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!

How To Rank Your Blog Post On Google

how to rank your blog post on google

Wondering how to rank your blog post on Google? For starters nothing is guaranteed with Google rankings. There’s many factors which are attributed to a Google ranking. Factors such as domain age and authority, incoming links, link source, and of course your all important content.

But if you’re starting out you can “gear” a couple of things in your favour. The things you can control are what you should be focusing on, such as your content and your keywords. The most competitive keywords are usually 2-3 words long. Less competitive keywords give you more opportunity for a ranking.

So start there. You’ll also want to check out the competition before you decide on your keyword. This can give you a rough idea about the relative competition on Google, and whether you even have a chance.

How To Rank Your Blog Post On Google #1

You can start by doing a simple search for your keywords by using the free Google keyword planner. Type in your main “seed” keywords – the ones which your site is presumably about. The planner will come up with a number of keywords which you can choose from. Look for the long tail keywords which offer less competition. Here’s a short video showing you how to find long tail keywords with low seo difficulty (below).

How To Rank Your Blog Post On Google – Step 1: Keyword Research

Your keyword should have at least 10 monthly searches through using the planner, preferably more. If there’s no searches for it, you won’t get any traffic for it even if you get a top listing for your keyword! 10 searches a month isn’t much, especially when you consider that these searches are divided among the top 3-5 organic listings and potentially paid adverts too!

Check that your keyword is also fairly uncompetitive on a normal Google search too. Over 10 million results means there’s quite a lot of competing sites for your keyword. So this blog post “how to rank your blog post on Google“, will be difficult to rank, (see below).

You can also do a phrase match search of your keywords using quotes like so. This should give you more of a clue about the relative competition for your chosen keyword. As you can see, the number is low. Anything less than 20,000 is generally good as a “sniff test”. You can then look at the top listings and get a better idea of the quality and quantity of competing blog posts.

It might take many attempts to find a good low competition keyword to build some content around. Even then, you’re not guaranteed a top listing since there’s many other sites doing exactly what you’re doing. The key is to learn as you go, and keep creating content which will have a good chance of getting ranked.

Remember too that there’s other search engines besides Google:

Duckduckgo
Bing
Yahoo
Baidu
Ask
AOL
Etc.

So, even if you don’t rank top of Google, there’s plenty of chance at getting free traffic if you persevere and create some awesome content!

How To Rank Your Blog Post On Google -Step 2: Creating Content

To create content which Google will approve of is pretty tough. You need to create some real value or the other sites will outshine you, especially if they have thousands of high domain, quality backlinks. With a newer site, it can be tough. Once you have identified your keyword with which to build content around, you need to look on Google again to see the top ranking posts for your keyword.

Have a read through some of the best content which already exists for that keyword and create something better, if you can! Aim to write longer posts than those which already exist. So if you find a top ranking post with 1000 words, write one with 2000 words. You want your content to be “evergreen” and stand the test of time.

If you have a new site, you may even have a “sandbox” wait with Google before they even consider ranking your content. This can be several weeks or months.

To help you write SEO friendly content use an SEO plugin. I use Yoast SEO which is a free SEO plugin. It will help you get the keyword balance write, and remind you to use your keywords throughout your content, in your title tags, image alt tags etc. Basically it helps you create more SEO friendly content which the search engines will use to determine your article’s quality.

Write at least 1000 words and link out to other authority domains on your topic. Wikipedia is a good source to link to because of its authority. Linking to other sites shows you are genuine and that you’re not withholding links only for your affiliate products or trying to be “greedy”!

Step 3: Syndicating Content

Step 3 is to syndicate your content and promote it as much as possible. Don’t rely on Google ranking your content, promote it too! By doing so you are also being proactive and the links you should earn from sharing your content can go towards your overall SEO score!

I use a few plugins to help with this effort, as well as manually sharing content through my social media platforms. Here’s the plugins I use:

Revive Old Posts – automatically syndicate your content when it’s published throughout your social media platforms – there’s a free version and an upgrade with more functionality
Social Media Share Icons – There’s many versions of this plugin. Here’s one I have used. Share buttons make it easy for people to share your posts on social media and they can help your SEO over time too.

Links are of course a massive factor, and if you have done your job well in creating good quality content, it should go towards a natural link profile as more people see and share your content.

You should also link to older content which you have created from your newer content as you repeat this process for newer keywords. Do this through deep linking, which means use the keyword in the link. Here’s an example and another post I have written previously: find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Summary

So that’s the basic strategy I’ve used to generate free traffic to my blog posts. I have been using this strategy for a while now and some posts will be winners and others will be losers! As you go on, you should develop your own strategy based on what works for you. The key is to keep creating good quality content which will stand the test of time. Content is king. If your content is good, people will naturally share and link to it over time. If not, the reverse is true!

You can also research your own link building strategies to give you more authority with Google. I’ve been pretty bad at doing this really and have outsourced back linking because it’s a job I detest!

Here’s a summary of the basic strategy again:

1: Keyword research – find the long tail keywords with less competition than the others
2: Create some awesome content which will stand the test of time.
3: Syndicate and share your content as much as possible (use automated processes like the plugins I mentioned to help).
4: Rinse and repeat with other long tail keywords you want to rank for.

Addition: Buyer Keywords

It’s worth also mentioning that your keywords should be “buyer keywords” rather than “tyre-kicker” keywords too! If you’re going to put a lot of effort into building content which will give you free traffic, you want that content to bring in buying customers, not freebie seekers! That being said, some of my content uses the “free” keyword such as my article: “Get traffic to your website FREE!“. But in general, I like to think about what’s in the mind of the person typing that particular keyword into Google.

Anything with “free” attached to it, might indicate that the person isn’t willing to part with any money! So they might not be the best person to attract to your website. Just a thought!

Portable Business Ideas

If you’re looking to make an income on the move, here’s a few portable business ideas you can use. With the internet it’s easier than ever to build an income source from anywhere just with your laptop. There’s a few ways you can do this. Here are just a few ideas.

Portable Business Ideas – Freelancing

Freelancers earn income by offering their skills to other internet based businesses. With websites like Fiverr.com and upwork.com, you can offer your services to anyone globally and build a portfolio of work to showcase. Although online freelance services are competitive, there’s plenty of scope for earning through these kinds of sites. Freelancers on Fiverr offer a number of different services:

Website design
Logo creation
Ebook covers
Link building services
Article writing
Etc

So if you have a skill or service you can offer, look into becoming an freelancer on Upwork.com or Fiverr.com. If you don’t have a skill to sell, you can also get training from Fiverr through the many courses on offer there.

Portable Business Ideas – Blogging

If you’re more creative and want to generate an income from building something of your own, blogging might be the answer. Many bloggers make a passive income from their content, which they grow over a period of months and years.

Bloggers create content and monetise it either with affiliate marketing or through using paid marketing programs such as Adsense. One of the best ways to monetise a blog is through promoting products and services to your visitors. You can do this directly from your blog or by building an email list of subscribers. See the power of email marketing.

Portable Business Ideas – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best portable business ideas I’ve found.. With affiliate marketing, anyone can earn money online through promoting other people’s products and services. They do this in various ways including:

Blogging and website building
Video blogging – YouTube (v’logging)
Paid marketing – using the various paid marketing platforms
Email marketing –
Social media advertising
etc.

There’s various affiliate products and services available online and you can join an affiliate or partner program in order to promote the various products. Learn more about affiliate marketing with this free video series.

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is another business model similar to affiliate marketing. With drop shipping you partner up with a business which is already delivering a service. You get paid for referring sales and the “front end” of the business delivers the item.

Drop shipping and affiliate marketing are both referral marketing strategies whereby you earn money only when you refer a sale. But the advantage of these models is that you don’t need your own business. You don’t have to deal directly with customers in many cases, and simply refer website traffic to existing businesses. See also alternatives to drop shipping.

Access a free video series which explains a few different online business models by clicking on the image below.

access free portable business ideas workshops

Google Adsense

Google Adsense runs a program for content creators on the internet. With Adsense, you can connect your content with advertising and earn revenue when people click on advertising placed on your website or YouTube channel.

There’s many ways to get paid with Google Adsense and you can even build content on free platforms which let you upload your content without owning the site itself:

YouTube
Hubpages.com
WordPress.com
Blogger.com

However, it does take some dedication to earn a good living using only Adsense. You only get paid small amounts when people click on your content. So you’ll need a lot of content and visitors to make it worth your while.

Membership Sales

Selling membership products is a great portable business idea. With memberships you can earn recurring commissions so even a few sales can give you a regular source of income.

The best online membership products are those which offer huge value and often relate to online business owners. If you sell a product to someone which carries an ongoing membership, and pays you recurring commissions, you can benefit from it for years potentially. Especially if it’s a useful product which carries a lot of value.

See recurring income affiliate programs for more details.

It can take some time to learn the strategies to sell affiliate membership products. Start here and access a program which has a step by step (from scratch) course.

Sell High Ticket Digital Products Online

One of the most lucrative portable business ideas is to sell high ticket digital products. I know I’ve already mentioned affiliate marketing, but high ticket affiliate marketing deserves another mention. Most affiliate marketers start out selling items from Amazon, for example. but they only get paid from 1-11% commissions.

With digital products you can earn from 40-50% commissions. High ticket items carry much more value (and a higher price tag), so you stand to earn much more per sale than those low commission physical products.

High ticket products are things which cost over $1000. Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product (a submarine). (Click on the image for access to the free video series).

earning from selling high ticket products online

A high ticket physical product like this submarine will carry a much larger commission than a $100 product, for example. But with high ticket digital products you get the best of both worlds: large price tag and a larger commission. (Digital products typically pay 30-40% commission compared with 1-11% for physical products).

Loopholes To Make Money

One of the best loopholes to make money is through using the internet. The internet never sleeps and you can learn to turn it into a cash generating machine, given the time. When I first looked to the internet I found a clever way to earn money through eBay. I thought it was genius and it involved finding badly listed items on the auction site. Here’s the basic idea.

Loopholes To Make Money – eBay

Ebay is a great place to make money. There’s various business strategies you can use, but the one I used involved finding badly listed items and re-selling them for profit. I used a misspell tool called bargainchecker.com to find items which were incorrectly spelled on eBay. I would find auction only listings which had a very low starting bid. Unfortunately for the owner, they will get far fewer views because of this spelling error. This also means they get far fewer bids. If you’re clever, and use another tool called auctionsniper.com, you can jump in with a bid in the last few seconds of the auction, and get the best price without entering into a bidding war.

You can also use the advanced search tool on eBay to determine whether something is worth bidding on, and whether you will make a profit.

Once you’ve won an item and received it, re-list it with better spelling, more keywords and better photos and description. For more on this strategy see the full article: “how to start a profitable ebay business“.

Loopholes To Make Money – eBooks

After doing the eBay strategy for several months I only broke even on a sale once, and that was because the item arrived in a bad condition. When I re-listed, I was honest and I still made the same money when I sold it.

Every other product I sold made a profit. I dropped this strategy though eventually because I knew there had to be something better. I looked into writing my own ebooks since I had bought the eBay strategy through an ebook purchase. So I wrote a couple of ebooks and attempted to sell them on my own website.

Ebook selling is a great business model because it can be done for so little. Plus, you can sell an ebook directly from a website and it gets automatically downloaded once someone purchases it. For more information on ebook selling see “how to sell ebooks on your own website“. It’s a great hands off business idea.

Loopholes To Make Money – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best loopholes to make money. It lets anyone benefit from the growing trend in online purchases, and you can promote existing products and services to earn from sales you generate.

Affiliates don’t need their own products and don’t have to deal with customers. They simply refer sales over the internet through using content marketing, email marketing or running advertising campaigns.

With the right products and a good marketing strategy anyone can earn money by using the affiliate marketing business model. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Affiliate Memberships & Software Products

Selling a membership product is one of the best loopholes to make money online. It gives you a passive income for sales you made previously. If you don’t have a membership product of your own, you can refer online sales using the various affiliate marketing business models.

With software products and memberships, customers can and do maintain their membership for years; especially if you choose a lifetime commissions affiliate program. These are usually programs which offer huge value to the customer. An example would be a business software which is necessary in order to run an online business. Once a business becomes profitable, the customer will be very loyal to those products which is needs the most. So if you can refer those kinds of products as an affiliate, you can earn regular recurring payments for a lifetime for each customer.

As an affiliate you only need to learn how to refer these sales, you don’t have to concern yourself with product fulfilment with an existing product/business model. See recurring commission affiliate programs.

Google Adsense – Generate Passive Income Online

Google’s Adsense program lets website owners place some code on their site which is transformed into advertising. When someone clicks on your adverts, you earn a small commission based on the advertising fee for that particular advert.

passive income from online advertising programs

Adsense can also be used with YouTube videos too. Some YouTuber’s create many videos and upload them to the site. Once you have over a certain number of videos, visitors and subscribers, you can join YouTube’s monetising program and earn for advertising on your channel. See how to earn money on YouTube with Adsense.

If you’re a blogger, Adsense is a good alternative strategy of monetisation to affiliate marketing. Advertising can be placed on any website to earn revenue from advert clicks. However, you’ll need a lot of website traffic in order to make a good profit from this program. This will generally need to be built up over time since you’ll need organic traffic to make this pay. See how to get free traffic to your website.

High Ticket Digital Products

Using the affiliate marketing model, you can also sell high value digital products. With a digital product you can earn far more as an affiliate than with physical products from the likes of Amazon. Typically digital products pay 30-40% commissions on sales you generate. Physical products pay much less; usually from 1-11% commission.

A high ticket product is a product which sells for larger than say $500. So you stand to make more per sale than with a lower valued product of around $100. With a high ticket digital product selling for $1000, you can earn $400. Compare this to a low value physical product at $100 which will only pay you $3-£11.

If the same work goes into making an online sale in both cases, you can see clearly where you should be placing your energies! See what is high ticket affiliate marketing.

Time Freedom Business

A time freedom business gives you both money and time. For many, time is more important than money. Would your life improve the most if you have more time or more money?

Most people sell their time for money and so are forever trapped by this relationship of exchanging their time for money to live. But what if you could break this cycle? What if you could earn money automatically without trading your time for it? You can, and one of the best ways to do this is through selling other people’s products online, and earning commissions from sales.

One of the best time freedom business models is known as affiliate marketing. Anyone can become an affiliate and use existing products and services to profit from. By selling recurring income affiliate programs such as membership products or software, you can build a passive recurring source of income from anywhere in the world. What’s even better about this business model is that you can also build it around existing work and commitments. The fastest way to build a time freedom business is with a digital business system which is already built.

Time Freedom Business

A time freedom business is something worth pursuing because it can eventually pay you a nice passive income. But in order for it to be successful, you need to give it some time and learn how to build it (start here). One of the best affiliate marketing business models is to use a product “suite” rather than selling only one product. With a range of products to sell, you can earn far more than with only one product to sell.

Plus, if you also use recurring income products such as memberships and software, you stand to earn much more. High ticket products and multi tier commissions are other considerations too. With these kinds of digital products in your sales funnel, you can benefit from the highest commissions structures in the affiliate industry. This means you can also use paid marketing and build a time freedom business much more quickly. See also fastest legit way to make money online.

Other low paying affiliate products, such as physical products, are much more difficult to sell, in part because using paid advertising to do so gives you less leeway. A physical product sold for $100 might pay only $3 in commission, (at 3% for example). Whereas a digital product which sells for $1000 can pay out more like $400 in commission, (at 40%).

If the same amount of work goes into selling affiliate products, whatever they are, surely you would choose to promote the higher paying products.

Digital Vs. Physical Products

Digital products are products such as software and memberships. These kind of products typically pay much more than their physical counterparts. Physical products like those you’d find on Amazon, for example, tend to pay between 1% and 11% commissions. So in order to be profitable, you would need to sell in bulk. With a membership product which carries a recurring commission, you can generate a good monthly income from only selling a handful of items.

Physical products pay very little in compensation to affiliate marketers. There’s much more cost involved in manufacturing and shipping with a physical product. So digital products can offer a better bet for a time freedom business.

The margin is small for physical products and this makes it more difficult to use paid marketing techniques to sell them. Content marketers build content and drive sales through it, which is a way around this. But this can take years to create and it’s an incredibly slow method of selling items online. Paid marketing on the other hand is very fast. But in order to profit from using paid marketing, you need a business model with a good commission structure and multiple earning methods. See SFM Digital Business System.

What A Time Freedom Business Can Give You

It’s important to set some realistic expectations with a time freedom business model. It’s still a business and not a “get rich quick” scheme! You’re ultimately responsible for the success or otherwise of an online business venture. However, the time freedom business model can give anyone the ability to completely replace their existing income, work from anywhere, and even build their online business around existing work.

It can give you complete financial, geographical and time freedom! Surely that’s something worth working really hard for! If you don’t think so, it might be that entrepreneurial life isn’t for you!

If you’re serious about building a time freedom business then access a free video series by clicking on the image below. You’ll learn the different online business models you can use to build a business which can give you more control, financial certainty and greater flexibility and freedom!

Hands Off Business Ideas

The best hands off business ideas work around the clock 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They generate an income through automation and through using the internet.

So how can you capitalise on the internet as a means to generate a hands off income? Simple; become a part of the growing number of people who refer sales online. In short, it’s a business model known as affiliate marketing. It’s one of the best hands off business ideas, and is available to anyone with a laptop and internet connection.

Affiliates put themselves in-between customers and products.

In 2020 online sales sales grew by 46% while overall retail sales fell by a record 1.9% – according to the office of national statistics (ONS). With so many people buying online, it makes sense to learn how to become an affiliate so you can benefit from the growing trend in online purchases.

Hands Off Business Ideas – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates promote all kinds of products online, from those you would buy from Amazon, to digital training and education products. If someone buys an affiliate product from your unique affiliate link, you generate a commission based on the sale. When you learn how to make a single sale online, you can make many more; even selling products in your sleep!

Product delivery and customer services are already taken care of by the product owner. As an affiliate you only need to concentrate on generating the sale. This makes it one of the best hands off business ideas available today.

You’re probably wondering how an affiliate can make a sale online? So here’s some of the ways in which anyone can create a passive, hands off business from the internet through using the affiliate marketing model.

Hands Off Business Ideas – Promoting Affiliate Products

Within affiliate marketing there are multiple ways to operate. Most affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and automate a follow up email series. They share information and link to affiliate products through their email messages. Some affiliates will even build an email campaign which stretches for months or even years. So when someone joins their email list, their email autoresponder automatically sends out emails promoting products on their behalf.

As people buy products and services through these email messages, the affiliate earns commissions based on the product sales. This can be completely passive too, once set up!

To build an email list affiliates will use various methods:

Paid marketing – using the various marketing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Google Adwords etc.
Content marketing – content such as this article is also used to drive online visitors (traffic) to landing pages where the owner collects the visitors email address.
Social media marketing – there’s various other strategies affiliates can use including free strategies on the various social media platforms. See unpaid social media marketing.
See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Passive Income From Adsense

One of the best hands off business ideas is to use Adsense (or a similar program). With Google’s Adsense program, you can profit from the advertising placed on either a website or through your video content.

Website owners generate content and get that content found on the main search engines. They place advertising on their site through Adsense, and earn revenue when their website visitors click on advertising on their site.

The amounts you earn from clicks will depend on your particular content, but are generally very small. But when you start generating free traffic to your site, you can generate an automated and passive income through using this method. See get traffic to your website free for some free traffic generation strategies.

You can also use Adsense in conjunction with free blog sites and with YouTube. YouTube’er generate lots of content and get paid for clicks on their adverts. Website owners do the same with written content.

Sell Digital Products You Own

The affiliate marketing model lets you sell digital products you don’t personally own (see above). But you can also sell your own products from a website in a hands off way. One of the best things to sell is an e-book because you can automate the sale over the internet. See also how to sell ebooks on your own website.

Anyone can create an ebook based on their individual expertise on any given subject. You can also use your own ebooks in conjunction with the affiliate marketing business model – giving your ebook away to encourage subscribers to join your email list. See ebook lead magnet.

Amazon Self Publishing

If you are creative enough to write an ebook, why not use Amazon self publishing to upload your material and get paid passively for it?

hands off business ideas - self publishing

Books you publish will appear in Kindle stores online within 24-48 hours. You can earn royalty payments on your work too. Enroll in KDP Select, (Kindle Direct Publishing) and earn more money through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Here’s an ebook I uploaded to Kindle which was originally only intended to be a lead magnet for my online business.

Summary

So here’s a short run down of the hands of business ideas I’ve shared:

Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products using automation and online systems. Get training videos here.
Adsense/online advertising – create content and drive traffic to advertising. You’ll receive revenue when people click on your adverts
Upload your own ebook to a website for sale – sell automatically through email marketing or through using a Paypal button on your website. See how to sell ebooks on your own website.
Use Amazon’s self publishing resource to publish a book of your own! This can be done quickly and Amazon uses print on demand so it’s also free!

Mastermind Affiliate Program

It’s worth joining a mastermind affiliate program if you’re thinking of being an affiliate marketer. With a mastermind affiliate program, you can learn from others who are further ahead than you. Without a mastermind group, you’re very much on your own as an affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is far from easy and there’s plenty of hurdles which you’ll encounter if you attempt to earn from it. With a mastermind group you can shortcut some of these problems by:

Learning from other affiliates who are making the same mistakes as you
Learn from mentors and coaches who have been doing affiliate marketing much longer.
Ask questions and gain insight to help you progress much more quickly.

mastermind affiliate program — On a mastermind group session learning from other affiliates and business owners.

Join a program which offers masterminds here. I even offer weekly masterminds to my members with another online business owner I know. Here’s a picture of myself hosting our weekly mastermind session (posted in our private Facebook group):

Mastermind Affiliate Program – The SFM

The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) offers a mastermind affiliate program with a range of courses, coaches and mentors available to assist you in building a profitable online business. The SFM Digital Business System has a number of advantages over many affiliate programs:

Coaching and mentorship available
1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching
A range of products you can promote and earn from
High ticket and subscription products – earn higher commissions and recurring affiliate commissions from previous sales
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
A digital sales funnel you can plug into and get set up with a simple and straightforward step by step process.

the SFM digital business system — In the SFM back office using the step by step digital business setup modules

Why Choose A Mastermind Affiliate Program?

A mastermind affiliate program gives you support and help on the journey to becoming a digital entrepreneur. Earning online isn’t an easy thing and most affiliates will quit before they even have 1000 email subscribers. Going it alone therefore is more likely to end in your quitting! See affiliate marketing failure rate. With help and support, you can more easily glean what is required for success with an affiliate business and decide whether it is right for you, or not!

A digital business system like that of the SFM is also a huge help. Digital products pay much more than physical products. See affiliate marketing commission rates. With many affiliate products you can promote them through a email marketing system. With a digital product range, you can earn far more than from selling a basic level product because you can earn from multiple products and you’ll have multiple sources of income.

So from a $100 product, for example, you can potentially earn $1 a month per subscriber to your list. With a high ticket product range this number increases to about $5 per subscriber.

A mastermind program can also mean you get the support you need when you’re encountering problems, as you surely will! Coaches and mentors can help you overcome obstacles and approach your online business with the right mindset. See affiliate marketing mindset. Coaches can hold you accountable to your plan/strategy, or simply help you not to quit when things seem like they aren’t going your way!

On your own, these battles are much harder to overcome!

Your Best Chance Of Success As An Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model in which you promote other people’s products online and get paid when you make a sale. No sales equals no payday! Many quit affiliate marketing too easily because they don’t get the traction they want in the early days. But affiliate marketing is a long term thing. It doesn’t happen overnight. Most new affiliates starting out will assume it doesn’t work. But they would be wrong. Thousands of people make a living from affiliate marketing.

It’s just that it takes some time to find your feet and start making sales. First learn how to sell an item online. Once you can do this once, you can do it again and again! It’s a skill which can serve you for a lifetime, so you have to keep an eye on the bigger picture when you’re starting out.

A good analogy to affiliate marketing is to view it like the Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese Bamboo tree has a 4-5 year gestation period in which nothing sprouts above the surface of the soil. If you didn’t know what it was, you would probably give up assuming that the plant was dead. But after the 4-5 year gestation period, the Chinese Bamboo suddenly sprouts to 90 feet tall within a matter of 6 weeks!

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he shows us this chart.

This is also a good analogy of the timeline of an affiliate marketer. “The valley of disappointment” is what many would-be affiliates experience when they give up. They work for some time but see no tangible results. But as you persevere through this difficult time, you come out the other side and things can change dramatically.

Without a mentor, it can be very difficult to get through this initial period of disappointment as an affiliate marketer. The work/activity:results line is not linear. Rather 80-90% of what you will do as an affiliate will not work. Only 10-20% of what you do will actually work. Once you have done enough work to see some tangible results, you’ll understand what needs to be done. You can then apply Pareto’s principle (the 80/20 rule), to your online business. See Pareto rule in business.

Get Started

Join the Mentors All In program here. You’ll have access to coaches and mentors and a community of online entrepreneurs and business owners (including mine and Scott’s weekly webinar).

Best Strategy For Affiliate Marketing

What’s the best strategy for affiliate marketing? There’s countless affiliate marketing strategies you can use to sell affiliate products. Here’s just a short list of some of the most popular methods:

PPC – Pay per click direct marketing. Paid advertising is fast and scalable, but expensive. You need to know your business model and whether you can actually profit while using this strategy. See affiliate marketing business models.
List building – most affiliates build a list of email subscribers. This is worth doing whatever your traffic generation methods are. List building puts you in control of your audience.
Content marketing – bloggers and v’loggers spend years creating content to draw the attention of Google, Bing and other search engines. If they are successful, they can get free traffic. But this takes time and a lot of commitment usually and a good understanding of SEO – (search engine optimisation). See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Social media – you can attract an audience with several social media tactics. Here’s one I share in the article: unpaid social media marketing. You can also use paid marketing on many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube etc.

Best Strategy For Affiliate Marketing

So what’s the best strategy for affiliate marketing? This of course is massively subjective. What might be the best strategy from someone escaping a corporate career, definitely won’t be the same strategy from someone who has nothing to invest. Some strategies are cheaper than others, some take much longer than others. Generally speaking the long term slow strategies which take more time to do are cheaper than the ones which can work super fast. See fastest legit way to make money online.

But speed might not be appropriate if you aren’t desperate to escape a well paid job. If your in the “I hate my job but are pays well” camp, paid marketing is definitely the way to go. But to use paid marketing you’re best off with a high ticket affiliate program which offers recurring commissions. To purchase a sales funnel which contains high ticket programs isn’t cheap, so you’ll need to invest if you’re going down this route.

Alternatively, if you’re prepared to work harder for longer, creating content, you won’t have to spend as much on your affiliate business. But results can take time to show if you go the content marketing route. See also get traffic to your website free.

Best Strategy For Affiliate Marketing – Cheaper & Free Routes

To do affiliate marketing for free can be a long term affair. It’s tough, even if you can invest some money on the software which will make your life easier:

Your own domain name and website – hosting provider (less than $5 a month) and domain name shouldn’t cost more than $10.
An autoresponder is probably the best investment you’ll make if you’re serious about starting an affiliate business. See the power of email marketing. An autoresponder is around $10 a month and this rises as you get more subscribers.

With your own website and an autoresponder, you can build an affiliate business by picking an affiliate niche and building content. You can use YouTube to create video content for free, if you have a smart phone or recording device. Use your website to start blogging.

You can also write reviews using free blog sites such as hubpages.com. Free blog sites let you write on them even without owning your own website However, search engines are less likely to rank your content and so getting views can be more of a challenge. See affiliate marketing without investment.

Fastest Strategy Using High Ticket & Paid Marketing

Some will definitely consider this to be the best strategy for affiliate marketing. And if you can afford to put yourself at the highest commissions levels and devote several months to learning how to market your business, I would agree! Start here. With paid marketing you can scale up a business much more quickly. So by devoting time and energy to a scalable method of doing affiliate marketing, you give yourself the best chance of building a large income business – even if you’re starting from scratch.

high ticket funnel Best Strategy For Affiliate Marketing

A high ticket commission product range plus recurring commissions (from memberships) and multi-tier commissions can give you the best opportunity for making money with affiliate marketing. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

The Best Strategy Is One Which Works!

Whatever your strategy with affiliate marketing is, you need it to work for you. So whether you are trying to escape a job, or just looking for another source of income, you need to find a strategy you can pursue which fits with your work style, financial position and timescale. If you want to be making money from affiliate marketing quickly, the paid route is much faster. But if you have more time spare but less money, you might want to choose a path which requires less investment.

Generally speaking the cheaper routes are slower than the paid ones. For more strategies and tactics see my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Choose just one strategy and become an expert at it. Don’t jump all over the different strategies looking for a quick win.

At first affiliate marketing can be difficult. But if you choose subscription affiliate programs (which pay recurring commissions) and use a high ticket sales funnel, your efforts can go much further than if you use low value affiliate products which pay only small commissions. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Keep going and never quit if you want to be successful with affiliate marketing. Whether you succeed or not with affiliate marketing is as much to do with your attitude and ability to learn from the journey as it is from choosing a strategy. I’ve failed hundreds of times with affiliate marketing. But learned from every one of these “failures”. Don’t see them as failures, just stepping stones to success. The more you fail, the more you’re moving forwards. “Fail forwards” and eventually success will be yours!

The best strategy for affiliate marketing is to bring this “die hard” mentality into your affiliate business. Whatever the journey throws at you, see it as an opportunity for self discovery and for learning. With this attitude, you can never fail.

Pareto Rule In Business

The Pareto rule in business runs according to Pareto’s principle. Vilfredo Pareto made some important contributions to economics; particularly in the study of income distribution, and the analysis of individual choice.

The principle states that 80% of outcomes can be attributed to 20% of causes. In business this means that you should focus on the 20% of activities which have the greatest influence on the outcome you desire. Knowing what these activities are is the first step towards using the Pareto rule in business.

If you can’t measure something you can’t improve it. But what do you measure in business? You must measure activity and how it relates to outcomes. In the affiliate marketing business this is done through tracking. Before you are able to track the actions which lead to online sales, you must first take some action. This might involve running adverts, creating content or generating leads in some other way.

Pareto Rule In Business & Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, a large portion of your activities can amount to nothing. As a beginner in affiliate marketing this can be a tough pill to swallow. But as you gain experience you’ll discover that some actions are leading to sales. Once you uncover those actions you are performing which lead to you making an online sale, you’re in a far better position to work on your business using Pareto’s principle.

Until you get to this point, you can often work for a long period of time and see nothing for your efforts. But don’t forget in these difficult times that once you have “cracked the code”, you can simply rinse and repeat. Previous efforts can work towards generating commissions over time. Affiliate marketing gets easier the longer you do it, knowing how to apply the 80/20 rule. At first it can be very time consuming and you get little for your efforts in tangible rewards. As you gain experience and knowledge, things get easier.

Pareto Principle Example

For business sales, 20% of a company’s customers are responsible for 80% of the sales. 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the results. For project management, many managers have noted the first 20% of the effort expended on a project yields 80% of the project’s results. Therefore, the 80-20 rule can help managers and business owners focus 80% of their time on the 20% of the business yielding the greatest results.

In affiliate marketing, you can spend a lot of time initially building content, blogging or uploading videos. If you track your sales, over time you’ll start to see where you sales are coming from and therefore be better able to spend your time accordingly.

In business, remember that 80% of your results comes from only 20% of your efforts. By focusing on the 20% which has the greatest effect on your business, and spending less time and energy on the 80% of efforts which are less effective, you can learn to be more efficient in generating a greater outcome.

Pareto Rule In Business – Summary

The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, asserts that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of the causes for any given event. In business, a goal of the 80-20 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority.

In affiliate marketing the same is true. An affiliate should endeavour to determine which actions are the most valuable to repeat on a consistent basis for the maximum possible benefit – to maximise sales.

Learn more about affiliate marketing with a free video series. Click on the image below for access.

See also affiliate marketing mindset for more on affiliate psychology.

I Hate My Job But It Pays Well

“I hate my job but it pays well”. Are you highly paid but dissatisfied with your work? Could you imagine another 10 years of doing your job? Does the thought of this fills you full of dread? Is the thought of Monday mornings getting too difficult to bear?

If this is you, you’re not alone in this predicament. Many well paid executives suffer from work dissatisfaction and burnout. But by the time you realise you’re in a trap, you’ve become accustomed to the lifestyle your income affords you.

This is also known as the “golden handcuffs” of a well paid career. With a mortgage to pay and children to look after, the possibility of escaping a job you hate seems even more remote.

I Hate My Job But It Pays Well – The Sunk Cost Trap

Sunk cost trap refers to a tendency for people to irrationally follow through on an activity that is not meeting their expectations. This is because of the time and/or money they have already invested. With a well paid job, this is not so irrational of course because you’re being well paid for your misery! Often by the time you want out of a well paid career, your lifestyle is already meeting your expenses and you don’t have any buffer to build your way out. Are you already living to your means?

To build your way out of a well paid career can take some time. One of the first things you can do is to lower your outgoings and pay yourself first. Paying yourself first is a strategy of the wealthy use to build up savings over time. Most people pay their bills and spend what’s left. The wise know to pay themselves first. They pay 5-10% of their income into a savings account before spending any of it; paying any bills or buying anything.

This does two things which can help you escape a job you hate:

Allows you to create a savings account which can later be used to start a business or invest in money producing assets.
Gives you the self discipline to live on less than you earn

I Hate My Job But It Pays Well – Confirmation Bias

If the statement: “I hate my job but it ways well” applies to you, you are probably quite well sucked into your job/career and the people within it. People around you are probably feeling stuck too, but too afraid to leave, or they don’t know how.

As you look for solutions from within the organisation, you’ll probably ask others what they think. They will then feed back what you already know and believe. “Yeah it sucks but it pays the bills eh?”, “What other job will you get on this salary?”, “I don’t want a pay cut, do you?”, “Who’s going to support your lifestyle, family etc.?”, “You’ll be starting again if you leave.” Etc. etc.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports your prior beliefs and values. So even though you are feeling utterly miserable about your job, your environment supports you staying in it. Only when the pain becomes so great you cannot tolerate it any more will you take any action. When will this be? 5 years, or 10? Consider stepping away from your work colleagues, when you can, and looking for another environment and other options.

Shift Sideways & My Story

Consider also the possibility of shifting sideways from a position rather than totally quitting, if you can. Shifting to part time hours can give you more space even though it will reduce your income.

But within that space you can create another income which can eventually replace your existing one. I started an online business and was eventually able to replace a lucrative income from the film industry. This can be done alongside a full time career too.

I worked as a stunt performer in the film industry. Over the course of 10 years I became utterly dissatisfied. Some years I didn’t work at all and I needed many other “fill in” jobs – see jobs with independence and freedom. Then other years it was so busy I was miserable because I was constantly working.

Nothing paid as well as the stunt work, but I couldn’t guarantee the work. So I felt trapped by the money. Many others in the industry claimed to want out too, but they were also trapped by the money or the kudos of the “stuntman” image!

Plan Your Escape

If you’re in a well paid job, you can build an online business much more quickly than someone with no money. Access free training videos here to learn more.

Save your income and sell things you no longer want. Set aside 10% of your monthly income for savings or put aside whatever you can. Use that money for investment or for building an online business.

Start to live below your means and eliminate debt. Once you build a buffer of cash in the bank you’re in a much better place to leave or reduce your hours. You can also build a side hustle income from the internet alongside a business, working flexible hours to suit.

WeWorkRemotely Alternatives

Are there any WeWorkRemotely alternatives? Weworkremotely.com is a remote working website which lists remote working jobs around the world. But you can find remote work from other places too, such as Fiverr.com and Upwork.com. Both these sites offer freelance opportunities for self employed workers from anywhere!

WeWorkRemotely Alternatives – Self Employed & Entrepreneurial

Sites which offer freelance work such as fiverr and Upwork require you to build up a portfolio of work and gain reviews. There’s a fair bit of competition on both these sites and as a freelancer, you’ll need to build up your portfolio over time to gain authority and win customers.

With freelancing you’ll also need a skill of some kind which you can sell. But if you’re looking for WeWorkRemotely alternatives you probably have some marketable skill.

Working Remotely – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another opportunity for those wishing to work remotely. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the affiliate promotes other people’s products and services online. Anyone can become an affiliate if they want to work remotely from a laptop. Unlike with weworkremotely.com, though, affiliate marketing is a business model in which you receive performance related pay.

You only get paid when you make a sale. So to become profitable as an affiliate you’ll need to learn how to make sales online. This can be done in a number of ways including:

Blogging
Email marketing
Social media marketing
PPC/direct response (paid) marketing.

WeWorkRemotely Alternatives – Blogging

Blogging is another alternative to remote employment. Blogging is generally seen as a long term strategy to generate an income online. But if you have a passion in a particular area, your blog can be used to help monetise it. Most bloggers will monetise blogs with either Google’s Adsense advertising program, affiliate marketing or their own business/products.

Bloggers also often build email lists and then promote affiliate products through their email marketing.

For more on blogging see Blogging Q n A.

Selling Memberships & Subscription Products

If you’re entrepreneurial you can create a course which you can sell online. Alternatively you can sell other people’s membership products and earn ongoing commissions based on the sales.

Membership affiliate products can be some of the best to sell because they give you recurring commissions from each sale. With a good product, a single sale can bring in an income for years.

Learn more about subscription affiliate programs.

High Ticket Affiliate Products

A high ticket affiliate program can give you much larger commissions than the average affiliate program. See affiliate program commission rates. With a high ticket program, you can more easily scale up an online business too using paid marketing.

High ticket affiliate programs are often training and mentorship programs which help people build online businesses.

Learn more about high ticket programs through this video series.

Direct Selling

Direct selling is like dropshipping. You can refer customers directly to products and services which you don’t personally own or need to store. As a third party referrer, you act as a promoter for products and businesses which already exist.

This means you don’t have to worry about product fulfilment or customer services. Simply refer customers to products and services online. The product owner deals with customers and delivery. This is similar to affiliate marketing but with physical products which you source directly from the manufacturer/wholesaler.

Watch the video below for more information on direct selling/drop shipping.

Weworkremotely Alternatives – Summary

So if you’re looking for “weworkremotely alternatives” there’s plenty of options available. Here’s a quick rundown of the ideas mentioned in this article:

Use freelancing websites; Fiverr.com and Upwork.com. Build up a profile and offer yourself up as a freelancer. Build your reviews over time. More (and better) reviews = more jobs.
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the affiliate refers sales to businesses and products as a third party referrer. When an affiliate link results in a sale, the affiliate earns a commission. Learn more and get started here.
Blogging – can be used in conjunction with affiliate marketing or with your own business/product. Bloggers also use advertising on their content to generate an income.
Memberships and Subscription products – Either create your own or use other people’s membership products to earn recurring commissions. See subscription affiliate programs.
High Ticket Affiliate Programs can allow you to build and scale an online business quickly using paid marketing and an automated sales funnel.
Direct Selling lets you align with current products which can be directly sent to customers when you make a successful referral. Also known as drop shipping. See also alternatives to dropshipping.