leap. He says it is our inner fears which pull us back like an elastic band when we have experienced a “peak” of success.

overcoming the upper limit problem

Think about how your life would look like if you could accept everything going well, exactly the way you want it to in terms of:

  • Finances
  • Relationships
  • Happiness
  • Lifestyle
  • Health

Notice the behaviours which cause you to pull back, limit yourself and doubt your worthiness. What thoughts are limiting your fullest good? Do you feel unworthy, or not good enough to have it all? Most people have at least a few self limiting beliefs in terms of not feeling good enough. The key to shifting an upper limit problem and creating more happiness and success in life is to “see” these limiting ideas you carry, and shift them from inside.

Once you have uncovered some of your limiting beliefs, you can use powerful mantras and visualisations to shift things. See the power of intention journalling and how to change subconscious beliefs.

See also Gay Hendricks upper limit.

Why Belief Is So Important For Success

There’s a few reasons why belief is so important for success, especially with an affiliate business. There’s this old adage from Henry Ford of course:

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

If you don’t believe that YOU can make money in affiliate marketing, you won’t even try. Self belief is the most important belief. If you don’t believe in YOU, you’ll find some way to fail.

But then there’s also belief in what you’re doing. It’s easy to struggle if you don’t believe in your direction online too, or if you don’t believe in the product you are promoting.

Of course there’s the belief that you might not know what you’re doing, too. But if you believe in YOU and that YOU can make money online with affiliate marketing, you can acquire all the necessary skills to do so because of this belief.

Why Belief Is So Important For Success – My Journey

I started learning affiliate marketing tactics back in the early 2000’s and it wasn’t an easy journey for me. I struggled from the very beginning. Having jumped from Forex marketing, and having a stint trying to make money on eBay, I stumbled upon affiliate marketing while trying to promote an ebook I had written. With a room full of unsold eBay stock, affiliate marketing seemed a simple solution. No stock necessary! A simple referral of someone else’s products/services.

why belief is so important for success

I liked how clean it was, so set about building multiple websites in a bid to sell affiliate offers, most of which I found on Clickbank, as per my earlier training back in the day! Having built multiple websites most of which didn’t work at selling a thing, I felt like quitting. If it wasn’t for an early sale in affiliate marketing, I would have probably joined the percentage of those who quit (around 95%).

But the idea of selling thousands of a digital product (originally my ebook) wouldn’t let me go! I was hooked!

Why Belief Is So Important For Success – The First Sale

The first sale is an important milestone for any affiliate because it proves to yourself that it can be done. When you can sell an item online, you’ve proved not only that affiliate marketing works, but that YOU can make sales online. Before this happens, it’s easy to carry around some scepticism and doubt.

But that doubt mustn’t grow, because if you allow it to, it will stop you from moving forwards. To stop doubt and scepticism from growing and destroying your future affiliate business, you must focus on building your belief. Here’s the dilemma.

why belief is so important for success

Without proof that something works, most people have very little time for it! But the seeking of the proof has the seed of doubt within it! Affiliate marketing does work, there’s no doubt. The question is whether affiliate marketing will work for YOU. Knowing all this, there’s very little point in the various online “gurus” showing you how well they’ve done. Although that can spur you on, earnings proof only shows one thing – that someone else made it work for them, not you!

Why Belief Is So Important For Success – My Blogging Experience

When I started out as an affiliate I didn’t have any money so organic (free) methods where what made me my first sale online. I wrote a product review and made $40 commission! It was to be a major boost to my belief around affiliate marketing and the idea that I could make it pay.

Before that I had tried a few other methods of earning online, one of which was using Google Adsense. With Adsense, you place advertising on your website content. When someone clicks on it, you earn a small commission. By small, I mean very small. I earned a few pence (cents) which was nothing compared to my $40 for my affiliate sale.

why belief is so important for success

So I chose blogging partly because of my earlier experience and this small, early success. As a beginner, I was fired up with enthusiasm after having bought an online course. But this enthusiasm quickly waned when I didn’t make much beyond that. I would blog and blog and blog, but still no more sales. So I would quit and throw in the towel! Then, a month would pass, and a sale would drop into my inbox! Wow, I would think, this really works. So I got back to blogging again. This time, with more confidence.

It was my belief, (or lack of it) which drove/killed my activity. And it was my activity which drove the sales.

Why Belief Is So Important For Success – Focus On Activity Not Results

One of my former mentors from a network marketing company I used to be involved with (Kleeneze in the UK), told me:

Don’t focus on the results, focus on your activity.

This was difficult in the beginning because I didn’t fully believe I could make affiliate marketing work for me. So I was looking for evidence that it could work. So, I would build a website or write a blog post, share it, and then sit back waiting for something to happen! I would wait, wait, wait! Sure enough, nothing much would happen. So I would doubt whether affiliate marketing worked!

But after a block of blogging frenzy, backed either by fear or belief, a sale would drop in! This gave me further evidence that not only did affiliate marketing actually work, but that I was making it work with my content and that I could actually replace my income with it.

Once this started happening more frequently, my confidence and belief grew. So I would write more frequently. Eventually, I let go of looking for confirmation and focused on fuelling my belief, once I realised I was in this stop/start pattern of behaviour.

Why Belief Is So Important For Success – How To Fuel Your Belief

For many affiliates, they never get the confirmation that a sale is possible for them, because they quit before that happens. But affiliate marketing is a performance based business in which you only get paid when you sell something. In the first instance this means you must do the work upfront.

Unless you do the work upfront, you won’t make any sales, but in order to do the work upfront, you must have some faith/belief that it will amount to something!

Therefore spending time building your belief is pretty important for affiliates and this can be done through a number of avenues:

When Things Don’t Work

There are always times when things just don’t work out in affiliate marketing. As a business, not every month is going to be pay check month, as in a regular job. I have some good months and some not so good months. In the beginning phase, there were long stints when I was earning nothing from affiliate marketing. Since I chose a largely organic marketing route, things were definitely slow for me. Paid marketing is much faster, but that’s a topic for another post.

why belief is so important for success

When things don’t work out you will fall back into doubt and scepticism. That’s where you need to go back and build your belief again. This is where most people quit. They try something, it doesn’t work and they assume it will always be like that. But those who stick, learn from those “failures” and use them to start again with greater knowledge.

It’s the knowledge which is valuable, because you can build on that to ultimately create a solid income from affiliate marketing. The fact that gaining that knowledge can be a painful process, perhaps explains the high drop out rate among affiliates. When things are painful, and you feel like giving up, is where you need to find that belief again, and come back even stronger (and better armed this time).

Small Wins, Long Game

It’s easy to want the big prize of making a tonne of money online. After all, that’s what so many “guru’s” are selling with their courses. But I have found the desire for megabucks can actually be a bit of a distraction. The wanting can create disappointment when it doesn’t happen straight away. You look at your results and are dissatisfied. This doesn’t lead to wanting to do more work, quite the opposite.

While a big goal can help motivate towards action, small goals can also be helpful when it comes to building belief in what you’re doing.

When you want a large outcome from an affiliate business, but all you have is small results, it’s discouraging. But if you focus on the small wins, you can more easily build confidence. A small win might be building your first website, for example. Or getting your first website traffic somehow. It might be purchasing your first online course, or running an advertising campaign for the first time.

Small wins are the path to big wins. Focus on the small wins and over time, the big wins will come! The best way to succeed with affiliate marketing is to decide not to quit. Stay the course and focus on small wins which build your belief and confidence.

The Power Of Intention Journalling

There’s huge power in writing out your intentions, or intention journalling. If you’re running an online business, but keep getting stuck, I would highly recommend it. It’s so easy to get caught up in routines and habits which don’t get you where you want to go. You think over the long term they will serve you, but what if they don’t?

carl jung

If you’ve been doing the same things for a while, but they aren’t taking you to where you want to be, start journalling your intentions on a daily basis. This can be a simple mantra such as:

“I now make 10 sales a month/week/day“, or whatever feels appropriate. It should be something which motivates you forwards, and perhaps feels a little out of reach right now.

It doesn’t matter that it might not be true right now. Just that it is believable enough to repeat on a daily basis.

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Limiting Beliefs

You may be aware of limiting beliefs. Those are beliefs which you may have picked up from your childhood which no longer serve you. They are still alive and kicking often because they were hammered into you by a parent with their particular mantras and “programs”. Think about something a parent might have said when you were young which limited your life somehow, for example:

  • Life’s a struggle
  • Money doesn’t grow on trees
  • Money is the route of evil
  • You must work hard for money

Those are just a few examples of limiting beliefs which are often picked up in childhood. They lay the foundations for the circumstances in your life through subconscious programming. It can take many years for them to appear, but the route cause may be a limiting belief which was repeated many times to you as a child.

the power of intention journalling

Remember at school too, when you had to repeat things over and over to remember them. The times tables, spellings or even when you’ve been in trouble!

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Installing New “Programs”

Limiting beliefs can hamper your attempts to change your circumstances because they are “hardwired” into your subconscious mind. So no matter how hard you attempt to change things on the “outside”, your inner world continues to create hardship because of a limiting worldview/belief.

So for example, if you’re intending to create more abundance financially, but your limiting belief is that “money is limited” or “life’s a struggle”, it might always seem as though you never quite “get there” and you always find it difficult to make money no matter what you try. It’s no wonder, that’s the case if you’re running this old program.

the power of intention journalling

You can shift these old paradigms by bringing them into your conscious awareness and replacing them by some new more powerful (and positive) ideas.

That’s what intention journalling does. It gives you something to repeat daily which is going to change your paradigm from the inside, rather than just struggling against old limiting beliefs on the “outside” of life.

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Choosing A Powerful Intention

To choose a powerful intention to use as a mantra, find something you want to achieve or bring about in your life. So, for example if you’re building an affiliate business, it might be to make more sales online.

Here’s one of mine that I used for a while:

“I now make 10 or more affiliate sales a month”

I wrote it out every day at least 10 times. It also became a mantra I used regularly where I just repeated it regularly (inside my head). At the time, this was a good intention for me because I wasn’t quite making that many sales on a regular basis. However, I knew it was possible because I had made that many on occasion. If you choose an intention which is too far fetched for you to believe, you may have more conflict over using it.

Ideally choose an intention which scores 10/10 for desirability and 10/10 for believability. If you don’t believe it, you’re likely to discount it and if you don’t desire it, you’ll likely give up using it before it has time to take effect.

It’s worth pushing yourself here too as to what is possible. So stretch yourself a little and as you repeat your mantra, notice what comes up.

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Observing

As you write out your intention each day, notice what comes up for you. It might be some limiting ideas or conflict. Notice this and “tweak” your intention accordingly. You can also imagine how your life will look once you have achieved your intention. This is also a useful exercise (visualisation). See also my article focus and inspiration what you need for affiliate success.

the power of intention journalling

However, it’s also important to suspend your disbelief a little. Set an intention which when it happens you will know that it is because of this work you have done in setting your intention. That might mean stretching what you believe is possible a little. However, you still need to make a habit out of writing out your intention every day. So if you are in conflict with your goal ,because you don’t believe in it, you’re unlikely to keep up with the practice.

There’s a great book which goes into more detail about this process by Stuart Lichtman. Stuart was an MIT professor who came up with a process he called Cybernetic Transposition. He “transposes a success from the past, and places it into a future event in your mind“. This is done through using what he calls meta stories, similar to the intention writing discussed here.

A “Flag” To Your Unconscious Mind

What this process does is “flag” up your goal to your subconscious mind so that it looks for solutions even when you’re asleep! So if you’ve been trying (and perhaps failing) to succeed with making sales in your affiliate business, this is definitely worth doing. All the attempts you make consciously are still going to come under the control of your subconscious belief system and programs.

the power of intention journalling

So if you have a negative belief which is holding you back somehow, you may be unaware of it. No amount of hard work consciously will make things change. You need the conscious mind and the subconscious mind working together in partnership.

This is where the power of intention setting comes in. Make a daily habit out of this and do it for at least 30 days consistently, writing out your intention at least 10 times daily, more if you can. In Stuart Lichtman’s book, he recommends writing out your “meta story” 100 times a day.

After several weeks of doing this practice, or even sooner, you should notice some ideas coming up. Make sure you do them and follow through. These will be subconscious suggestions based on the intention you have set for yourself.

The Subconscious Mind

The subconscious mind is powerful and will bring about your intentions whether you realise what they are or not! By setting specific intentions for your affiliate business, you are consciously letting your subconscious mind know exactly what you want.

Most of us are running programs we known nothing about and then complain when they materialise in the world! We complain, focus on the negative things which we don’t want to bring about, but then they show up in our lives.

The subconscious mind doesn’t care what shows up! It simply obeys the commands of your programs and brings about events and circumstances which are congruent with the messages you convey!

If you spend all the time grumbling about life, focusing on the bad things, what you don’t have, and your lack and limitations, they keep showing up because you keep giving them your attention! To make change you need to consciously shift away from this pattern towards a more positive outcome which you truly desire.

The unconscious patterns of thought (and intention) are running the show if you let them. Intention writing is a means to change these to a very specific outcome which you definitely want to achieve.

Training The Mind For Success

As a beginner affiliate I never thought that training the mind for success was at least as important as my affiliate marketing strategy. So I kept on trying (and failing) over and over again. I was trying the same strategy over and over, and things didn’t change.

As the quote by Albert Einstein goes : “The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things but expect a different result”.

In 2014 I found an online mentorship community and I dutifully joined it. Despite having been an affiliate for some time, I still wasn’t having much success. I knew if I gave up then failure was inevitable! So, I rolled up my sleeves ready to start again from scratch with an open mind.

While I learned some new strategies, there was also an emphasis on mindset and training your mind for success. This was definitely an aspect of affiliate marketing I was unfamiliar with and I believe one of the missing components which hold many affiliates from the success they desire.

Training The Mind For Success – Growth Mindset

With a growth mindset and full of self belief and the right knowledge, anyone can make a success of affiliate marketing. But that’s the biggest problem. Most people go in with over confidence, false expectations and a lack of knowledge and with self limiting beliefs. They soon quit! Their belief takes a hammering as they come up against the reality of making a living online versus their fantasy version of it.

success affiliate

95% of affiliates will quit which is testimony to the fact that affiliate marketing is not an easy business. But consider how many people can “give affiliate marketing a go” and this number isn’t all that surprising. Most businesses fail and it’s not just online businesses. But the fact that an online business is easily accessible to anyone with a laptop, means that a 95% drop out rate isn’t so discouraging.

Those who succeed with affiliate marketing are those who don’t quit, despite the difficulties, and this comes down to mindset, not techniques.

Training The Mind For Success – Belief

But how exactly do you train your mindset? Can you really work on your mindset, or are you just always going to be the same as you are? This question has huge implications because if you believe you can grow and change, you have a growth mindset. If you believe you can’t change, you won’t even try!

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

If you believe you can build a profitable online business, or not, you’re right! Belief is the catalyst for motivation and action because the actions you take are driven by a belief. Try and think of an action you take in your affiliate business which doesn’t have conviction behind it. Without conviction/belief in what you’re doing, you’ll soon give up!

When you lack conviction about something, you stop taking action. So it’s pretty important for affiliates to focus on building and maintaining their belief in what they are doing. Otherwise, they will quickly lose interest, focus and drive.

Training The Mind For Success – Autosuggestion

Mantras and intentions are a good method of instructing the subconscious mind. This happens whether you’re conscious of it or not. In Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich, Hill likens the the subconscious mind to a “fertile garden spot..” where “..weeds will grow in abundance if they are not replaced by a more desirable crop”.

training the mind for success

In this analogy, he is referring to your conscious “chatter” and the thoughts and intentions which are allowed to enter into the subconscious mind through autosuggestion. Our “garden spot” is our subconscious mind and we ‘feed’ it through the thoughts which we give the most energy to.
While this analogy might seem over simplified, and thoughts only have a subtle impact on our lives, over time they become attitudes and characteristics which define our very nature and reality.

To take charge of our thoughts is a good first step towards communicating what we want to our (more powerful) subconscious mind. It is our subconscious mind which delivers the “crop” to us over time: whether that’s a successful online business or a failed one!

Training The Mind For Success – Autosuggestion

For most people, the conscious mind runs mostly on autopilot, and we generate millions of random thoughts every day. Many of these are already heavily influenced by the major events in our lives and our childhood programming. This programming happens before we have the conscious facilities to override negative beliefs and limitations which might hold us back in life.

Therefore, if a parent continually spoke in terms of limiting beliefs, it’s likely you have picked them up. “Life’s a struggle”, “Money is the route of all evil”, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and so on. Through repetition, we have embedded many negative beliefs about money, life, love and happiness.

training the mind for success

To change them you can use mantras and visualisations. A good mantra can help you overcome a lifetime of negative repetition of a limiting belief. But only if you make a habit out of it and repeat it over a long enough time period:

For example: “Money comes easily and frequently” might be used to replace a negative belief about limitation of money such as “money doesn’t grow on trees”! “I love and approve of myself” can be used to overcome a negative belief like “I’m never good enough”.

Mantras For Success

A mantra is something you consciously choose to replace/override some negative programming you might have running in the background of your mind. So, for an affiliate business, you might choose an empowering mantra such as:

  • I now make 10 sales a week/day
  • I easily make affiliate sales
  • I am a successful affiliate
  • I now make $10k a month in affiliate sale
  • I now make a living from affiliate marketing
  • etc.

Although it can be difficult to start telling yourself these things when it isn’t yet true, that’s exactly how you created your current reality – through repetition of mantras, many of which were negative in nature. Such as “I’m not good enough”, “I can’t seem to succeed whatever I do”, “It’s too hard” and so on. When you repeatedly tell your subconscious mind that idea which you want to appear in reality, your programming shifts and you’ll come up with ideas and brainwaves which will allow it to happen.

For this to work, you need to make it a part of your daily routine. Remember, you’ve probably been telling yourself something negative for decades! If your old mantras and inner dialogue are things such as “I’m never good enough” and “money doesn’t grow on trees”, you’re painting the reality you’re currently faced with. To change that reality you need to change the “paint brush”, that is your current mental chatter which perpetuates that reality.

Using Visualisation

For a long time, I used an “away from” motivation. I was motivated “away from” fear, debt and scarcity. But there’s a problem with this motivation. When you reach an oasis of abundance, calm and peace, and you’ve recovered from the stress, your motivation wanes. You fall back towards doing less, because your motivation is gone.

A more powerful way to self motivate is through a positive visualisation of a long term worthy goal. For example, the actor Jim Carey wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars and dated it 10 years into the future in 1985. 10 years later in 1995 he got the movie role in Dumb and Dumber and was paid $10 million for the film.

training the mind for success

He regularly visualised himself meeting directors and getting work as an actor in Hollywood. He kept his check in his wallet and looked at it frequently, while visualising his goal.

Visualisation is a powerful tool for affiliates because it creates an attractive future which you can use to inspire you forwards. This is much better than running away from fear, scarcity and lack because you create a more positive and powerful “towards” motivation, rather than a fearful and negative “away from” motivation which continues to draw you to it, rather than towards something positive, hopeful and inspiring.

Focus and inspiration is what you need for success with affiliate marketing, not fear and scepticism.

Why Affiliates Need Focus

It’s easy to become distracted when you’re working online which is why affiliates need focus. Social media platforms are designed to suck our attention and they do a good job of it. Unless you’re mindful of that, you can spend all your available time online scrolling Facebook feeds and reacting to your notifications and alerts! Before you know it, your day has gone; wasted on unproductive activity.

time versus results in affiliate marketing

Even if you don’t use social media much, you can still get distracted by other things. Unhelpful habits can lead you down paths which lead nowhere. You can get stuck in “training mode”, watching endless hours of training videos; but without taking any action. Or spending all your time on a logo, but without having any website visitors.

It feels as though you’re working, but affiliate marketing is a performance based business. So unless you’re working on a marketing method somewhere in your daily routine, nothing comes from it all in terms of sales.

Why Affiliates Need Focus – Training Vs “Doing”

When you’re juggling your time between family, your job and your affiliate marketing business, you need to zone in on the things which matter. Time spent unproductively is dead time which you’ll never get back! Spending time on the small things, which don’t drive your business forwards is known as being a “busy fool”. As an affiliate you must determine which actions are going to move the “needle” on your affiliate income.

focus - the affiliate's best weapon

In the beginning, you’re likely going to be watching training videos and setting up your sales system; your website and email marketing campaigns, for example. 90% of your time will be in “training mode”. But once you have some knowledge, it’s important to shift this to a 80/20 split, spending 80% of your time on a marketing strategy, and less time on learning.

You’ll still be learning. Only you will learn by experimentation not just from learning materials. If you want to learn to swim, you have to jump in the water. Trying (and often failing) at a marketing tactic is the “water” when it comes to affiliate marketing. Unless you get your feet wet, you’re not going to succeed as an affiliate.

Why Affiliates Need Focus – Spreading Yourself Too Thin

As an affiliate there’s so many possibilities and strategies you can venture down. One day you can “try” blogging and the next day you can run an ad. The problem is, you can easily spread yourself too thin, jumping from one strategy to another, and never getting any traction in any.

Far better to pick a single strategy and focus on that wholeheartedly over the longer term. Become an expert at your particular marketing tactic. I took the scattered approach as a beginner, and jumped from course to course, looking for the “easy path”, “magic bullet” and “quick win”. Sadly, this approach is another example of spreading yourself too thin.

It can be very difficult to get traction if your attention is scattered across multiple marketing strategies. Or, worse still, you don’t stay the course in any strategy and constantly change direction looking for another (easier) route.

Why Affiliates Need Focus – Doubt, Scepticism, Fear

Doubt creeps in all too easily especially if you’re a beginner. You wonder whether your strategy will work or not. Should you bother? Is it worth your marketing budget, or your time? If your mind is plagued with doubt and scepticism, you’ll dither and never fully commit.

why affiliates need focus

You’ll “try” one method, expecting some quick return, and then switch and “try” another. Since no method is guaranteed to work and most ad campaigns fail, you’ll most likely experience one “failure” after another with this approach.

But commit to the journey, and focus on one marketing strategy alone, and you’ll learn much more, even from your “failures”. Remember that the master has failed more time than the beginner has even tried! Clearing your mind of doubt, scepticism and fear is the first thing you should do. If your mind is clouded your intention is weakened. When you doubt, you tread too carefully, always pulling back, uncertain and therefore non committal.

Goals & Intentions

We all have doubts, it’s only natural. But if you focus more on your doubts than your intentions, they will eventually kill your ambition for your affiliate marketing business, if you let them. The antidote to doubts, fears and scepticism is to set a powerful goal, and regularly write out mantras to remind you of your highest intention.

When you don’t do this, your mind takes over. Most people’s mind runs on autopilot. They don’t take charge of it and when it’s filled with doubt, that’s what takes hold. Intention writing helps you gain clarity and focus as you write our your business intentions every day:

  • I have a successful affiliate marketing business
  • I now make 5-10k a month from affiliate sales
  • I write 5 blog posts a week
  • I now make consistent sales
  • I am committed to obtaining my first, hit, lead or sale

Intention writing is the antidote to scepticism, fear and doubt which runs in everyone. The key is not to let it take charge of your mind. Instead, commit to choosing an goal/intention which you are passionate about achieving. Write it out multiple times each day to remind yourself of your commitment, and especially when you’re feeling doubt.

The Meandering Affiliate

I’ve definitely been the “meandering” affiliate marketer. I meandered from course to course, tried one strategy after another, lost hope and dropped off, and then started all over again months later. This is not the path to success, let me tell you!

My sporadic work schedule only contributed to my doubts and scepticism. I would make a sale, then spend the week congratulating myself rather than focusing on what brought the sale about – or making the next one.

why affiliates need focus

As soon as I made a sale, I would spend my commission, rather than reinvest it. I had no clue what I was doing for the large part! Over time though, I slowly built confidence as I started making more and more sales.

When I made a sale organically, it inspired me in my content creation. But there was a long time period where nothing much happened. This is tough. You don’t know what works and what doesn’t until you start making sales. But that only happens when you consistently work on a specific marketing method for some time.

It’s like the chicken and the egg. We want the egg to hatch, but carry doubt and fear with us, expecting proof that it works first! Without doing the work, the egg won’t hatch. To do the work, you need faith, belief and intention, which you must fuel yourself.

Summary

Affiliates need focus and not just focus for what they do in their affiliate business, but focus in how they think. If you continually give energy and thoughts to your doubts, fears and scepticism, you’ll find ways to stop your affiliate activity. Use mantras and intention setting to overcome the doubts in your mind.

If you haven’t made any sales yet, this can be a tough phase. You don’t have “evidence” that “it” works yet, so you’re full of doubt. But how can you work towards making that sale when you’re full of scepticism? How can you sell a product, if you don’t fully believe in it?

You’ll subtly sabotage your success if you are filled with fear and doubt. So you need to purge these thoughts before they take hold with strong goals and intentions which motivate you and drive you forwards.

Focus also means removing distractions and creating a clear, cohesive path towards your desired outcome. Stay consistent and work each day on a single activity which will carry your affiliate business forwards. Don’t get distracted by other “shiny objects”, social media or potentially “better” strategies which keep you jumping from one idea to another, spreading yourself too thin to get any traction.

If you haven’t started out yet you can get a step by step process here.