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!

Breaking The Glass Ceiling Meaning

Breaking the glass ceiling meaning often refers to breaking the invisible barrier to success or achievement. This term “breaking the glass ceiling” is often used in reference to minorities or women. They cannot rise in their career because of the social barriers stopping them from achieving top positions. To break the glass ceiling means to break through this unseen social barrier.

The term can also be used in business too; where a business owner is stuck behind an invisible barrier of their own thinking. To break through this mental barrier might mean thinking in a different way. Affiliate marketers, for example will often have this problem. Their business cannot grow beyond the thinking they bring to it.

With affiliate marketing, you earn commissions online based on the sales you generate. As an affiliate’s business grows to becoming more successful, the business owner will often reach a certain point which they can’t surpass. For example, they are generating affiliate sales, and making profit, but their income is stuck at a certain level. This can be referred to as a glass ceiling in business. In order to surpass this level, they have to change something about what they do. But their thinking keeps them stuck.

Breaking The Glass Ceiling Meaning: Glass Ceiling In Business

An example might be that an affiliate is paying $1000 a month in advertising and making $2000 in commissions. So it makes sense to increase the advertising spend, given this relationship. However, this seems out of the comfort zone of the affiliate, and so they maintain their current advertising budget in spite of the obvious action they need to take.

But the necessary action isn’t always obvious; hence the business owner reaches a “glass ceiling” which they are stuck under, limiting the success of their business.

Many business owners will hire coaches and mentors to help them overcome their limited thinking. Often limited thinking can come from underlying assumptions such as the need to be frugal, or a poverty mindset; or a genuine lack of marketing budget.

With affiliates this is important to understand because most affiliate marketers are “one person businesses”, who operate entirely on their own.

Breaking The Glass Ceiling Meaning In An Affiliate Business

Henry Ford said “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right”; your thoughts precede your actions. If you think in limitations, you’ll create outcomes which reflect that thinking.

In any business this is a useful concept to understand because your thoughts will always either grow or limit the outcome of your business.

Ask Better Questions

One way to improve your business is to ask yourself better questions. If you find yourself in a negative spiral, doubting yourself and asking yourself negative questions, stop. Think of better questions you can ask yourself.

Why is my business failing? vs. How can I grow my business?

Can I cut back on my spending? vs. How do I limit my business?

Why can’t I succeed? vs. What actions generate the biggest growth for my business?

How can I save money? vs. How can I grow my business faster?

The glass ceiling of your business is often determined by the questions and thoughts you have privately which no-one else is privy to. If your thoughts are sabotaging your business, your actions will likely follow.

Removing The Glass Ceiling

To remove the glass ceiling of your business you can start by paying attention to the thoughts you have about your business. Often it is limiting thinking which has stuck because of your previous experience in life and/or business.

Have you heard the saying that “you become the average of the 10 closest friends“?

If you are surrounded by people who think in a certain way, you’ll end up thinking like they do. This also means you’ll get the outcomes they get in their lives. A good way to grow as a business owner is to surround yourself with business owners, mentors and coaches. You can join an online business community here.

Coaches can help you to see your business in a different light and to change the way you approach it. See also 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching. This can take some time and effort because much of your thinking is habitual and will come from many years of experience. So you often need to unlearn your old thinking habits in order to make lasting change.

See also psychology and affiliate marketing for more on this topic.

If you’re an affiliate you can also break through your invisible glass ceiling by getting consistently out of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a nice, comfortable place to be in, but nothing ever grows there! So if you’re stuck doing the same old things, try something different and make some changes which challenge you and help you to grow beyond your current level of success.

Do something that scares you if your want to grow. If you want things to remain the same, and to be “comfortable”, keep doing the same!

Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing

If you’re a content creator, you’ll need to keep coming up with new content ideas for affiliate marketing. Once you’ve built a huge volume of content, that content can work for you, bringing in sales on complete autopilot.

But before that can happen you need to create enough content to get traction in your affiliate business. This can take some time and serious effort. Many affiliates will quit because they can’t keep coming up with new content and sustain the necessary effort required to make work.

So it’s a good idea to choose an affiliate topic or product which you have an affinity for. It’s much easier to keep finding new content ideas in a topic you have a passion for, or at least an interest in. When you are excited by your topic, you can continue to learn and build new content around your knowledge.

When you don’t care about your topic, this is much more difficult!

Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing – Keyword Tool

One of my favourite hangouts is Google’s keyword planner which is always a good source of keywords for blog posts and videos. The keyword planner even gives you the volume of monthly traffic for specific keywords which you can create content for.

There’s a number of ways you can use Google’s keyword planner but one strategy I use is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can do this by typing in your main “seed” keyword into the planner and you will find longer tail derivatives of those keywords. You can then compare the relative competition of those keywords on Google with a quick search of the keyword, and with a search of the keyword in quotation marks.

These two searches can give you an idea of the relative competition for the keywords. Once you find a good keyword which is suitable for your audience, topic and product, you can go to work creating an article or video for it.

You can also add filters to your main keywords to show it with terms such as “why”, “who”, “what”, “where” and “when” for example, to find popular questions in your niche.

Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing – Quora.com

Quora.com is a popular question and answer website where people post questions in all kinds of topics. By searching the site for the keywords relating to your business/niche, you can find queries which you can write/create content for.

Because there are so many questions, you can use this strategy in combination with Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keyword questions which you can answer with your content.

You can also write answers on Quora too, and even link back to your content if appropriate. Quora does have a lot of spammers though so it’s important not to just spam your links but to also answer questions with some depth. When you do this, you can link to your content from your answers. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: YouTube

YouTube is a great source of ideas for content whether you simply browse the site for your particular niche, and use videos for inspiration, or use the search feature on the site. To use the keyword suggestion on YouTube just type your main keywords into the search bar. You should see a number of common searches for longer tail derivatives of your main keywords.

You can then use these common keyword searches to build content around specific keywords.

Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Buzzsumo.com

Buzzsumo.com is a great site for finding trending popular content within your niche.

Type your main keyword (or a derivative of) into Buzzsumo’s search bar and you’ll get the most popular trending articles and content which is going viral on social media.

Use the content for ideas, or the blog/video titles can give you insights into the best titles to use to get the most traction from your content. You can use Buzzsumo for free or upgrade for greater functionality.

Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Use “How To” Posts and Videos/eBooks

Whatever niche you’re in, there’s a tonne of people looking at content you can provide on your website or YouTube channel. “How to” posts are very popular and people searching for “how to” in a topic relating to yours are potentially going to become customers if they land on your website.

You can find popular “How to” searches using Google’s keyword planner with the term added to your keyword, also use Quora.com or YouTube by using the search bar; i.e. “how to {insert your keyword}”.

You can create a lot of “how to” pieces to help your audience with a specific problem and lead them to your products/services.

You can also do the same with an ebook giveaway which can be used to build your email list. Here’s an ebook I created for affiliate marketing to help beginners:

Shift To Helping, Rather Than Selling

When you’re stuck with your affiliate marketing content strategy it can also help to shift your mindset. When I shifted from a mindset of “getting” to “helping” things began to change for me.

Writing became more of a joy and less of a hassle. Because of this, I no longer got stuck with ideas for writing and creating video content. Instead of struggling trying to sell, I just asked how can I help someone with my content.

Having this mindset comes across in your content and helps to build trust with your audience too. If you’re stuck in your content marketing strategy, try shifting your mindset to align with your values. When you’re aligned with what you are doing online, it’s so much easier to create content because there’s no inner conflict with what you’re trying to do.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are a good idea for affiliates for a number of reasons. Firstly a review is something which attracts buyer traffic. Compared to “how to” traffic, a product review should convert many more visitors into buyers because you attract people on the last stage of the buying cycle. If someone is looking at a review, they are already interested in a particular product, or solving some specific problem with a product.

So if you have a particular affiliate product which you know well, write a review or create a video about the product or service. You can also look at other reviews of the product on Google and YouTube for inspiration and insight.

Lists

Lists are always pieces of content which seem to do well. There’s always lists on Google at the top of the search results pages.

As you use Google’s keyword planner, look for ideas which can become lists. Here’s a few pieces of content I’ve put together into list format:

22 ways to promote affiliate products

23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid

Highest paying affiliate programs list

Interests, Hobbies, Passions

If you’re struggling for content ideas, brainstorm your interests, hobbies and passions. What topic would you be happy about learning about for the rest of your life? Zoning in on the topic you are aligned with can give you content ideas for the long term because you have a genuine interest and passion for the topic.

Long term content creation is definitely more difficult if you’re creating content in a topic you have no interest or enthusiasm for. There will always be someone more dedicated in a topic you have no love for!

It can take some time and experimentation to find your perfect affiliate topic, but it’s worth finding it because it can make all the difference.

Tripwire Funnel

What is a tripwire funnel? A tripwire funnel is a sales marketing funnel which uses a low value purchase to trigger a higher value offer. When someone purchases a low value product, at $7 for example, they are automatically up-sold another offer which has greater value, perhaps for $40, for example.

This is useful for marketers because someone who has already made a purchase from you is much more likely to re-purchase something else, particularly if you can show them huge value in their first purchase.

A tripwire funnel is therefore a means of building trust with paying customers, and up-sell them another product. If your products can help solve problems, people are much more likely to make a purchase. When you show the value of a product, they’re more likely to trust you.

Tripwire Funnel: The Marketing Funnel

A marketing sales funnel works by sending website visitors towards a landing page where they can access something for free. To access a free training video, for example, they must enter their name and email on the page. Once they do so, they have entered the marketing sales funnel. They receive emails regularly with the training materials they requested. By offering value through email marketing, the marketer can also offer products and services which may be of use to their subscribers.

The marketing funnel begins with an email opt in page like this one:

The entry level product in a sales funnel is usually priced to offer a lot of value for a good price. This is usually less than $100. Once the customer purchases the entry level product, they are then offered a high ticket offer, which is of larger value (and cost).

This is the “tripwire funnel” which has a range of products within a single marketing funnel. It’s great for affiliates because the affiliate only needs to refer the entry level product in a product range. If the affiliate program they promote offers a built in sales team, the up-sells are done automatically through the sales team and the tripwire funnel.

Benefit Of Using A High Ticket Sales Funnel

The above is an example of a six figure funnel. Once a purchase is made, a higher priced product is offered to the customer automatically: the tripwire.

This has another benefit for affiliates in that the entry level sale covers their marketing costs. If the affiliate can achieve this, it means they affectively acquire customers for free once they buy the first product in the range. After that, any up-sell is a profit for the affiliate.

So for example the affiliate runs an advertising campaign where they pay out $200. In return they make a couple of sales making $200. So they are at break even! But, with a tripwire funnel, they are actually ahead; the funnel will up-sell their customers automatically and the later sales will all be 100% profit.

This is how to benefit from a tripwire funnel as an affiliate.

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s many upsides, but what are the disadvantages of affiliate marketing? If you’re looking at being an affiliate, you’ve probably heard all of the upsides already. Unlimited earning potential and time and geographical freedom are often the benefits touted by those selling a program! But don’t forget that they will benefit from your participation if they sell you the course!

So of course they are going to tell you the benefits of affiliate marketing. But what about the drawbacks?! Affiliate marketing definitely isn’t for everyone despite what you may have heard. It takes a lot of commitment to build a profitable affiliate business. Most people are used to employment, whereas affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means you’re effectively an “entrepreneur” when you decide to build an affiliate business. There’s no safety net, it’s high risk and if you sell nothing you make nothing!

So if you want to talk yourself out of affiliate marketing, this is the article to read! For a more balanced view see the article pros and cons of affiliate marketing.

Remember also you get what you look for online too! So be careful of the material you’re reading. I almost talked myself out of affiliate marketing too after reading some negative reviews. It’s not all bad, but here’s some of the disadvantages of affiliate marketing.

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing: Programs/Products

One of the disadvantages of affiliate marketing is that however good the program/product is that you choose to sell, it can always change. Programs can and do expire. This can be a bit of a disaster for an affiliate. Amazon recently changed their affiliate commission structure and often updates their API – (basically software which affiliates use to connect their websites with products).

An affiliate friend of mine had been spending huge amounts of time and energy building content which linked to Amazon affiliate products. The recent change meant his work became redundant overnight! All his backlinks were effectively worthless unless he changed all his content!

This is an extreme example of course and many affiliate programs will run for decades without any issues. Amazon is known for lowering their affiliate commissions though.

As an affiliate marketer the Achilles’ heel is that you’re relying heavily on the affiliate program you use to make money. Since you’re not in control of the product/program, you could get kicked out, or something could change which effects your income. So you need to stay tuned in to the program you choose to promote; otherwise something could change which effects you and your income could suddenly stop.

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing: Competition

There’s a tonne of competition online from other affiliates who are promoting the same products as you. Although there’s many products you can promote as an affiliate, there’s also going to be a lot of other affiliates who are doing the same things as you. So if you’re building a blog, for example, chances are good that thousands of others are doing the same. If you’re running paid ads on YouTube, guess what, thousands of other affiliates will be doing the same too!

This competition can be a major problem if you’re going after a certain market. If you’re attempting to rank your website for a certain keyword, for example, there’s a lot of noise out there competing for the top place! If you’re using social media to advertise, others are doing the same.

When people are inundated with marketing messages they get more discerning about what they buy and who they buy from; so you need to be a better marketer in order to sell in this kind of climate.

More competition also means advertising becomes more expensive. So even if you’re using the faster method of paid marketing to build an affiliate business, you can expect it to become more costly if there’s a tonne of people competing for advertising space.

Cons Of Affiliate Marketing: Customer Base

With most businesses you can connect with customers and establish a customer base. But with affiliate marketing you’re simply a third party who connects customers directly with the products they want. The customer can’t be loyal to you, the third party referrer. Should there be other products and value offered by the company you have referred the customer to, you can’t benefit from these relationships you have effectively created.

The exception to this rule is with a product range from which you can earn commissions from. But with most affiliate programs, you refer a customer once, and they become a lifetime customer of the company which offers the products, not the affiliate.

Subscription affiliate programs do offer the potential of lifetime commissions from having made a referral. So these are better to use than off-off commission products which only pay you once.

No Guarantees

With affiliate marketing there’s no guarantees. If you sell nothing, you earn nothing! It’s a performance based business model and you’re effectively working for yourself. If your marketing efforts produce no sales you’re out of luck! Plus, you could spend thousands on marketing and still not make a sale if your marketing efforts don’t produce the desired outcome.

Marketers spend huge amounts on their marketing budget just learning how to sell affiliate products. So if you’re on a tight budget it’s difficult to compete in this environment.

If you’re a content creator you can spend months or even years building content (blogging or video blogging) to no avail! It takes more than most people realise to become consistently profitable with affiliate marketing and there’s a huge drop out rate at around 95% – see affiliate marketing success rate.

Discipline & Consistency

Whatever path you choose as an affiliate it will take a lot of discipline and consistency to break through the initial phase of learning and failing! As a beginner, you start with nothing; no email list, no traffic, no leads or sales. You build the blocks of knowledge first and then start to implement that knowledge in building your business. It can take months to even get off the starting blocks. After that you need to apply what you have learned consistently for a long enough time to make your first online sale.

When results aren’t forthcoming, this can be psychologically very difficult. To overcome this you need to be good at a number of entrepreneurial skills which most people have never learned:

Mindset – see also psychology of affiliate marketing.
Time management
Self discipline
Self motivation
Controlling your mental state
Vision, purpose and goal setting etc.

Most people don’t have these skills or the long term vision needed to overcome the most common barriers to success. So they see it not working and give up.

Bad Press

Affiliate marketers get a bad press and are often associated with spammy tactics to make quick wins.

There can therefore be a stigma associated with the affiliate marketing business. Most people are employees and don’t know many, if any entrepreneurial or business owner types. They are mostly not familiar, not comfortable with risk.

So if you venture into the unknown world of affiliate marketing, you can expect some friends and relatives to try and talk you out of it! This can be tough and without help and support as an affiliate, particularly if you’re already struggling, you may have the added pressure of your family or friends not being very supportive.

If you’re not supported, and are having a difficult time anyway with affiliate marketing, it’s very difficult maintaining a positive attitude when those who you lean on want you to quit!

How Many Website Visitors To Make Money?

How many website visitors to make money does it take? This will of course depend on many factors. However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that you are selling products from a website which make you $100 per sale. Let’s imagine you want your website to make $100,000 a year income, which is 100 sales in a year, given this example.

The average conversion rate on a website is just 2%, but this will of course vary from site to site. So to make 1000 sales in a year you can find the traffic you need by dividing 1000 by 2% (or 0.02). This gives you a figure of 50,000. So in this example you’ll need 50,000 website visitors in a year in order to make this much in revenue.

That sounds like a lot, but divided by 365 (days) means you’ll need 137 visitors a day in order to earn this much money over the course of a year. This example remember stipulates a 2% conversion rate and a $100 income from each sale.

How Many Website Visitors To Make Money: Monetisation Methods

There’s a variety of monetisation methods you can employ from a website. The most common ones (if you don’t have a business/product or service yourself) are affiliate marketing and advertising. With affiliate marketing you sell products from your website, either directly or through email marketing. With advertising, you place adverts on your site and earn a percentage of advertising revenue from each click you get on an advert. If you’re using advertising on your site, you’ll need a lot more traffic to become profitable because ad clicks are worth only tiny amounts.

So affiliate marketing is often thought of as a better way to monetise a website. There’s a huge variety of affiliate marketing products too, so depending on the one/s you choose for your website, it can be more or less profitable. For example, many affiliate products only pay tiny amounts too. By using subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can earn a lot more per sale. In the above example, you earn $100 per sale. However, most affiliate programs pay much less than this, so you should choose carefully which products to promote.

How Many Website Visitors To Make Money? More Sales, Same Traffic

You can of course increase your sales from the same amount of traffic which will result in your conversion rate percentage going up! With a higher conversion rate you need less traffic to be profitable. This can be done through your targeting, advertising and content marketing. By getting to know your target audience better, and bringing more buying customers to your site, you can effectively turn more visitors into customers from the same or a similar amount of website traffic.

In terms of content this can be done through creating content which is very targeted towards your perfect customer avatar. For example, a review of a particular product will convert more visitors into customers because it’s a very targeted piece of content. Reviews attract buyers looking for a specific product. They are in their last stage of the “buying cycle”. With a “how to” guide, you may attract less buyer traffic with your content. That’s because that kind of content is absorbed by a different type of visitor; one who is looking for a DIY guide, for example.

Another way to convert more traffic into sales is to build an email marketing list. With a list of subscribers you can turn visitors into customers over a long time span. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. But on an email list this timespan is dramatically increased.

Summary

You can of course get lucky and make some money with very little traffic. However, in order to make the most from your site you should look carefully at different monetisation strategies and at your marketing strategy. The factors at play are your conversion rate and how much you can make from the sale of products from your site or from advertising clicks. Traffic isn’t the only consideration.

For a site to make money consistently, you need a good consistent flow of traffic because only a small percentage will convert into sales/clicks (2% is standard). You can increase this number by learning how to target your perfect customer and through building an email list from your website. See target audience for affiliate marketing and the power of email marketing.

Affiliate marketing is generally a better way to monetise a website than through using only advertising. With Google Adsense, you place code on your site which is converted into adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn advertising revenue. But this is usually only tiny amounts so you need a lot more traffic. See also Google Adsense vs affiliate marketing for two main monetisation methods.

Ideally, increase your sale value, conversion rate and traffic all at the same time. That way you guarantee that your website will become more lucrative over time.

Pros And Cons Of Blogging

What are the pros and cons of blogging? Blogging is a very cheap way to do marketing which can, over time produce some fantastic results. There’s also millions of bloggers out there too, which means there’s a lot of competition. If you’re choosing a topic which is very competitive, it can be more difficult to get traffic to your blog for free from the search engines.

Still, blogging is a very good way to attract visitors to a website or business. Should you do blogging as a means to making an income? It can take some time to build enough traffic to make an income from blogging, but it can be done. Whether you achieve it or not will depend on how long you keep going for and the topic you choose to blog about.

If you enjoy blogging, there’s no reason it can’t be turned into an income if you wish it to be. Lots of people do make money from their blogging, but not all!

Pros And Cons Of Blogging: It’s Cheap

Yes blogging is a very cheap way to generate traffic to your website. By creating and uploading regularly to a blog, you can encourage the search engines to index your website and you can get found for your blog post topics on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.

It’s also very easy to build a blog and you can even use a free website builder or blog platform such as Weebly or Hubpages. So you don’t even need to pay a thing in order to get started blogging.

You can even monetise a free blogging platform and make money from blogging through selling affiliate products or advertising. See how to make money with Google Adsense without a website.

It’s well worth building your own website however, if your’e serious about blogging. Having your own domain and hosting gives you more authority with your visitors and with the search engines too.

Pros And Cons Of Blogging: Time Consuming

Blogging is time consuming. So if you’re not into writing on a regular basis it can be too much. If you don’t know your topic too, you’ll need to research every blog post you write! So if you don’t have the time to do blogging, you’re better off using another strategy if you intend to earn from the internet.

It can take a huge amount of time and effort too; building up enough blog posts to draw a good amount of visitors for free. Because blogging is so easy, it also means that there’s a huge amount of competition in the SERPS. This means getting visitors to your site from blogging is going to take some time. Depending on your topic, it can take months or even years before you see enough regular visitors coming to your site to start generating an income from it.

AI writing tools are a boon to bloggers who want to save time. But their presence also means that more content can be created more quickly and easily. This means more competition for bloggers.

Blogging Should Be Fun!

Blogging should be fun and ideally choose a topic you have a passion or at least an interest in. If you’re blogging in a topic you have no interest in, it can be difficult to sustain the necessary effort over the longer term to make it work. If you want to make money from blogging, you’ll need to keep at it for some time in order to build enough traffic to make it profitable.

So don’t choose a topic you hate, just to make money in with blogging! You’ll likely find, as I did, that you can’t sustain the necessary work needed for long enough.

I built a blog website around the topic of mushroom harvesting because I found the keyword I thought I could rank on Google. It did rank but I lost interest in the topic and the site fell off the search results pages. It was a lesson to only focus on a topic I could sustain an interest in over the longer term.

If you find your passion, you’ll keep going for longer when the other people quit. There’s lots of bloggers out there who also want to rank their content on the search engines and this means it’s tough! It’s much easier to write about a topic you love for several months or years, than one you hate!

Blogging Might Not Pay

Another downside of blogging is that even after a lot of work, you may earn nothing from a blog. If earnings is your goal, find something which is enjoyable about the process. That way you’ll keep going.

It took me a long time before I was earning consistently from blogging. Only after I had built up months worth of content did the sales start coming in more regularly. Before that sales were sporadic.

This can be hard, especially at first. To sustain yourself during the drought period you need to keep your belief high in order to keep going. Once I started seeing the proof that blogging was in fact a viable way to earn online, it motivated me to become a more consistent blogger. But as a beginner, I worked sporadically always looking for evidence that it worked! This can hold you back if you don’t believe in what you’re doing.

To earn from blogging you need a lot of content and a way to monetise. This can be done through advertising or affiliate marketing. See what is affiliate marketing for more on this topic, and Adsense vs affiliate marketing.

Blogging Is Flexible

Blogging is a very flexible way to earn an income once you start making it pay. You can blog from anywhere and on any subject. So if you like writing, and can find a way to monetise blogging and write about a topic you love, it can be an awesome way to earn a living.

The downside of the flexibility to blogging is that you need to be very disciplined to maintain a blogging habit for long enough to make it pay. If you are only dabbling with your blogging, you shouldn’t expect much income from it. But if you get disciplined and turn blogging into a long term habit, it can give you a huge amount of freedom for doing something you love!

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s a few pros and cons of affiliate marketing. If you’re a business owner, affiliates can provide you a good cheap way to market your business/product. Plus you don’t pay them until they have successfully referred a customer. This means for a business, affiliates offer a very cost effective way of advertising.

The affiliate on the other hand takes all the risk! Affiliates are third party referrers who only get paid for referring online products and services. But affiliate marketing has it’s up sides too. If you an become successful as an affiliate, your online activities can replace an existing income. This can give you a huge amount of freedom, especially if your marketing is scalable.

If you’re a brand new affiliate, or thinking of becoming one, there’s a few things to consider before taking the decision to sell other people’s products and services online for an income.

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing – Cons: Trust & Belief

There’s a few downsides to affiliate marketing if you’re thinking about being an affiliate. Affiliate marketing can be great, but it can also suck! In the beginning, you start out with a lot of enthusiasm, which can quickly turn to disappointment. This is because making sales online is a skill and as such it requires a lot of work initially to acquire that skill. A lot of newbie affiliates will quit when nothing seems to be happening. This is where you should keep going; when others quit! See also affiliate marketing success rate.

In the beginning phase of being an affiliate, you won’t know exactly what to do. You need to get some education and follow some training or a course. You can access one on this website by signing up to the free video series. Obviously courses cost money and this is how many affiliates earn their income; selling courses to other would-be affiliates!

If you’re sceptical this can act as a barrier to your building an affiliate business because of lack of trust in the process (or lack of money). When you don’t immediately start selling things, it can fuel this doubt, which leads only to procrastination and more scepticism!

If you are fuelled with passion and belief and you get the right help, it can get you beyond this beginners phase to your first sale! Once you have proved to yourself that you can make a sale online, you have achieved something really worthwhile and it can help you overcome the fear and doubt which can hold you back.

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing: Pros

The pros of affiliate marketing are really worth paying attention to. Affiliate marketing is a business model which can give you a huge amount of freedom. Once you have made your first sale, you will have overcome two really significant mental hurdles of doubt and scepticism. These hurdles will often keep many would-be affiliates from taking the right actions which could completely change their lives.

Although affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, this really is a double edged sword. While on one hand this means if you don’t sell anything you don’t make any money, on the other hand there’s no limit to the number of products you can sell. You can also sell products in your sleep on complete autopilot!

In a job, you’re tied to trading time for money. But with affiliate marketing you can escape this trap. Once you have learned how to sell a single product online, you can sell many more, and in greater numbers. Affiliate marketing can give you time and geographical freedom, freedom from a job or a boss and freedom from a commute.

Competition & Slower Methods

The downside to all of these benefits is that there’s thousands of other people doing affiliate marketing. This means there’s plenty of competition. In the most lucrative niches this is all the more true. So if you decide to start blogging on a particular topic, for example, it can take years to gain traction and start making an income which is capable of replacing your salary.

The cheaper methods of doing affiliate marketing are often much more time consuming than the more costly paid advertising. So if you don’t have much money to invest, you’ll need to invest a lot of time to make affiliate marketing work. See also PPC vs organic marketing.

Content creation is one method of marketing affiliate products but there are many other ways. With content creation, you create video or written content and upload it to YouTube or a blog, for example. Because of the vastness of the internet, and the many other competing affiliates, you’ll face stiff competition and it can be difficult to get traffic to your content unless you have been at it a while. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

It Can Be Fast

But saying all that, there’s faster ways to do affiliate marketing. The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is through using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs. Using both these methods in unison can help you build a profitable affiliate business much more quickly.

This is all the more true if you can use paid marketing methods which are also much more scalable than blogging, for instance. One of the pros of affiliate marketing is that you can build an affiliate business very quickly if you can invest in your marketing and in a high ticket product range.

A product range can take the heavy lifting out of an affiliate business because it offers a means to sell larger value products to a scalable number of people. With most affiliate products you only earn once for each sale. With a product range you can sell an individual product and benefit from subscriptions and recurring income from up-sells which are bought later on. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.

Summary

There’s pros and cons of affiliate marketing and depending on how you approach it, your journey will be different. With paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel, you can get your business going very quickly. Cheaper routes to success involve building content and advertising for free, but this route is much more time consuming and much slower.

Many affiliate quit because they don’t get the traction they need to keep going. Getting over the initial hurdles of self belief and time management are key to success. Once you’ve made your first sale online, consider it a massive achievement, because it is! Many fall before they even reach this point.

Access a free video resource and learn more here.

Affiliate Marketing Business For Sale

Are you looking for an affiliate marketing business for sale? There’s a couple of options available if you want an affiliate business. You can buy a pre-made affiliate website from a site such as flippa.com. Or, you can invest in a six figure business funnel and start your own affiliate business from scratch.

With a pre-made already existing affiliate website, you will need to shell out for the site initially, according to what it’s worth. Make sure you do your due diligence before purchasing. Top sites can sell for upwards of $100,000 if they’re earning well already. You’ll obviously pay more for the affiliate sites which are already producing a monthly profit. The more profitable an affiliate site it, the more the owner will want to sell it for.

Affiliate Marketing Business For Sale

Here’s what a six figure business model looks like which is the other option for the purchase of an affiliate business:

high ticket funnel for sale — Access a high ticket funnel through this video series.

A six figure affiliate business funnel like the one pictured is a game changer for affiliate markers. With most affiliate marketing business models you promote a stand alone product which typically sells for around $100. Even with a digital type of product this will usually only give you a $40 commission. You need to perpetually sell more and more products in order to be consistently profitable. But with a six figure affiliate business model you use a product range which includes:

High ticket affiliate marketing products – larger than average value products which typically pay out $500 minimum in commission
A recurring income product – membership or subscription affiliate products
A multi-tier product range – not just a stand alone product
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.

A product range gives you much better opportunity for building a profitable business from affiliate marketing. It also allows you to more easily use and profit when using paid marketing methods which are faster and much more scalable than cheaper marketing strategies. See also SFM Digital Business System.

Affiliate Marketing Business For Sale – Pros & Cons

There’s pros and cons of purchasing a pre-made affiliate business. The price is often prohibitive for many but there’s a huge choice on Flippa.com if you decide to go that way. The more a site makes, the more it will cost you. Plus, you only have the details on the site to go on. Once you purchase the site, it’s yours! Websites can quickly change in terms of SEO and traffic generation, so you’re taking a risk whatever you do. Just make sure you check the website stats before you agree to make an offer.

Buying an affiliate website outright can give you a monthly income outright. But remember to ask why someone would sell a profitable asset like a affiliate site. If it’s making money, why sell? If you’re paying $100k for a site, when will you recoup your investment? It could be years after the purchase, depending on what it’s earning.

A six figure funnel will set you back too. If you invest in a six figure digital business system, and want the top commissions, expect to invest over $10k or so just to access top level commissions. This is of course much cheaper than a top website from flippa.com. However, you’ll need to also learn the skills to market your business too.

This can be a blessing or a curse depending whether you have an interest in adding to your skillset and building yourself into the business as an asset. Digital skills can be learned and they are lifetime skills. But if you’re not up for spending months learning how to market your sales funnel, a pre-build affiliate site might be a better choice for you.

Cheaper Options

Of course you can build an affiliate business from scratch and completely free! But it will take you much longer if you don’t have a product “suite”; a range of products including subscription and high ticket products offers a much more realistic option for building a profitable business online. Without such products you’re stuck promoting individual products and unless you use high ticket and subscription products you’ll need to sell in bulk in order to be profitable.

Lower value affiliate products are much more difficult to sell using paid marketing and still come out with a profit. This means you need to look for cheaper marketing strategies such as blogging which are much less scalable and very time consuming and slow.

Still, if you’re on a tight budget you can still go that route. There’s tonnes of affiliate programs which are completely free to join. You only need to find a promotion method which suits your budget. Ideally use high ticket and subscription products to give you more chance of success. See also best products to sell as an affiliate and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Ready Made Affiliate Websites For Sale

There’s a couple of main options if you’re looking for ready made affiliate websites for sale. One is to buy an existing website from a site such as Flippa.com.

Flippa.com is a marketplace for buying and selling affiliate websites. You can purchase an affiliate site on Flippa for a few hundred dollars or for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Obviously the more you pay for an affiliate website, the more money you can expect it to produce! Cheaper sites, on the other hand aren’t going to be as profitable or well established as the more pricy options. Due your due diligence though before making a purchase and make sure you’re well aware of the potential earnings of a site and how long it will take to recoup your purchase price from it.

Ready Made Affiliate Websites For Sale -Shopify

Another option to buy an eCommerce store is to use Shopify. Shopify.com lets you easily build an eCommerce store, add products to it and then you’ll need to promote it. Keep in mind that building an affiliate website this way comes with some strings. You don’t get an instantly profitable website like you might do if you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a site from Flippa.com.

The “flip” side though is that you can have an eCommerce store for much less investment. You can build an eCommerce store with Shopify for as little as $19 a month! However, you don’t get an instantly profitable site, you’ll have to learn marketing in order to get people to it. This will take some time and investment outside of the $19 a month.

Problems With “Plug & Play” Website Builders

One potential problem with a Shopify store is the product you choose to put in it. If you choose low value physical products to sell in your store, it can be more difficult to monetise if you’re using paid marketing to get traffic. Paid marketing is expensive and so you’ll need some high value products in your store to recoup this cost and ideally make a profit!

If you use high ticket affiliate marketing products, it can be a way around this issue, since you can earn a lot more from each sale with these kinds of products. For example, a typical high ticket products gives you a much larger commission ($500 or more) compared to your average physical product which will only pay a few dollars if you make a sale.

If you monetise your Shopify store with Amazon products for example, you’ll only be able to earn between 1% and 10% commission on any of the products you sell. See Amazon affiliate commission rates. With digital products this commission percentage jumps up dramatically and you can often earn between 30% and 40% on digital affiliate sales.

Ready Made Affiliate Websites For Sale – The Six Figure Sales Funnel

Another option is to purchase an existing sales funnel which offers a range of high ticket products. This is similar to the Shopify option, but you’re in a much better position to profit from your affiliate sales.

A high ticket sales funnel offers a number of benefits to affiliates, including a ready made affiliate website which is up and running in just a few clicks. Here’s what’s good about a high ticket sales funnel:

Subscription products in your funnel – offer recurring commissions so the potential of profit is much larger than a typical Shopify store, for example
High ticket digital training products – offer some of the largest possible commissions available for affiliates.
A product “suite” – a product suite means you benefit from a built in sales team closing sales on your behalf and a product range: sell the entry level product and the sales team does the rest.
Multi-tier – some high ticket product ranges offer multi-tier commissions. This means you can earn from sales generated from your referrals.

All in all a high ticket sales funnel can give you more bang for your buck. As with Shopify though, you’ll need to market your sales funnel with this method. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Summary

If you want an instant income from a ready made affiliate website, your best bet is to purchase a profitable one from Flippa.com, or similar site. Just be careful and know what you’re buying before you dive in! Cheaper sites won’t be as profitable, or profitable at all, so you should expect to pay a lot for a site which is already earning a decent profit.

Shopify is another option if you’re prepared to roll your sleeves up and learn a few marketing tactics to bring people to your site. At only $19 a month, you can have a website up and running with a small amount of effort. However, this doesn’t mean it’s profitable. Just having a website which can earn money doesn’t mean it will earn money! You need to build a marketing “engine” to drive targeted traffic towards it for it to work.

This can take some time and effort and you’ll need to learn some new skills. So simply buying a site from Shopify doesn’t guarantee a profitable business. It only gives you the ability to make profit if you figure out how to get customers to your online shop.

The Online “Edge”

A six figure sales funnel can give you the edge here because it allows you to use more easily accessible marketing strategies like pay per click. If you don’t have subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products in your store, it’s much harder to use these marketing tactics and still come out on top. This means with cheaper items in your eCommerce store, you’ll need to focus on cheaper marketing strategies which may take longer and be less scalable.

Blogging and video blogging for example are free ways to generate traffic. But it can take a long time and a lot of effort to generate the kind of traffic you need to become profitable. With PPC – (pay per click marketing), you can turn on instant traffic to your site. But it comes at a cost. You should expect to spend money while learning these strategies if you want to be profitable long term.

Access a free video series here which explains the different types of affiliate products and business models which you can set up.

Earn Commission Selling Products Online

You can earn commission selling products online, even if you don’t have any products yourself. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are rewarded for passing customers on to other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate too. All you need to do is join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Once you have your link, you can advertise it to make sales. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you and you receive a commission based on the referral.

As long as you have a laptop and internet connection, you can promote products and services online from anywhere. The key to making a success out of affiliate marketing is of course to get good at finding customers for products. When you can do this in large numbers, you can potentially replace your income from online referrals. This can give you a huge amount of freedom; both in terms of your time, geographical location and from a monetary perspective too.

But what does it take to become successful as an affiliate marketer? What are the average earnings from affiliate marketing? What are your chances of success?

Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Affiliate Marketing

To earn commission selling products online there are many strategies you can use:

Blogging
Video blogging (v’logging)
Social media marketing
Email marketing – building an email list
PPC – pay per click advertising
SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building – part of SEO
and so on..

To sell products en-mass, you need to learn how to reach an ever growing audience and this typically doesn’t happen over night! Most affiliates will have at least some struggles when they begin to learn the skill of selling online. Many will also quit! To become successful in selling products online you need to get good at marketing. Affiliate marketing means marketing other people’s products and services. The marketing part of the equation is your responsibility as an affiliate. Unless you get good at this skill, your chances of success in affiliate marketing are pretty low.

The Email List

One of the best and fastest methods of selling products online is through using an email marketing list. Autoresponders are automated email marketing systems which allow affiliates to collect emails from a website and send automated messages out on a regular basis. Through building a large list of subscribers, affiliates can sell products in large numbers through sending email marketing messages to their subscribers.

An email list can be built up to many thousands of subscribers which gives affiliates the means to reach an ever growing audience. By connecting to their subscribers on a regular basis, affiliates can built trust, give value and ultimately promote useful affiliate products which allow them to earn commissions based on the sales.

The email list is pretty important for affiliates as it gives them control of their traffic. Without traffic, an affiliate can’t sell products and services online. Traffic can be generated in many ways through either building content or paying for it. Paid traffic is far quicker than free traffic, which takes a lot longer and more effort to obtain.

Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Types Of Product

Not all affiliate products are equal, and not all pay the same in affiliate commissions. Physical products, for example typically pay less than digital products in terms of commission percentages. A typical physical product you might find on Amazon, for example, pays between 3-10% commission, depending on the product. A typical digital product on the other hand will pay much more – usually from 20-40% commission.

Some products are much more expensive than others too, so you’ll earn a larger commission if you refer a sale. High ticket affiliate marketing products are typically those which pay out a minimum of $500 for referring a sale.

There are subscription affiliate programs too which pay affiliates recurring commissions. These are good for financial stability if you’re a beginner affiliate especially because regular recurring commissions can help to stabilise your affiliate income.

Marketing – The Key To Selling Products Online

Marketing is the key to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. Whether you decide to use paid marketing, build a blog or create a YouTube channel, you’ll need to attract an audience which resonates with your messaging and who are a good fit for the products and services you choose to promote. Blogging, for example can be used to attract an audience through SEO – search engine optimisation. Over time and with patience, a blog can ultimately attract website traffic completely for free!

If you’re less patient, you can use PPC – pay per click marketing to attract traffic directly from social media platforms or from search traffic. This is often used to send targeted traffic to a landing page where affiliates collect emails and follow up with automated messages via email marketing. Email marketing combined with PPC (pay per click advertising) is one of the fastest ways you can build an affiliate business. Combined with a high ticket product range this can give you the best chance of building a profitable income from scratch with affiliate marketing. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing.