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!

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme? Nope! Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which “affiliates” refer customers to products on the internet. If someone purchases a product through someone’s unique affiliate link, they earn a commission for referring the sale. Affiliate marketing is therefore referral based marketing. Anyone can learn to become an affiliate to earn an income from the internet. You don’t need your own products or services to earn from affiliate marketing, which is what makes it attractive to so many people.

A pyramid scheme is something different. With a pyramid scheme, there is usually an incentive to recruit more people with the promise of income, often without a product or service involved. MLM or multi-level marketing businesses are often confused with pyramid schemes too, even though many are legitimate. With multi-level marketing, you can build a team of sales people within your organisation and earn income from the sales they make.

Affiliate marketing though isn’t a pyramid scheme or MLM (multi-level marketing) either. With affiliate marketing you only get paid when you successfully refer a sale online. So for the business or product owner, it’s a useful business model in which performance related pay works extremely well. It’s far cheaper than advertising in many cases for the business owner. For affiliates it’s a good business model too when the affiliate starts earning. It means they can work from anywhere and build profitable businesses without any products or services of their own to sell.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

With affiliate marketing you only get paid when you make a sale. Unless you manage this, you don’t earn a thing! Many affiliates struggle to make it work for them and therefore consider it a “scam”. For this reason it’s a good idea to get the right training and help if you’re considering building an affiliate business. The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high with over 90% of new affiliates giving up.

For the business owners (who own the products) it’s a great deal. Rather than pay continually for expensive advertising and marketing, they can pay the affiliate only when a sale is made! For this reason affiliate marketing will always be worth doing for some. For the affiliates themselves it can be a challenge to make any money. But for the few who refuse to give up there are great rewards.

Affiliate marketers who are successful can work from anywhere and earn a potentially unlimited income. By using websites and automated systems, sales can be generated worldwide on complete autopilot. This outcome is often touted by online guru’s trying to make sales of their courses! The ease of entry and promise of ease of earnings means many can become affiliates without huge investment. This, in part, can explain the high drop out rate of new affiliates trying to earn money online.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?

In order to become successful as an affiliate, you need to have a strong desire to succeed. Affiliate marketing is not like a job where you earn a wage for showing up. Your income as an affiliate is performance related. At first, all affiliates start from earning nothing! Many quit when they don’t see any results. Those who persevere often have a strong reason for doing so and refuse to quit. If you’re not committed to the journey of continual learning and improvement within your affiliate business, it can be easier to drop out.

Affiliate marketing is definitely not easy. But once you start to earn with affiliate marketing, you can create a passive income. This can be done through automation and recurring income from subscription affiliate programs. Before this can happen though there’s usually a period of doubt, fear procrastination and uncertainty. Learning anything new can be daunting, and affiliate marketing is no exception. It can be useful to remind yourself of your long term goals for your affiliate business and your “why?” for building an affiliate business.

Ultimately an affiliate business can replace an existing income and this is many people’s reason for learning affiliate marketing. But this doesn’t happen overnight and successful affiliates have usually worked for many months or sometimes even years before they can be free of their jobs.

Affiliate Marketing Fast Track

The fast track route to earn with affiliate marketing is through using a high value product range and paid marketing. With paid marketing you can build a list of subscribers very quickly. Then, you can offer products and services to your subscribers. As your list grows in numbers, you’ll see more and more sales coming through if you do it right.

This requires investment of both time and money. To recoup your advertising expenditure, you’ll need a number of high ticket affiliate products to sell. Not all affiliate products pay out equally. Physical products for example usually pay between 1% and 11% commission. Digital products can pay a lot more – even up to 100% commission in some cases but more often between 30% and 40%. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Affiliate Marketing Longer (But Cheaper) Route

The fast track route isn’t right for every affiliate marketer. It’s the best option for someone who wants to quickly escape a career and can afford to spend on product ranges and paid advertising. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing though. Some affiliates will choose a longer path which is slower but suits them better. Blogging and content creation is another option for affiliates. This can take a lot longer but is far cheaper. Bloggers create content (like this article) and build up an audience over time. From their websites they offer products and services and often they also build an email list too.

Over time and with consistent effort, content creators build a vast resource of online content. This acts as a “digital footprint” which brings in leads and sales from a website or landing page which they own. Although this is a much longer term strategy than building an email list with paid marketing, it suits many affiliates to go this route because they have the time but not necessarily the money to use paid marketing.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

A pyramid scheme often doesn’t have a legitimate product or service to offer. But rather it uses the idea of large amounts of income to entice people to join and promote a scheme which offers little value outside of this earning potential. So one way to spot a potential pyramid scheme is to ask about the product or service being offered. If the product is vague and little is offered outside of the promise of wealth, it’s a bit of a red flag!

Don’t confuse pyramid schemes with MLM either. MLM’s or multi level marketing businesses are often legitimate. With an MLM, your earning potential is increased by the ability to expand your influence through a team of other sales people. When your team make sales, you can earn a percentage of these sales because you have introduced the sales people.

There are many legitimate MLM businesses which aren’t pyramid schemes. Affiliate marketing though is different to MLM in that an affiliate usually works alone and promotes products online for a share of profit.

Some affiliate companies have successfully combined MLM with affiliate marketing. See SFM Digital Business system for more on this. See also is SFM a scam.

Micro Niche Website

A micro niche website is a website built around a specific topic. Most niches or topics are well saturated. This means there’s a tonne of other competing websites which get all the traffic. So a new website in a competitive topic/niche won’t get much traffic. But in a micro niche, there’s less competing traffic because the niche is not as saturated.

For example, the “money making online” niche is a hugely competitive one. If you built a website around this keyword, you would have little hope of gaining any organic visitors from the search engines. However, a niche within this niche is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a more specific way to make money money online. A micro niche goes further still. Affiliate marketing is still very competitive. This site has been built on a micro niche topic “affiliate marketing mentors“. That’s so it can compete on Google (and other search engines) for organic traffic.

Micro Niche Website – How To Choose Your Micro Niche

Even in a micro niche you can still face lots of competition. The days of throwing up a 3 page website and getting it to rank on the top of Google are long gone. You still have to provide value to your visitors or Google won’t give you any traffic. Of course you can still get traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com and other search engines. But Google has the majority of traffic so it’s the one to aim for.

It’s worth putting in some time before you choose your niche. A niche should be something you have an affinity for because you’ll be creating content on your website for some time. A good way to choose your niche is to look at what you are interested in. If you can’t see yourself creating content for several months in your topic, it’s probably not the niche for you.

Ideally find a topic you have a passion for and then use Google’s keyword planner to look for related keywords. Build a site around a good keyword to give your micro niche website the best possible chance.

Google’s Keyword Planner

Use Google’s free keyword planner tool to find keywords within your niche. Then compare the relative competition with a Google search. More on this in the article how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

You can start with a major keyword within your general topic. Then look for longer tail keywords which fit your sub-niche. A good micro-niche website will rank for your main keywords. In order for this to happen, you need to build your site around those keywords. This means you’ll need to find a domain name which has your keywords within it. This can give it a helping hand when it comes to getting a ranking. But there’s other factors involved too:

Your content is probably the most important element in whether you get a good ranking from Google
SEO – use an SEO plugin to help you create content
Use Google’s keyword planner to find other long tail keywords within your niche
Interaction on your site shows Google how compelling your content is
Back links show its authority

Monetising A Micro Niche Website

You can monetise a micro niche website in several ways:

With your own products/service
Through advertising (e.g. Adsense adverts)
Using affiliate products
With drop shipping

One of the best things you can do to monetise your micro niche website is to use affiliate products which offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs tend to offer training or software. With this kind of product on offer, you can earn ongoing income from each sale.

You can also use high ticket affiliate products too, which pay much more than the typical affiliate products will. See also affiliate marketing business models. One of the best ways to generate a good income from a micro niche website is through using email marketing. With email marketing, you capture your visitors email address and can market to them for an extended period of time. On a website a visitor only has a few minutes to make a purchase. But once on your email list this time is dramatically extended. See the power of email marketing.

Blogging For Profit On A Micro Niche Website

A good way to increase the value of a micro niche website is through blogging. You can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty and write content around those topics. One way to find these keywords is to use your main “seed” keyword in the keyword planner. Then look for longer tail derivatives which have lower competition than most. Create good content and use an SEO plugin to help you write search engine friendly content. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Over time if you make a habit out of this, you should find some free traffic from the search engines. Again, it’s useful to choose a topic you have an interest or passion for because even in a micro niche, there’s still likely to be a lot of competition.

Summary

Not all micro niche websites will find a good placement in the search engines. The key is to keep building them until you have some success. Then learn from your “failures” and your successes alike. If you align your interests with your niche, you’re much more likely to be able to sustain the necessary motivation and enthusiasm to create content over the longer term, which is what is generally needed.

Choosing your micro niche keywords is also pretty important. In a very competitive niche, you’re more likely to struggle in getting your website a good ranking. In a less competitive niche, you have a greater chance of getting free traffic. Content is pretty important too and you need to consider the powerful algorithm which the Google uses. If your visitors bounce from your site quickly, this shows Google that it’s not well received. Likewise good content doesn’t go out of style, so create quality content with a view of the longer term.

Making Money From A Website

Making money from a website can be one of the best ways to make money. Your website does the work and you make sales automatically 24 hours a day! Well, that’s the dream anyway. But before this can happen you need to put the hours in on your website. There’s two basic ways to generate income from a website; from advertising or from referral marketing. If you have your own products or business you can promote it from your website too, of course. But without your own products or service to offer, the best ways are through referral marketing and advertising.

Referral marketing lets you earn money from referring customers to other people’s products and services. Affiliate marketing and drop shipping are two examples of this. Or you can place advertising on your website and earn from clicks made by your visitors. Google’s Adsense program is the most popular program to offer this service.

With advertising through clickable adverts, you only make tiny amounts for each click. So you’ll need to build traffic to your site organically. This takes a lot of work and time. Alternatively you can use affiliate marketing and promote products and services from your website. This can work much quicker, especially if you use high ticket affiliate products and recurring income affiliate programs. But let’s start by looking at traffic which is the number one roadblock for anyone looking to making money from a website.

Making Money From A Website – Traffic Generation

To make money from a website you need people to visit your site. Without regular visitors to your website you’ll never make any money from it. If you choose to go the affiliate marketing route, your visitors will need to be engaged with your content and you’ll need to offer products or services which are well aligned with your content. Otherwise visitors won’t be interested in buying from you. With advertising placements you can write about pretty much anything. Adverts will reflect your content and show according to your visitors searches and the content you provide.

The two main types of attaining website traffic are paid and free. With paid traffic you can turn it on much like a tap. But you’ll need to monetise your website with products. You can’t earn from advertising revenue while paying for advertising because you simply won’t earn enough to make it work. So if you’re thinking of using paid marketing, you’ll need to use products which pay well. See affiliate marketing business models. With a good recurring income from affiliate products, and a range of high value offerings, it’s much easier to use paid marketing and make a profit from your site, especially when using paid marketing to promote it.

With lower value affiliate products, or if you use only advertising to monetise, it can be more difficult because paid traffic is more out of reach.

Making Money From A Website – Email Marketing

One of the best strategies when making money from a website is to use email marketing. With email marketing, you can obtain your website visitors email address in exchange for something you give away on your site. This gives you a number of advantages:

You can extend the time period with which a website visitor might make a purchasing decision
You can build trust and offer value to your email subscribers
It gives you control over your traffic – once you build a list you can contact your list without paying for the traffic.

On a website, someone only has a small “window” of opportunity to make a buying decision. When they leave they are gone forever! But once on an email list, this is extended to days, weeks and even months and years. See also the power of email marketing.

A Google Compliant Website vs. a blog

A Google compliant website is one which has been approved for use with paid marketing. If you go down the organic route and become a blogger, this isn’t so important. But if you decide to use paid marketing platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Adwords etc., you’ll need a compliant site. Each advertising platform has it’s own rules and regulations regarding compliance. In general, you’ll need to show your site is authentic and you comply to the GDPR, data protection and privacy rules. This generally means using a privacy policy, GDPR pop up and stating your disclaimer on your website. Check with the platform you’re going to be using for the full terms and conditions.

If you get this wrong it can mean an advertising platform will suspend your account and you won’t be able to advertise with them. So it’s worth crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s!

With a blog website, compliance isn’t so important although it will still have an effect. On a blog website, your traffic comes organically from Google and other search engines. SEO – search engine optimisation is more important if your traffic is coming from the search engines for free. Site speed is also an important factor in either case but particularly with an organic blog. Slow site speed will considerable impact your SEO. You can get plugins to help with site speed and other aspects of helping with organic traffic. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Fast Vs. Slow

To make money from a website is a great achievement. It can mean time and financial freedom. But there are fast ways of doing this and much slower ways. As you would expect, the fastest route is much more expensive. See fastest legit way to make money online. With this route you would use a high ticket sales funnel and paid marketing to run traffic directly to a landing page. From there you collect subscriber’s information and promote products through your email list.

This technique requires some testing and measuring but once you are at a positive return, you can scale up by increasing your advertising budget. With a global reach and digital products, the sky is the limit! But make sure you’re profitable before increasing your advertising budget. Once a $100 advertising spend produces $200, you’re in a great position to increase your budget and double your money each time. You’ll also need to invest in a high value product range in order to maximise your revenue potential. See SFM digital business system to learn more.

A slower route might involve a different method. If a high ticket product range is out of reach, you can build up your traffic more slowly by using organic traffic methods which are much cheaper or free. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Free marketing strategies typically take much longer to take effect than paid traffic. Plus they are often less scalable. But over time, if you put the effort in, you can build a digital footprint of content which keeps generating you sales for years to come.

If you choose your affiliate products wisely, and use subscription affiliate programs, you’ll keep getting paid even years after making the sale!

Get Started

If you’re serious about building a long term income from a website, access an all in one business system and training resource to help you learn and understand marketing. Click the image below to get started.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense

Yes, you can earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense. However, this does take some time and initially, be prepared to put some work in creating content. After some time, you will see a small, trickle income which is probably going to be sporadic at first. Once you have built up enough content, and are getting more regular traffic, you’ll see more consistent income.

There’s two main strategies which are used to earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense; blogging and v’logging. Blogging involves putting written content on a website. Blog = web log. V’logging is the video equivalent and you’ll be creating video content and uploading it to YouTube.

As your content grows in size, and if you have done your keyword research, you should start to generate organic traffic from the search engines.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense – Free Blogging Platforms

There’s several free platforms you can use as a blogger:

Hubpages.com
WordPress.com
Blogger.com
Weebly.com
etc.

You only need to choose one of these platforms to get started creating content for free. Over time, if you get good at promoting your content, you should see some natural organic visits to your content if you keep at it. However, one source of free traffic which doesn’t rate free blog sites very well is Google. Google will give you more search traffic if you build your own website and host it yourself. More about this here.

If you use a free blogging site, Google doesn’t see you as such an authority as if you had your own domain name and hosting provider. So if you want to take an Adsense income seriously, it’s worth building your own website.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense – A Niche Website

Traffic is the main problem if you want to earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense. To earn an income from Adsense, you’ll need a lot of traffic. Not all of your traffic (visitors) will click on your ads. Only a small percentage of them will. Plus, you’ll only earn tiny amounts from each click. This means that you’ll need a huge amount of visitors just to make a small trickle income using this strategy.

One way to jump start your traffic generation is to use a niche website. A niche website is one which is built around your topic’s main keywords. This website is an example of a niche website. To find a good domain name for your topic, use Google keyword planner and research keywords which offer less competition than most. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can use the same or similar strategy I describe in my article: building a niche website for a local business.

With a niche website, you build the site around your targeted keywords. This can give you a head start in terms of traffic. Most new websites will take several months of blogging to get just a modest amount of daily visitors. But using the niche website tactic can help you find traffic searching for your main keywords.

Traffic From YouTube

YouTube is another avenue you can use to make money passively from advertising revenue. YouTube is pretty competitive too, although not as much as Google. With YouTube, you can use Adsense advertising, channel memberships, Merch shelf, Super Chat and Super Stickers and YouTube premium revenue.

Again, as with blogging, you’ll need to build up a library of videos over a long period of time. There’s millions of YouTube users who create content on a regular basis. So you’ll have plenty of competition. Depending on the topic area you choose to create content around, this could take anything between several months or years according to the relative competition.

Making Adsense Work & Alternatives

The great thing about Adsense is that it can work in nearly every topic area. Whatever your niche, you can monetise it with Adsense, even if there are no affiliate products available in your topic.

The most popular alternative to using paid advertising on your content (Adsense) is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you use your content to promote related products and services (affiliate products). This can pay much better than Adsense, especially if you don’t get much traffic. To monetise through using affiliate products is pretty easy.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense — The various forms of affiliate income you can make described in this video series.

Simply promote the affiliate products of your choice on your content. You can also build an email list which helps you make more sales. With recurring revenue affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing, you can make much larger amounts, even from less traffic. With the Adsense program, you’ll need to deal in bulk and attract a lot of website visitors in order to make even a small trickle of income. See micro income streams.

Money From Adsense – Summary

Making money from Adsense can be done and it can become a nice passive income. However, before this happens you’ll need to have created a lot of content and get traffic for free. This can take some time and considerable effort. Depending on the topic you pick, and the relative competitiveness online, this can take months or even years!

Adsense doesn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile paying for traffic and getting free traffic online is tough. Expect to work for some time before you see even a small regular trickle of income from Adsense. The most popular alternative to Adsense income is to use affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can use products which pay you a recurring income. This means it’s easier to make more from less traffic. With high ticket affiliate marketing, you can also use paid advertising to make sales much more easily. With Adsense income this isn’t possible.

Adsense is a great passive income if you can use existing content which already attracts website traffic. Or, if you have a passion for something and are willing to work for months or years to build some content. But if you’re looking for a faster business model, affiliate marketing might be for you instead.

Access a free video series by clicking on the image below for more information.

Micro Income Streams

Micro income streams are so much better than one single income. A single income usually comes from a well paid job, which takes a huge amount of your time. Micro income streams on the other hand can be largely passive and you can build them up over time around existing work.

A micro income stream might be a royalty income, a rental property you own, or income from the internet. The internet offers one of the best opportunities today for anyone to get involved in making micro income streams.

A micro income stream might not replace your main income straight away. But it’s something that can grow over time, if you give it some nourishment.

Micro Income Streams – Blogging

One strategy to build micro income streams which is accessible to anyone with a laptop is blogging. With blogging you create an online resource, or a digital property which you own. Blogs can then be monetised either through advertising or affiliate marketing. What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which affiliates refer customers to other people’s products. When a sale occurs online which has been referred by an affiliate, they earn a commission based on the sale. The best part about affiliate marketing is that the sale can be completely hands off and passive.

With blogging as the marketing strategy, it can take some time to build your online resource/blog. But over time your blog can work for you, making commissions from advertising or affiliate marketing. See also blogging QnA

Adsense – Micro Income Streams

Adsense is a popular way to monetise online content. You can also use Adsense with video too. On a blog, adverts are placed around the written content. When visitors click on adverts, the blogger earns a commission based on the advertising revenue.

With YouTube, advertising is placed on your videos and the same applies. You earn revenue according to how many people click on your ads. With both blogging and YouTube videos, it can take some time to earn even just a regular trickle income.

But some bloggers and YouTuber’s have this down to a fine art! They create a huge library of content which generates a growing number of visitors. Over time this starts generating income passively. The more content they create, the more they can earn. Whilst many struggle with monetising their content, top YouTuber’s and bloggers earn a full time living from their content generation.

Recurring Revenue Affiliate Products (Subscriptions)

Recurring revenue affiliate programs can pay you ongoing commissions for years and potentially for a lifetime. With the right products, customers will continue using them forever! See lifetime commissions affiliate program. Subscription and membership products are products and services which offer ongoing value. Software products and training programs fall into this category. You don’t have to personally own a product or offer a service to benefit from these kinds of products.

An example is an autoresponder email service for online business owners. Online businesses depend on software like this. So if a business becomes profitable, they’ll use this service continually. If you have referred the sale, you benefit from ongoing recurring commissions.

Selling just one subscription product once can give you an ongoing micro income stream for life.

Micro Income Streams – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the simplest ways to generate passive micro income streams. With email marketing, you send targeted visitors, or website traffic, to a landing page to collect the subscribers information. Once a visitor enters their details they join a database of email subscribers. Emails are sent out to subscribers promoting useful products and services – affiliate products.

Over time, email lists can grow in numbers into the tens and even hundreds of thousands. So, an email can be sent out to a list of subscribers, and hundreds of affiliate products can be sold at the same time! This process can be automated and scaled up quickly to generate a passive income from anywhere too!

This means email marketing is one of the best ways of generating micro (and not so micro) income streams. See the power of email marketing.

Online Design – Redbubble

Redbubble is a clothing company which pays artists to upload their designs.

So if you have a creative flare, or even an existing design, you can upload it in just a few minutes. Should your design catch someone’s eye and they make a purchase, you earn a commission based on the sale.

Photography Sites

If you enjoy taking photographs why not turn your passion into micro income streams? Foap.com, and several other such websites offer to pay you when someone purchases your pictures or videos.

With this micro income strategy, you should be uploading images on a regular basis for some time ideally. A single image won’t likely bring in much, but if you’re a photographer, you can upload images regularly and you should see some trickle income from your work over time.

An Existing Website

Do you already have an existing website? If so, you can monetise it passively using affiliate products!. Amazon and eBay are two of the most popular affiliate programs which anyone can join.

Ideally, decide who your audience is and what they are looking for. If there an affiliate program which offers something your visitors would like, simply put a link on your site, or use existing images and sales banners.

Other affiliate sites include ZVzoo.com, Clickbank.com and Click2Sell.com. To find affiliate products within your topic, just do an online search for “your topic affiliate programs”.

Most affiliate programs have banners and images you can use directly on your website to promote products. If someone purchases a product from your website, you earn a commission. You don’t need to deal with customers and send products and it can be another passive income trickle for your collection!

Learn more about affiliate marketing here.

Micro Income Streams Summary

So there’s a few micro income streams you can use to start building a passive income. This can take some time and effort, but over time, these income “trickles” can grow into something more substantial.

Interested in learning more about earning online? You can access a free webinar by clicking on the image below.

Multiple Income Funnel

A multiple income funnel uses a product range, rather than a single product. It also benefits from subscription affiliate products so you can earn a recurring revenue from every sale. With a built in sales team, automated up-selling and high value products, sales are closed automatically. The affiliate simply refers the initial sale through an email marketing campaign which can be set up through the step by step modules in the back office. Start here.

The multiple income funnel benefits from the following benefits:

An automated selling system – using a digital affiliate product range and an email marketing system
Subscription income – memberships pay affiliates a recurring income from members they refer
High ticket affiliate products within the product range – are offered automatically to your members as they move through the funnel
Multi-tier commissions – available at the top tier level for those purchasing the highest valued products

How The Multiple Income Funnel Works

A multiple income funnel uses multiple products within a range. The first offering in the funnel should be free. This is usually a free document or video explainer series.

The free offering is used to build an email list and subscribers are offered useful products once they join the list – as well as valuable content. Once a subscriber purchases a product, they are offered other products within a range which offer ever increasing value to the customer.

Of course many subscribers won’t purchase a product. But an email list can help to build a longer term relationship with subscribers. A small percentage of subscribers will purchase the initial product within a range of products. This product can also be a subscription product which pays a recurring income to the affiliate promoting the funnel.

Up-Sells

A percentage of customers will upgrade their purchase, or buy another item from the range.

Everyone knows what an up-sell is if they’ve ever been to McDonalds or Burger King. In McDonald’s the up-sell is “do you want fries with that”. In Burger King, it’s “do you want to go large?” With a multiple income funnel, an up-sell is a higher value product or a product “add-on” which makes it more valuable. Although an up-sell might not be very costly for a customer, for the business it can be very profitable over many customers.

Automated up-sells are the crux of a profitable multiple income funnel. Even with fewer customers, a product range including high ticket and subscription products can be more profitable than a smaller valued offering, or a single product.

Multiple Income Funnel – High Ticket Digital Products

A good multiple income funnel should have a number of high ticket affiliate products within it. A high ticket products is generally one which has a larger price ticket associated with it. $500+ products are high ticket items. High ticket items can be either physical products or digital products. High ticket digital items are often courses trainings and mentorship programs. They help people to build online businesses.

High ticket physical products pay a smaller percentage of the cost price in commissions. But they can still be good payers if the price of the product is high. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Multi-Tier Commissions Within A Funnel

Some companies offer multi-tier commissions. This means you can earn income streams from sales generated by your referrals, within a business system. The SFM Digital Business System offers multi-tier commissions at the top level of their business system.

To access the multi-tier commissions you’ll need to purchase the top level products.

Here’s a breakdown of a basic members commission structure on the SFM Mentors product range:

And with the addition of tier 2 commissions:

For more information see SFM Digital Business System.

One Time, Subscription & High Ticket

Most online affiliate programs offer a single commission on a product or O/T (one time) payments. With subscriptions (S) and through using multiple products within a range, including high ticket items (HT), affiliates can make recurring commissions and earn from later purchases made by existing customers.

With a good multiple income funnel, you can also benefit from a built in sales team closing sales in-house, and from multi tier commissions.

For more information access the free videos by clicking on the image above.

Marketing A Multiple Income Funnel

A multiple income funnel like this can be advertised by promoting a landing page and collecting email subscribers. Because a multiple payment funnel will generally return a greater revenue than single items, it’s much easier to use paid marketing to promote it with.

This means that anyone can start and build a profitable online business much more quickly with a system like this. Smaller value items leave far less room for error when using paid marketing. But a six figure plus funnel means you can use paid marketing and more easily recoup advertising spend.

Using paid marketing has another huge advantage too. With paid marketing, once your advertising campaign is running profitably, you can easily increase sales by increasing budget. With slower marketing methods such as blogging and organic marketing, it’s far more difficult to scale up.

Affiliate Marketer Website

The affiliate marketer website is one piece of digital “real estate” affiliates can use to generate traffic. Affiliates can also use a whole host of other strategies too.

What is traffic in affiliate marketing? Traffic is the term used for visitors who land on a website. Without traffic, an affiliate won’t earn anything from their affiliate efforts. So traffic is pretty important in order to generate affiliate sales.

The affiliate marketer website can be used to generate traffic in a number of ways and often affiliates will have more than one site. They might have different websites for different purposes. For example, an organic blogging website can be used to generate traffic from the organic search engines. This site could be used to create content about their topic to draw in visitors.

Another website might be used in conjunction with paid marketing. This kind of website must be compliant with the advertising platform being used. For example if you’re using Google Adwords to drive traffic to a website, your site must comply with the latest terms and conditions of their advertising platform. This usually means using privacy policy, disclaimers and cookie notice as a minimum.

With a paid marketing platform, traffic can be driven to a website in large amounts very quickly. With an organic blogging website, an affiliate might spend several months or years creating content which draws in traffic at an increasing rate over a longer period.

Affiliate Marketer Website – Authority Site

An authority website is one which is trusted. Trusted sites are what affiliate marketers want because if they get trust they get more visitors. On an affiliate marketer website this means more sales!

Trust comes in a number of ways: trust from other authority sites, trust from visitors and trust from industry leading experts. When you have trust, you also get trust from the organic search engines. When you get this, it means the search engines will reward all your hard work with more authority.

Once you are trusted by the search engines it means more traffic. This can take some time and a lot of work. There’s millions of new affiliate websites popping up all the time.

Google usually puts newer websites down in the rankings because they haven’t built any authority yet. This is often known as the sandbox. New websites can be held in the sandbox for several months before they get a clear ranking from Google.

Blogging With An Affiliate Marketer Website

This site is an example of a blogging website. With a blogging site, bloggers create more and more content with the aim of increasing their traffic gradually over several months or years. As you get more content on your site, and share you content as much as possible, it can start to receive organic searches. When this happens, you can get free traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines. Google is the main search engine and the most popular one. So it’s a good idea to use Google as the one to aim for.

One blogging strategy is to target long tail keywords. There’s several benefits of long tail keywords, but one of the main ones is the lower competition on the search engines. With a short tail (2 word) phrase, there’s going to a be a lot of websites and web pages which compete in the Google search listings. But with longer phrases (which have more than 3 words in them), there’s more chance of getting found for them in the search engine listings. So many bloggers find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

This strategy can take quite some time before you start to see website traffic coming of its own accord. But if you do this for long enough, it’s a cheap strategy which can pay off months or years later in organic sales.

Paid Marketing Site

Paid marketing is a much faster strategy to use for an affiliate. However, in order to be profitable, they will need a number of products which pay larger commissions. With smaller valued products, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing and still be profitable. So if you want to build an affiliate business more quickly, you’ll need a high ticket sales funnel which offers a number of high ticket affiliate products within it.

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? With a high ticket product you can earn considerably more than with standard affiliate products which only pay small commissions. A high ticket products will sell for more than $500. Standard affiliate products tend to sell for $100 or less and physical products will only pay 1-11% commissions. So for a $100 sale, the affiliate might only make $1, at the lowest commission level. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Email Marketing

The affiliate marketer website is a vital part of an affiliate marketing business. But some affiliates don’t even use websites. Instead they use simple landing pages to collect subscribers information and follow up with an email marketing campaign.

This works well because email marketing allows an affiliate to build a relationship with their subscribers over the longer term. Whereas an affiliate marketer website usually only gets visitors who stay on their site for a few minutes.

Still, a landing page needs traffic too, and affiliate marketer websites are a useful means to build this traffic in a cheaper way than using paid marketing. Without a website, you can still do affiliate marketing. Simply use a landing page software to create landing pages, and send paid traffic towards it to collect your subscribers information. See also the power of email marketing.

Get Started

You can join an affiliate program below which gives you access to everything you’ll need to start an affiliate business:

Website builder – set up in a few clicks
Landing page creator – build landing pages with a few clicks
Business system and set up – no products of your own? no problem! Use a ready made business system and step by step tutorials.

Access by clicking on the image below:

Affiliate Coaching Program

I found an affiliate coaching program back in 2014 which helped me learn affiliate marketing from scratch. Having already been working as an affiliate, I had had some issues – to say the least.

I was of course sceptical because I had already joined a number of courses and programs and was still struggling. But I knew that I had to keep going, despite my doubts. The alternative was much worse – a lifetime of 9 to 5 jobs! Here’s a video I created after joining the program, with my story of how I got started online, beginning with eBay.

Affiliate Coaching Program

The many courses I had previously taken didn’t offer actual coaching. And this was partly why I was struggling. Affiliate marketing is tough, especially if you have no clear direction. I jumped from one strategy to another and each course I took taught a different thing. No wonder I was struggling!

In 2014 I met co-founders of The SFM Mentors – Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek. These, and other members of their coaching program were the first affiliate marketers I had actually met in real life. Before then, program creators were difficult to connect with. I did meet one other affiliate online, but only via email. This was the first time I could actually meet people face to face who were actually building online businesses!

The SFM Digital Business system offers a multiple payment structure digital sales funnel which anyone can use to earn online as an affiliate. The business structure includes a number of training and coaching programs you can earn and learn from:

Subscription products you can earn recurring commissions from (memberships)
High ticket coaching programs you can learn (and earn) from
A number of live groups and sessions with coaches and mentors you can access
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
Multiple product range – earn from up-sells automatically offered to your members

Affiliate Coaching Program

In addition to this business system, the coaching and mentoring is available from mentors and coaches within the community. Weekly sessions are also available through booking using a 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching booking system.

Weekly groups are organised too. These are available to join even at the basic membership level. Access Mentors All In here to join.

I was able to access a number of groups and learn from those who were already successful as an affiliate. Here’s a snapshot of one of the group Q &A sessions:

Why You Need Help

Affiliate marketing isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes time and effort to earn online and more that I once thought. When I first started looking into affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s I thought things would be easy. I was promised easy money by many of the affiliate “guru’s” of the time! Unfortunately the get rich quick mentality isn’t useful for new affiliates. If anything it will bring more problems with it. Many affiliates quit within their first year and the affiliate marketing failure rate is high.

But if you’re genuinely looking to build a long term income from affiliate marketing, it’s well worth getting coaching. A coach can help you understand the parts of your mindset and mentality which hold you back. This is a large part of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing should be easy, but you as the owner are also the “glass ceiling” of that business. So depending on your background, habits, beliefs and working mentality, you will have a different experience to anyone else with it.

The actions you take in your affiliate business are a reflection of what you believe about it. Limiting beliefs, self doubt and procrastination can hold you back from taking the right actions. As Henry Ford once said, “if you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right”.

If you are coming from an employee background, it can be difficult to know the mindsets needed to succeed with your own business. See also affiliate psychology, affiliate marketing mindset and mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur.

Get Coaching

If you’re ready to take your affiliate marketing business seriously, access a mentorship program through this course. You’ll get an all in one business system, access to coaches and mentors and a range of 1 on 1 coaching programs and courses. You’ll also be able to access over 10,000 Linkedin learning courses with the Mentors All In program. These cover multiple strategies and skills which can help you personally and professionally with your online business building. Click on the image below for more details.

Is Blogging Worth It?

Lately I’ve been wondering is blogging worth it. Especially since many in the online business community I’m a part of are using paid ads. Paid adverts can get your business running much faster, but it still takes time and of course money. Blogging on the other hand, is free! The downside of blogging, compared to paid marketing is that it isn’t scalable. A blog post from several years ago can make me a sale, but I’ve no way of repeating that success on a large scale. But once you master paid marketing, you can scale up by increasing your budget.

I’ve been a blogger for several years now and it is how I started out online. Over time, I’ve come to enjoy writing, and it’s brought in a number of high ticket sales now too. But maybe you’re starting out wondering the same: “is blogging worth it?”

Is Blogging Worth It? – Your Sales System

Depending on how you decide to monetise a blog, it can take between several months and several years for it to provide you with an income. Blogging doesn’t work immediately and in the first instance it can be a little frustrating. Google especially doesn’t give new blogs much in the way of traffic. It usually sandbox’s them for several months. This means you don’t get traffic from Google, but there’s other search engines you can get traffic from: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com.

You can also promote your content yourself throughout social media. There’s a number of plugins for WordPress which help you automate this process. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

As traffic comes to your blog, you’ll want a strategy for monetisation if you intend to earn from it. How you do this will go a long way (or not) to your income generation. Using affiliate marketing high ticket items and subscription affiliate programs has made a huge difference for me. Before I found such programs I was promoting low value physical products from my blog and I made a pittance for the same amount of work!

So before you build a blog and start blogging, it’s worth learning the different affiliate marketing business models and the affiliate marketing commission rates if you decide to monetise with the affiliate model.

It’s also worth building an email list from your blog. An email list allows you to collect visitors details and maintain contact over a longer period of time. This helps with sales too. See the power of email marketing.

Is Blogging Worth It? – Your Topic

Some bloggers simply pick a topic they love and enjoy writing. With this kind of spirit, it’s much easier to sustain your blogging habit over the longer term required to make an impact. If you can choose a topic you love, and align it with an affiliate resource you can get onboard with, or with your own business/product, then so much the better.

Writing a blog about something just for the sake of money will often mean it’s much more difficult over the longer term. Plus, each piece of content needs to be thoroughly researched – so it takes longer.

I chose a topic I knew nothing about and spent several months writing about mushroom harvesting! It was a bad idea and I eventually burned out and gave up. The trouble way I had zero interest in mushroom harvesting. I was only looking to make money from the site. I utterly failed with it although it did reach top of Google for its main keyword terms! But monetising was a problem and the site was eventually ditched.

Writing about a topic you enjoy is a different story. If you can find something you love writing about, you’re on to a winner.

Don’t Look For Results – Look At Your Activity

One of my business coaches once told me, don’t look at results when you’re starting out. Look at your activity. When you start out blogging, it can be easy to look for signs of traffic and sales. You write a blog post and the very next day are looking for sales! Unfortunately it takes much longer than this in most cases. If you base your actions on your tangible results it’s likely to hamper your enthusiasm and motivation. Ah, no sales today, should I bother!? Well yes, you should. But expect to be writing for several months before you see the signs of your hard work. Celebrate a click to your website. Celebrate a lead on your email list. But don’t get too far ahead of yourself looking for massive results with a long term strategy like blogging.

From James Clear’s book atomic habits – this perfectly sums up expectations vs reality from blogging.

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits he shows the plateau of latent potential (shown above). This relates to blogging very well. When you start out, you look for results but none are visible. Some will quit because of this but those who continue for long enough will break past the “valley of disappointment” where nothing happens. Over time though, if you stick with it, you’ll see an exponential increase in your traffic. This might take months or years depending on the niche you choose to write your blog in.

One way to overcome the desire to look for results too early, and therefore get disillusioned, is to choose a long term goal for your blog.

Overall, companies that have published 400+ pieces of blog content received twice the traffic as compared to those that have published between 301-400 blog posts. source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/5-simple-steps-thatll-help-you-determine-how-often-you-need-to-blog/

Is Blogging Worth It?

Only you can decide whether blogging is worth it depending on your ultimate reason for blogging. It’s most definitely a long term marketing strategy, but it does work. Just don’t expect overnight wonders! To get the most from blogging choose a subject you enjoy and find a way to monetise your blog which aligns with your passions, interests or hobbies.

Some people just like blogging and it can be a rewarding way to spend your time even if you’re not doing it for the almighty dollar! But if you enjoy writing and have a business or product to sell of your own, blogging is a great way to increase your online presence and sales over time. If not, you can monetise with a number of affiliate products which you can find online.

There are affiliate products available to promote in pretty much any niche. So choose your niche wisely if you’re planning on blogging for the longer term.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

Understanding affiliate marketing is key to achieving success with it. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which an affiliate recommends products and services online. When someone makes a purchase through an affiliate link, the affiliate makes a commission based on the sale. Affiliate marketing is therefore a referral based business model in which third party referrers are rewarded for generating sales online.

A good analogy is that of recommending a restaurant to a friend. Only with affiliate marketing, when your friend goes to that restaurant, you get paid a commission for the referral. Referrals are tracked through affiliate links which are coded to the individual affiliate who referred the sale. When a sale is made, the vendor (product owner) knows who to pay because of the link it came from.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing – Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available for affiliate marketers to join online. One of the most popular is Amazon.com. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program once they have met the partner program criteria. More details of Amazon’s affiliate program here.

Once you have become a partner or affiliate for Amazon, you can promote any product from the site and earn commissions from sales you generate. Amazon pays between 1% and 11% commissions which is one of the lowest rates in the affiliate industry. See affiliate marketing commission rates. But Amazon can work well for affiliates from all walks of life because of the huge range of products they can promote.

Amazon is a trusted website too and most online shoppers are comfortable using it.

Digital Products

Another type of product affiliate marketers use is digital products. With digital products there’s no postage or delivery costs and this means savings can be passed on to the affiliate. With an affiliate doing the selling, it can mean sellers can pay less in advertising fees.

Affiliates can also earn much larger commissions selling digital products online. Most digital products pay much more than physical products in commissions. Typically digital products will pay from 20% to 40% commissions, some even more.

One of the most popular places new affiliates get started is on Clickbank.com. Clickbank has a huge selection of digital products in most topic areas. This can be useful if you already have a website in a certain topic area, or niche. For example if you have a sports related website, you can join a program which offers a related product and sell it from your website.

High Ticket Products

The best paying products are high ticket products. High ticket affiliate marketing products are those which carry a price tag larger than around $500. With a high ticket item, you can make a much larger commission than with a standard product, especially if it’s a digital product.

High ticket items also let you learn paid marketing much more efficiently. With a low value item, you’ll need to sell many more items in order to break even on advertising costs, or make a profit. A high ticket item gives you more room for testing and measuring your advertising campaigns.

If you have a marketing budget of $1000, for example, you’ll need to sell 100 low value products at $10 commission to break even. With a high ticket product, you may only need to sell 10. See also what is high ticket affiliate marketing.

Subscription Affiliate Products

A subscription affiliate product can pay an affiliate over and over again, potentially for life. These are a great idea to use, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. Subscription products are membership and software type products which offer ongoing value for the customer. Selling a subscription product for an affiliate is far better than selling a product which only offers a one-off commission.

A good subscription product can also overtake the profit earned from a high ticket commission over time. If a customer maintains their subscription for decades it will mean an ongoing income for the person who referred it. With each sale, an affiliate can earn a passive income from subscriptions. See subscription affiliate programs.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing – Promoting Affiliate Products

Affiliate products can be promoted in a number of different ways although the fastest way to scale up your sales is through using paid marketing. Some affiliates create content (like this blog), and others run paid marketing to a large audience using paid platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Adwords etc.

One of the best ways to build an affiliate business is through using email marketing. Email marketing is a cost effective way for affiliate marketers to build a relationship with many subscribers over time.

By getting website visitors to opt in to an email list, an affiliate can automate email messages over a long period of time. Some subscribers will buy an affiliate product years after joining an email list, some will purchase straight away. But as your list of subscribers grows, you’ll find you make more and more sales. See also the power of email marketing.

How an affiliate promotes a product will depend on their own unique strategy. The main ways are through:

Content creation – blogging, or video blogging
Social media – either paid or free strategies
Paid marketing – Using social media or advertising platforms (YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc.)
List building – email list building is definitely recommended for anyone starting out

Why New Affiliates Struggle

Affiliate marketing is a business and like any other it takes time to generate an income from. Many affiliates will quit within their first few months or years because they haven’t gained any traction. This in part is because of high expectations of earnings or lack of understanding of how affiliate marketing works. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

Depending on how you go about your affiliate marketing business, it can take months or even years to see any sales coming in. With paid marketing methods, things can happen considerably quicker than with content marketing strategies such as blogging. As a performance based business, everyone will experience a different outcome according to the training, products and strategies they use.

There’s many different affiliate marketing business models affiliates can use, and each offers a different earning potential. To use paid marketing and build a business model quickly, it’s recommended to use a high ticket sales funnel which offers more earning power. See also the fastest legit way to earn money online.

Most new affiliates will struggle if they expect too much from affiliate marketing too soon. If you have a good strategy, and get help and support it can considerably shorten the journey and give you more confidence in your chosen route.

Before you get an results with affiliate marketing it can be easy to think that it doesn’t work. In the beginning this is a tough period because your belief is low and your expectation is high. When nothing shows, it can be easy to throw out your expectations and lose the faith!

Access a free training resource by clicking on the image below.