Affiliate Marketing Mentors – For Your Success Online!
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!
PPSAffiliate marketing refers to Pay Per Sale. This means the affiliate gets paid when someone buys something through the affiliate’s unique link. Affiliate marketing is a performance based referral marketing business model. Affiliates recommend products and services online and earn commissions based on what they sell. The most common commission structure for affiliates is PPS affiliate marketing (pay per sale). See also affiliate marketing business models.
There are other methods of affiliate marketing too such as recurring commission affiliate marketing and high ticket affiliate marketing. But most affiliate programs will only pay when the affiliate actually refers a sale. Recurring commissions happen with programs which offer memberships and ongoing payments. An affiliate can sell a membership program, for example, and earn ongoing commissions potentially for a lifetime. See lifetime commissions affiliate program.
PPS Affiliate Marketing – Make The Sale
With PPS affiliate marketing you only get paid when you make a sale. This often means in order to make your affiliate business work, you’ll need to make sales continually. If you use a high ticket products however, you can earn much larger commissions than the standard affiliate program will offer.
Amazon offers a popular affiliate program and pays commissions of 1%-11% to its affiliates. This is on a PPS basis (pay per sale). However, Amazon also offers its affiliates the benefit of earning from other items a customer purchases at the time of buying. So if you refer someone to a product from Amazon, and they checkout your product with a number of others, you receive the commissions based on their checkout total.
Pay per sale affiliate marketing can work well if you can get the traffic to your offers. But a good way to build an affiliate business is to use multiple strategies together: PPC, High ticket and subscription products can give you much more bang for your buck as an affiliate.
Using the three side by side can mean the work you do gives you a larger pay day. Subscription products too can help you to earn more consistently in the early days of becoming an affiliate marketer.
Multiple Earning Strategies
Often the hardest part of being an affiliate is getting consistent results in the early days. Using only PPS affiliate marketing means that you must consistently make sales in order to consistently make money. If your goal is to replace your current income with affiliate marketing, this can be a challenge with using only PPS.
By using high ticket, PPS and subscription products, you give yourself a much greater chance of success when things start turning in your favour.
You can also use a product “suite” instead of a stand alone product. A product suite is a range of products you can offer existing customers.
When you refer a customer to a product on Amazon, Amazon “wins” the customer. You get paid once, but Amazon gets a customer for life. But with a product range you can promote a product from a product range. When your customer purchases something later on, you get the credit for that sale too, and earn a commission. For more on a product range see SFM Digital Business System.
SOIaffiliate marketing means Single Opt In. DOI means Double Opt In. Double Opt-In means that the user needs to verify their e-mail after they have signed up. Single Opt-In means that the user only needs to enter their e-mail (or fill in a form) and that’s it – no verification required. Assuming two offers are identical, the SOI version will always convert better (in terms of numbers of opt ins) since there’s less to do for the user.
Getting people to enter their name and email (or fill in a form) isn’t always easy. But getting them to opt in and then confirm what they have done is even more difficult!
SOI Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketers build email lists of subscribers (see the power of email marketing) to send their offers to. In their emails they place their affiliate links and that’s how they earn money. With SOI Affiliate marketing you (the affiliate) deliberately switch off the double opt in setting within your autoresponder software. I use Aweber, and often affiliates will have to contact them directly in order to get them to turn off the double opt in function.
The double opt in is a safe guard which autoresponders usually recommend using. The problem is, many of your subscribers will opt in, and then forget to confirm once they receive the confirmation message. Or, this message can be lost in their spam folders and never seen. When this happens, they don’t get your follow up email messages.
If you’re paying for traffic to a landing page, and have double opt in turned on, you’re likely to spend a lot more money for less subscribers; since a number of them won’t confirm. This is why many affiliates use SOI (Single Opt In) rather than opt for the confirmation message being sent out.
However, some believe that the double opt in will ensure a better quality lead. Some single opt in’s may even be fake emails, used to access more information without giving up the users actual email address. With a double opt in, you make sure that the email is genuine.
SOI Affiliate Marketing – Paying For Traffic
Some affiliates will drive traffic (leads) to a landing page where they take the details of the user from a form. Here’s an example of a landing page form:
To access the information using SOI, you only have to enter your details and click on the submit button. The information will be sent to the email address you have entered into the form. With a double opt in, you have to click a link in your email message to confirm you are the user of that email address.
If an affiliate is paying to drive traffic to their landing page, and collecting data, they will spend more money with a double opt in. Since a percentage of subscribers will never confirm, and those subscribers will be lost.
Quality Versus Quantity
Depending on the type of lead you are trying to attract, and your particular niche within the affiliate business, you can choose between the two types of opt in. If you’re spending money and attracting a large quantity of leads, you’ll want to turn off the double opt in feature in your autoresponder.
However, if you’re more concerned with a quality lead, it can be worth leaving it on. With your double opt in switched on, only genuine leads will get your messages. Your open rate can be much higher too with double opt in; since leads are actively confirming their interest.
It’s more difficult to get your messages with a double opt in (for the lead). So those who are only vaguely interested, or want a quick fix, are less likely to seek out your confirmation message and click on it.
Traffic & Intent (Target Audience)
With a good offer, many people will want to opt in, if you target the right audience. But if you’re spending money on that audience, you also want those people to convert into paying customers. Conserving marketing budget and minimising waste is therefore pretty important, especially if you’re only testing a particular marketing campaign.
Getting to know your perfect target audience therefore is pretty important for an affiliate. Without a deep understanding of your target market, you can easily spend money on leads which don’t convert into customers. See why target market is important.
An affiliate marketing ebook pdf free download is where many affiliates begin. I began my journey to earning with affiliate marketing through purchasing a downloadable ebook. It wasn’t an affiliate marketing book, but taught a strategy to use eBay to buy and sell. Needless to say, I went on to learn affiliate marketing instead! I even created a number of my own affiliate marketing ebook pdf free downloads which I offer here in this article. Scroll to the bottom to see them all together.
Affiliate Marketing Ebook PDF Free Download
But first I’ll share the ebook I put together before I jumped ship on eBay and starting earning through affiliate marketing.
Although this book isn’t about affiliate marketing, it’s a clever strategy I used to generate an income from buying and selling using only eBay itself. In short, you find cheap eBay items using a miss spell eBay search tool. Then you re-list the item for a profit. It works too and I bought and sold many items for a profit. The trouble was, this strategy wasn’t scalable like affiliate marketing. And I had to spend a huge amount of time and effort looking for items, re-listing them and queuing at the post office weighing items!
Affiliate Marketing Ebook PDF Free Download
But I know you’re not here for a pdf download on eBay! So I’ll share my first ebook I wrote on the subject of affiliate marketing – Niche Blogging For Profit! In niche blogging I share one of the main strategies I’ve used to generate traffic and sales for free!
Niche blogging is a clever strategy I have used for years. It’s based on information I got from a course I bought several years ago. Basically it involves finding long tail keywords and writing content around those keywords. Some of this content will get indexed by Google (and other search engines) and I’ll get free traffic! This article, “Affiliate Marketing Ebook PDF Free Download”, is an example of this strategy.
Affiliate Marketing PDF Download – $9.97
The next ebook I put together is called affiliate marketing for beginners. In this ebook I share some of the most important concepts around affiliate marketing which took me to learn. I just thought I could jump in and earn money quickly with affiliate marketing. That’s what many courses which I purchased taught me. Sadly that’s not always the case and it took me years to learn that some affiliate programs are far better than others. Affiliate commissions vary from 1% to 100% in some cases so it’s important to choose the ones which will pay well if you’re looking to replace your existing income using the affiliate model.
In this book I explain which types of products will save you time and money and how to avoid many affiliate pitfalls. This book is for sale on this site for $9.97: Click the image below to access:
In affiliate marketing cheat sheet, I explain how certain programs will pay far more than others. Subscription affiliate products will pay you a recurring commission. High ticket programs will pay you very large commissions. Why choose to promote low value physical products when the same amount of work promoting high ticket subscription products will make you much more money? It makes no sense but many affiliates start off without this knowledge. I did too and wasted so much time selling low value items for tiny commissions. This is the book I wish I had read several years ago, when I started affiliate marketing!
Secrets Of Affiliate Marketing
In affiliate marketing secrets I share some of the “secrets” which top six, seven and eight figure affiliate marketers use to generate such high incomes. Having a large value sales funnel is key here. You can’t generate a high income with affiliate marketing with a bad marketing strategy. The best marketing strategy is one which is scalable. With a scalable strategy you can quickly increase your reach when you known your numbers are working. Once an advert is profitable, you can increase your budget. This is harder or impossible to do with some other marketing strategies such as content marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF
Once you get started creating ebooks it can become a habit! Here’s another one I put together called affiliate marketing blueprint. It has been created as a step by step strategy which anyone can follow showing the secrets and strategies of super affiliates.
Super affiliates make massive amounts of sales. They are the top achievers in a program. Not all super affiliates have the same marketing strategies either. Some use paid marketing and others use content marketing. But they all think big and generate traffic and sales in large amounts.
Ebooks and pdf downloads are a great tool for affiliates. They have been a useful list building strategy for me and I’ve had thousands of people joining my email list through downloading my ebooks! If you have downloaded an ebook of mine, do let me know what you think and reply to any of my emails! I’m a real person not a robot!
The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing
The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing covers a number of paid and some free marketing strategies. If you have a local business too, this book covers some free strategies you should be using for bringing in free customers on complete autopilot. Paid marketing though is the main topic for this ebook and I share a number of tactics and mindsets you can use to build any business with online tools and resources.
Affiliate Marketing Ebook PDF Free Download
I hope you’ve found something useful here on this article “Affiliate marketing ebook pdf free download”.
Here’s the books again. Just click on the images to access any of them:
In this affiliate marketing webinar, online entrepreneur Stuart Ross explains the business of affiliate marketing. Click this link to register for this important webinar.
If you’ve been wanting some answers about earning online through affiliate marketing, this is your chance to get your questions answered. Stuart is an 8 figure online business owner and has helped thousands of people to escape their careers and live a life of freedom and flexibility.
They can do this through using the affiliate marketing model. Not all affiliate marketing business models are alike. And in this webinar, Stuart explains the different approaches you can use in the affiliate marketing world.
Affiliate Marketing Webinar – What You’ll Learn
Most people now known of a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, anyone can earn an income by promoting other people’s products and services through an affiliate link.
When they make a sale, they earn a commission. Anyone can join an affiliate program from anywhere in the world. All they need is a laptop and internet connection. From there, they can use their unique affiliate link to make sales without ever talking to a customer or even handling a product themselves. Not all affiliate products offer the same opportunity though. Stuart explains how some products can give you more leverage than others.
Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and offers a number of products which you can promote. Commissions vary from 1% to 11% on their products. But there’s also the opportunity to benefit from additional purchases your referrals make when they buy through your link.
Digital products pay larger commissions – often around 40% but sometimes even more. There’s also subscription products and high ticket products which you can use to generate passive ongoing income and larger amounts per sale.
Affiliate Marketing Webinar – Crisis to Opportunity
Click on the image above to register for the webinar
2020 has been a difficult year for many. But where there’s a crisis there can also be an opportunity. The internet offers one of the best opportunities available today for anyone to earn an income from their laptop from anywhere.
That being said it’s also important to be realistic as to what you can achieve online. This is not some “get rich quick” scheme! Anyone can learn how to use the internet to generate an income with affiliate marketing. But there’s work involved and your success is your responsibility. There’s no guarantees with any business, and an online business is no different.
Stuart Ross Background
Stuart Ross explains his background in the mortgage business and how he transitioned into affiliate marketing. After some struggle, and building a few online businesses, he was earning more from his affiliate business than with his regular job.
He puts much of his success down to taking full responsibility for himself and through finding a mentor. Most people will have a high expectation about what they can achieve from an online business.
But many also underestimate what they can achieve in a year online. By taking small steps, anyone can turn their life around and build an online income through taking some simple basic steps.
Success Through Email Marketing
Through sending only a few emails, Stuart was able to make more through product referrals than he had done previously through months of his salary as a mortgage advisor. This was one of the main things which led him to become a millionaire.
By choosing the right products in an up and coming market and using automation in their sale, affiliates are able to create leverage to escape the trap of trading time for money. Instead of trading time for money, as in a job, you trade products instead.
Time is always finite. But with an online business you have access to a global marketplace. Product sales online have no glass ceiling or limitation. But the time you have to sell (in a job) is always limited; therefore your income will always be limited.
Stuart explains the main mindset shift he had was from reading a few books:
Robery Kiyosaki – Rich Dad Poor Dad
Never Cold Call again – Frank J Rumbauskas
He realised the key to selling online was to build a sales funnel which does the selling, not through cold calling. The key to unlimited wealth and financial freedom is trading products not selling time! Positioning yourself in a market that is trending upwards was another key insight which Stuart shares in this affiliate marketing webinar.
In these free affiliate marketing training videos you’ll meet Stuart Ross, one of my personal mentors. He has successfully built several online businesses, and helps affiliates build lifestyle businesses to help them escape their jobs.
In Workshop 1 you’ll learn a little about Stuart’s background as a Mortgage adviser. A recent Gallop poll showed that 85% of people are unhappy in their jobs. Stuart’s experience was no exception to this! He became enthused about affiliate marketing and was eventually able to leave his full time job through pursuing affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a business model where you can recommend and endorse a product online and earn commissions from the sales you make. Anyone can become an affiliate marketer by signing up to a program and promoting their unique affiliate link. There’s many industries and products available with the affiliate marketing model. So you can choose a niche or topic in pretty much any area which you’re interested in.
Free Affiliate Marketing Training Videos
Different types of products offer a different commission rate. In video 1 Stuart explains the different payment structures you can earn from affiliate sites such as Amazon and Clickbank. See also affiliate marketing commission rates. Although Amazon typically offers lower commission rates, you can also earn from other items your referrals add to their shopping basket at the time of purchase.
Subscription affiliate products are another consideration. With subscription products you can keep earning commissions long after you refer a sale. Memberships and software products can pay affiliates a monthly recurring commission, whether you’re working or not!
You’ll also learn about some of the products Stuart has created to help affiliates generate an income through referring subscription products.
High ticket commissions are another earning consideration to affiliate marketers. With high ticket products you can earn a lot more in commissions through doing what is effectively the same work you would do for a much smaller commission. In video 1 Stuart shares some high ticket products you can promote as an affiliate.
By using one-time sales, subscription affiliate products and high ticket products in combination, you can give yourself the best chance of success as an affiliate. See also SFM Digital Business system for more on this.
Free Affiliate Marketing Training Videos – Video 2
In Workshop 2 (access here), you’ll learn about how to sell your own products and selling physical products.
Stuart shares some real world examples of entrepreneurial ventures anyone can learn from, and how by aligning with your passions, you can create a business you truly love.
Many new affiliates start out with a lofty goal such as making their first million online. Stuart suggests instead to make your first $100 online without a job. By doing so, and by aligning with something you’re interested and enthusiastic about, you can break down a large task into smaller more achievable steps.
Sourcing products you want to sell is also covered in this video. Stuart shares examples of various products you can source and sell: drones, fake eyelashes, drone propellers, car key fobs, photo boxes etc.
Wholesale websites such as Alibaba are great places to do research for products you can sell.
Going directly to manufacturers and wholesalers and negotiating means you can purchase items at the best prices.
Direct to consumer selling is also explained in this workshop. This is a huge opportunity; promote products and services without having to hold or buy any stock. Amazon, Shopify and eBay offer the opportunity to list products to be sent directly to the consumer.
Workshop 3
In Workshop 3 Stuart sets some expectations about what you can realistically expect to achieve. You’ll also learn about finding affiliate programs and how to build your confidence about selling online. Start with learning how to sell a single product online. Once you’ve done that, you can sell 10, or 100. With the affiliate marketing model you don’t have to worry about product fulfilment or dealing with custmers. Simply learn how to refer a product and you get paid.
You also don’t need to be an inventor or come up with an idea of your own. The art therefore is really knowing the system of selling online. Stuart uses some real world examples such as tripods, car suction attachments and other small items which sell well online.
A positive mindset will get you so far in life. However, nothing will match actually doing the work required to earn an income online. Earning millions isn’t an out of reach possibility to someone coming into the digital space for the first time. However, it’s important to set some realistic expectations and do one step at a time. Learn how to sell a product online. Then build your confidence by taking small steps on a regular basis.
Whatever your age, experience or technical knowledge, you can learn how to make a single sale online. Taking one step at a time is key to success in affiliate marketing.
Access the free affiliate marketing training videos here.
How long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing? It’s the million dollar question! There’s thousands of people looking at affiliate marketing wondering whether it can replace their existing income. Affiliate marketing is a referral marketing business model in which an affiliate refers a customer to a product online. If someone buys through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission. There’s various ways to do affiliate marketing and depending on your marketing strategy, product choices and work ethic, you’ll have a different experience.
Most affiliates will struggle in the first few months. It’s definitely not easy and it takes time to build a reliable income from it. The fastest amount of time an affiliate can start earning is usually within 6 months. Some take shorter time and some take longer. But this will depend on a number of factors which I’ll cover in this article. The short version is don’t expect to make a regular income in the first instance and don’t give up the day job. But affiliates can use their online businesses to replace their income if they stick at it for long enough, and take the right action steps.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Fast Version
The fastest legit way to make money online is through using a high ticket affiliate program and using paid marketing. Paid marketing can reach a larger audience much faster than through months and years of blogging, or content creation. In the early months you’ll still need to test and measure your advertising. Not many affiliates get it right on their first try. Those who succeed, often test and measure many versions before they find the winning advert and generate consistent sales.
With a high ticket product range this testing and measuring of advertising is much more doable. You can recoup your marketing budget much more easily through selling the high ticket products in your sales funnel. High ticket products pay out much larger commissions than most affiliate products will. You can even earn 40% commissions on products valued up to $20,000. That’s $8000 a sale! Of course this kind of sales funnel needs investment. To earn those commissions you’ll need to invest in the business model yourself.
Plus you’ll need to test and measure your paid marketing strategy. This takes time and of course money. In the first instance you’ll be testing adverts which potentially fail! This is tough and even if you have a large marketing budget you’ll need to expect setbacks. But once you have a winning campaign running, your business can pretty much run by itself to a large extent. See make money on autopilot.
Some affiliates have managed to use this strategy and replace existing income inside 6 months, although this is not typical. For others it can take longer. Drive, focus and available funds for investment and marketing are all factors.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Slow Version
The slow version relies on cheap or free marketing such as blogging. It’s a much slower strategy than using a paid-for marketing approach. With paid marketing you can scale up by simply increasing your budget to reach more people (once your sales funnel is proving profitable).
With content marketing, you need to create more and more content to eventually generate traffic, leads and sales from the sheer volume of your “digital asset”. You can get lucky of course and have some content go viral, although this isn’t guaranteed. Early content too might lead to a sale or two. But generally you’ll need a lot of content to be making sales on a consistent basis.
Your content needs to get traffic too, so creating content is only part of a content marketing strategy. Once you have created a blog post, for example, you’ll need to share it and link to it. You should do this many times over several months or years before you’ll see consistent sales. This is the point where most affiliates simply quit. Unless they are invested in the long term picture, they will look to their pitiful results within a few months, deem the venture as a “failure” and quit!
From James Clear’s Atomic Habits – The valley of disappointment (is well known to affiliate marketers!)
But that can be a mistake. Affiliate marketing can work wonders if you pick a strategy and work towards its fulfilment. The trouble is success isn’t immediate and you need to get through this period to appreciate the rewards. Blogging and content marketing can show fruit within a few months. But it’s often much longer before you can consistently make sales and replace an income with it. Drive and consistent action are prerequisites for success with content marketing as a strategy.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Your Niche
The niche you pick is another variable which can mean your journey is either faster or slower than someone else’s might be. In a competitive niche such as dating or making money online, you should expect a tougher ride if you’re going down the content marketing route. There’s millions of blogs and videos covering all sorts of niches, so the less competitive the niche you pick, the better it is for your online visibility.
If you have money to spend on an online business, you can shortcut the content marketing minefield by using paid marketing. (See affiliate marketing shortcuts) However, as mentioned already, you’ll need a number of large value items to sell to recoup your advertising budget and make a profit. In a less competitive niche, you have more chance of finding an audience for your products or service through using content marketing.
Physical Products Digital Products Subscription & High Ticket
The product/s you choose to promote as an affiliate will have a bearing on how long it takes to make money from your strategy too. Many affiliates start off with Amazon and promote the physical products from the site. While this can give you lots of choice, and it’s easy to find a matching products whatever your niche or interest, Amazon products only pay small commissions. You’ll earn from 1%-11% commission on an Amazon product. So sell a $100 product and you can earn between $1 and $11. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
Digital products can pay much more and often pay out 40% and upwards to affiliates in commission. So for that same $100 product, you’ll earn $40 instead of $11! This means your efforts can be multiplied simply by choosing the right products. Subscription products too offer a better opportunity to affiliates to shortcut their earning timeline.
Subscription affiliate products are often memberships and business software which is used by affiliates themselves. When an affiliate is earning from their affiliate business, they will potentially use these kinds of tools for life. If you have referred those tools (as an affiliate) this means you’ll be earning recurring commissions for life too! See lifetime commissions affiliate program.
High ticket affiliate programs offer the largest payouts with some digital products paying out upwards of $2000 per sale! For what often amounts to the same amount of work, you can sell a $100 product and earn $1, or sell a $20,000 product and earn $8000! So it’s wise to educate yourself before rushing in to the affiliate marketing business guns blazing! You can shave years off your affiliate marketing journey just by using the right affiliate marketing business model and choosing the right strategy to market your products.
Your “Why?”
Your reason for building an affiliate marketing business is another variable which cannot be accurately measured in terms of time. Some people have a strong reason for getting involved in affiliate marketing. If you hate your job and have a difficult situation, you’ll likely work much harder, and for longer, than if you’re quite happy in your life just the way it is.
With a strong reason, you’re much more likely to overcome the difficulties inherent in the affiliate marketing world. If you’re simply “giving it a go” to see what it’s like, you’re much more likely to quit when you don’t see any results straight away.
Other Unknown Variables & Programming
There’s many other unknown variables within the affiliate marketing journey. Your resolve and ability to work under your own steam is a strong one too. If you need supervision constantly then entrepreneurship probably isn’t for you! There’s many distractions you’ll face when working under your own supervision and it can be easy to fall into one of several traps:
Being a busy fool – spending time on wasteful activities instead of money producing activities
Shiny object syndrome – buying course after course looking for the “magic bullet” will you imagine will make it all easier
Stuck in learning mode – Endless training and studying doesn’t move your business forwards, only action does. It can be easy to think you’re progressing when you only learning – not moving your business forwards.
Endless distractions – When friends and family know you’re working from home they will often distract you. Social media too can be a massive attention black hole which can draw your energy and waste your time!
Your own mental belief system and internal programming also is a controlling factor over the time it can take to make money as an affiliate. As Henry Ford said “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right”. Building any business is a challenge, but if you doubt you can do it, this will often stand in the way of you taking productive action. See motivational books pdf free download for some helpful books on motivation, goal setting and building belief.
Training & Support
Another huge variable with affiliate marketing is whether you get the training and support you need. Without support, you can find affiliate marketing much more difficult than with it. By following other mentors and coaches who have already trodden the affiliate marketing path, you can considerably shorten the journey.
There’s no guarantees with affiliate marketing and it’s a business in which you take 100% responsibility for your outcomes. However, with the right training and support you can shortcut your affiliate journey by avoiding many of the pitfalls you would find going it alone.
Affiliate marketing is it worth it? If you’re wondering whether it’s worth bothering becoming an affiliate, this one’s for you! Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative career and is for many. However, before you get to the stage where it’s working for you, there’s a lot to do. There’s several ways you can do affiliate marketing too. And depending on the route you take, how hard you work and for what duration, you can expect a variety of different results.
For this reason many bemoan affiliate marketing – saying that’s it’s a waste of time. But tell that to those who have quit their jobs and become financially free and you’ll get a different story.
Affiliate Marketing Is It Worth It?
Affiliate marketing can be tough. It can be very frustrating and just when you think you’ve got somewhere, nothing happens! In the beginning you should expect to struggle, to an extent. It’s easy for the “guru’s” to claim the ease of which they make tens of thousands of dollars. But these people have usually been at it for years, or even decades.
With a large list of subscribers growing into the tens of thousands, it’s far easier to shoot out an email and make sales. But as a beginner, your list will be starting from zero, like everyone else’s.
This is the hardest stage of affiliate marketing, when nothing seems to happen. But trust the journey and there’s a large prize waiting at the other end. The trouble is, most don’t get beyond a few hundred subscribers before they quit. Or they don’t even build an email list and things are even more difficult! The affiliate marketing failure rate is at 95% according to polls.
But many of these people simply quit, before they get anywhere. It’s impossible to count all the affiliates in the world too, so the accuracy of these kinds of polls is difficult to rely on. But it’s a fair assumption than most affiliates don’t give up the day jobs and either have a part time income from it, make nothing, or quit!
Affiliate Marketing Is It Worth It?
But what about those who make a success of it? If the number of affiliates who succeed is only 5% of those who try, you only have to be in that 5%! Affiliate marketing is a business model which rewards you when you make sales. Make no sales and you’ll get no commissions. It’s a performance related pay – unlike working a job. The difference is that with affiliate marketing when you start making progress, your “machine” can keep working even when you’re not! Affiliates can even make a passive income once they have built their online businesses to a certain level.
This is especially true if they use subscription products and build huge email lists. Once you sell a few hundred subscription products, you’ve got a number of subscription payments hitting your bank account each and every month – whether you work or not! This is most definitely a prize worth working hard for. The problem is, some don’t see the bigger picture and within a few months of nothing happening they decide to quit! This is a big mistake. What these people are missing is the freedom and flexibility an online business can give them.
An Analogy
My favourite analogy with affiliate marketing is the bamboo tree! Apologies if you’ve read a similar article but I think this sums up affiliate marketing the best. The Chinese bamboo tree has a 4-5 year gestation period. During that time, it doesn’t break the surface of the soil. It needs water and nutrients from the soil. After that period, it can grow 90 feet in 5-6 weeks time!
Within the affiliate marketing space you’ll see all kinds of reviews such as “I tried this course for 7 weeks and didn’t make a penny” “It’s a scam!”
But what these people are missing is the big picture and the Chinese Bamboo tree analogy. Most quit affiliate marketing because they don’t understand this concept. If they just kept going and made a breakthrough, then used that motivation to keep them going a little further, they would eventually see sales coming through.
Of course you can have a bad strategy and work like a ox for years and still struggle. This is an experience I had with affiliate marketing when I was following a bad strategy.
Affiliate Marketing – Worth It? Strategies
There’s fast strategies and slower strategies with affiliate marketing. Blogging is one of my strategies and it’s a slow one. Blogging can be compared to the Chinese Bamboo tree analogy too. When you first start blogging, nothing much will happen. Google has a sandbox which means it holds your website off the search results for several months. During this time, it’s easy to think you’re not moving forwards and quit, or at least have your motivation hampered.
You stop, look at your results, and wonder whether affiliate marketing is worth it! If you doubt your direction, which many beginners will, you stop and look for another “shiny object”. Shiny object syndrome can keep you in perpetual course buying mode when each email landing in your inbox promises the next best thing. With a continued flow of new emails from affiliates, it’s easy to fall into this trap.
Affiliate marketing can be tough, and you should expect to work at it for some time before you start to see the results. Looking too early can stop you in your tracks because you can lost faith in your strategy and the path you have chosen.
Affiliate Business Models
Of course there’s different business models within affiliate marketing too. Choosing a slow strategy and a low value product can hamper your progress for a long time. There’s no guarantees with affiliate marketing and your success or lack of it is 100% your responsibility. Even with a high ticket product range and using paid marketing, you can still fail! But using a good business model which has more potential for earnings has a huge benefit.
Most affiliates, like myself, start with affiliate sites such as Amazon. Amazon is the most well known affiliate program and offers thousands of products you can promote. So no matter what your interests are, you’ll likely find something from Amazon you can promote. The trouble is Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are pretty low.
You’ll only earn from 1%-11$ commission on any given product from the site. So if you sell a $100 product, the most you’ll earn is $11. There are other benefits on Amazon and you can pick up some extra earnings from your referrals basket, especially if they are on a shopping spree when they use your affiliate link.
However, choosing subscription products and digital products can mean you get much larger commissions for what is often the same amount of work. Digital products typically pay much more than physical ones do; often 40% commissions and even above. With larger commissions, a high ticket sales funnel and subscription products, you can much more easily use paid marketing to drive your affiliate business forwards.
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It? – Paid Marketing
Some affiliates focus only on blogging and other organic marketing strategies. They make take several months or years even to see a return from their hard work. When it does come in, it can be passive. All the content they have created previously still works for them; bringing in leads and sales to their affiliate business. But most won’t work for long periods like this without evidence that their work is paying off! So unless you’re creatively inclined and like working for months with no obvious reward, you’ll need another strategy.
One such strategy is to use paid marketing. With paid marketing you set up advertising campaigns and send people to a website or sales funnel. When your paid marketing is working (and this takes some testing and measuring usually before it does), you can leave it running. Campaigns which become profitable can be left on, those which don’t turned off. When a paid campaign is profitable it can also be scaled up to a larger audience simply by increasing your budget. This is like turning on a tap and getting more water – only money comes out the other end! This is why so many affiliates put up with the struggle in the early days. Ultimately they can create an abundance of income and free themselves from their jobs, bosses and long commutes and work from anywhere!
Those who don’t see this as the outcome can struggle to maintain consistency and may eventually give up before they get there.
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It – Outcomes
Depending on your life right now, and if you’re read this far, you might have an opinion on whether it’s worth becoming an affiliate marketer. If you believe in the outcome and believe that it’s possible, nothing can stop you from achieving the goal you set out for. You can work from anywhere, and make money on autopilot, if you succeed. For some that’s an impossible dream. Depending on your financial situation, available time and ability this can take some time.
If you can invest in a high ticket business system, for example, and use paid marketing this journey can be considerably shorter. But it’s not impossible to do without such a system either and only through organic marketing. You can still use subscription affiliate programs to give you an advantage without investment.
But if you’re choosing the longer route of content creation, it’s worth considering what you would enjoy to do. Writing content around something you hate or at best are disinterested in is a bore. And it’s much harder to sustain the necessary input you’ll need to succeed. See how to blog for profit without selling your soul.
Raymond Holliwell Working With The Law PDF is one of my favourite books on the law of attraction. Download it at the bottom of this article.
Working With The Law PDF – If You Are Not Succeeding
Here’s a short exert from Raymond Holliwell’s book Working With The Law:
“If you are not succeeding, if you lack any good thing, look more closely to the cause. It is not outside; it is somewhere within. See where you fail to use the Law correctly or where you fail in your consciousness to think rightly. There are three points common in everyday life where one may fall into a snare and a delusion. “
First of all:
First of all: Do you expect something for nothing? Does it make you feel good, pleased, when you get something without paying for it? If so, you are violating the Law. Your returns will always be unsatisfactory. No matter where you go, be willing to pay your way. Have you known some people who hang back when you go out for an evenings entertainment? They stand back and let the other fellow pay for the show. People like that lose hundreds of dollars when they themselves a paltry fifty cents. The quality of thought they entertain repels many dollars they rightly could attract. If you, knowingly, cheat another one of a dollar, it may cost you many dollars for the mistake.
Second:
Second: Do you hunt for things that are called cheap? Are you a bargain hunter? Cheap thoughts can only bring cheap returns. You who wait for bargain days will always have to take bargains, but remember, there are no bargains in life. If you have gained monetarily, you may have lost in other ways. You place yourself in a vibration that lowers your present state. It forces you below your proper level. It limits your thought to a state where you support underselling, cutting, bankruptcy and dishonesty on the part of the seller. He must lie, or deceive, or cheat somehow about the price of the bargain or some other article, because he is in business to make a fair profit. Thus, you become a party to the violation and come under its penalty.
Third:
Third: Do you begrudge spending money? Do you hate to pay your bills? Release your money cheerfully even it if be the last dollar you have. Decide what your need is; if it is of more value than the dollar in your purse, then spend the dollar cheerfully. In this way you comply with a law. Often when we get to a low level we begin to tighten up on pour purse strings. We begin to hold back. This is like closing the faucet, limiting the supply from pouring in to you. I remember a man telling of a time when he had an urgent need for a thousand dollars.
He had but a ten dollar bill in his purse and he was holding on to that bill like a drowning man to a straw. For days, he said, he carried it about with him, afraid to spend it for fear of being broke. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was pinning his faith more on the ten dollars than he was on the true source of supply. He was closing his faucet with a mere ten dollar bill; it had grown to become a fearful obstruction.
When he realised this truth, he sat down at once and mailed the bill to a nearby church, and following the release of the bill, supply began to flow in to him. Before that week was out, he received his thousand dollars, enough to pay the months obligations. He added “Never since has supply failed to flow to me, for I learned a lesson.”
From Chapter VII – Law Of Compensation (Raymond Holliwell – Working With The Law)
If you’re also looking for another way to generate income, you can sign up to a free video series here to learn some online earning strategies. The free videos explain a few strategies anyone can use to start generating an income from the internet. Click here or on the image below for access.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may be wondering is Clickbank worth it? Clickbank is often the first place to go for new affiliates, and it was for me too. Clickbank is a great place to go if you’ve already got an online presence and get traffic in a particular niche. You can simply browse through Clickbank’s product range and choose a product which you, yourself would buy. If it’s a good product, it might be worth using it on your website.
There’s plenty of products on the site which aren’t good of course, and some will sell better than others. Ideally you should choose products which offer ongoing commissions. These are subscriptions and membership type products and they offer you the means to earn an ongoing income from previous sales.
With regular commissions from subscription products, it’s much easier to build a reasonable income through affiliate marketing. When you’re only making sporadic sales here and there, it can be a very frustrating experience however.
Subscriptions at least give you a more sustainable income when you’re starting out. See also subscription affiliate programs.
Is Clickbank Worth It – Expectations
So, is Clickbank worth it? To make money with Clickbank will take some time. If you already have a popular website, you can simply put a banner of some product on it and make a few sales. If you’re starting from scratch online, be prepared for a long journey ahead. Most affiliates quit long before they generate a regular income from affiliate sales. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
Clickbank offers digital products which means you can earn 40% and sometimes more on any sales you generate. Amazon, by contrast only offers tiny commissions of 1-11% but offers physical products which can be easier to sell than digital products.
Wherever you are in your affiliate marketing journey, it’s useful to set some expectations. If you’re going down the route of organic traffic generation, expect a longer wait for sales to start coming in, especially if you’re starting from scratch. Paid marketing can be much faster but you’re going to need to be careful of what you spend. Again, subscriptions can help you here because you will often recoup more with a subscription affiliate product than you could with a “one-off” sale.
Is Clickbank Worth It – Using CBEngine
CBengine.com is a website which you can use to help you find products on Clickbank. It’s particularly useful in that it can help you find subscription products on the site. See Clickbank passive income for more on this. Remember with a subscription product you earn a monthly income stream. With a one-off sale you need to keep on making sale after sale to make a regular income. So subscriptions are definitely worth selling. The trouble with Clickbank is there’s a lot of rubbish on the site, so it’s worth choosing a product carefully.
A good subscription product will bring in an income month after month for every member you refer. However, choose a bad product, and people simply won’t keep their subscriptions going. See also lifetime commissions affiliate program.
Your Ability To Make Sales
Your success with Clickbank, (or any other affiliate platform) comes down to just one thing: your ability to make sales.
This is a learned skill which is well worth studying. Once you can make make sales and automate the process, you can generate an income from the internet. This has huge implications for geographical, time and financial freedom. But you still need to learn how to do it and that’s no easy task.
Just because a course on Clickbank tells you how easy something is, doesn’t make it so. Clickbank “gurus” often show you their earnings from Clickbank but fail to show you their marketing costs! So it can be easy to show how well you’re doing on making sales, without illustrating the massive costs involved in marketing your products.
Ultimately it comes down to how much you really want to make a success with Clickbank. Clickbank isn’t the platform for me. I have used it and sold a few products, but ultimately it didn’t work very well for me. That doesn’t mean it won’t work well for you though. Some marketers can make Clickbank very lucrative. But that comes down to your ability to market products online. Whether you use paid marketing or content marketing will depend on your risk profile, available funds and available time.
Giving Yourself A Better Chance
With the average Clickbank product you’ll make around $40, since most of the products on Clickbank sell for $100 and pay 40% commission. 40% is a better level of commission than most physical product programs you’ll find online. But it’s still a tight margin if you want to use paid marketing to promote the products. You’ll need to spend less than $40 on your advertising if you want to make a profit. Or, focus on free marketing strategies instead, if you have the time and patience.
But the free strategies take a long time and there’s still no guarantees. So is Clickbank worth it if you’re starting out as an affiliate? If you’re going to spend months or years blogging or creating content, I’d say that, no, it isn’t. Not unless you love your topic and want to do it anyway. It’s way too hard.
With high ticket items, subscription products, multi-tier commissions and a built in sales team (closing sales on your behalf), it’s much more attainable to use paid marketing and come out with a profit. Clickbank gives you an average sale of $40. But with a large valued product range, you can earn much more from what equates to the same, or a similar amount of work.
What exactly is a repeatable and scalable business model? A repeatable business model can be copied by anyone and used to generate profit. Chain stores/restaurants are examples of repeatable business models. McDonald’s, for example is a repeatable business model. Anyone can purchase a franchise licence to operate a McDonalds restaurant. It’s a proven business model. Not everyone can afford to do so, but it’s just one example.
James Dyson with his vacuum cleaner
A scalable business model can be scaled up and has a product or service which can be sold globally. Scalable business models are often entrepreneurial endeavours in which the business owner has created some kind of unique product. If you’re ever seen the popular UK TV show Dragon’s Den, you’ll understand that most “dragons” are looking for a business they can sell globally and scale up.
Small scale business models can’t be scaled. A local store, for example is only useful locally. Whereas a product which has global appeal can be scaled to a global audience.
Repeatable And Scalable Business Model
A repeatable and scalable business model is something which anyone can use to generate profit. Chains and franchises are typically both scalable and repeatable, hence why people are prepared to pay large fees for a franchise. But large franchise fees can often mean many are unable to use such business models.
Millions of people are now buying online, which offers an opportunity for affiliate marketers to generate income from referring sales
Affiliate Marketing
One such arena which is much more accessible to the masses is the affiliate marketing business model. With affiliate marketing, you can sell a product online and earn a commission. This is a scalable business model because you can sell that same product globally, in many cases, and anyone can join an affiliate program to use this model. However, if you’ve spent any time doing affiliate marketing you’ll know that it isn’t all plain sailing! The main problem is in finding a repeatable business model you can scale up.
With the cheaper affiliate products you might find on Amazon, for example, you only earn 1-11% commission on a sale. See affiliate marketing business models. This means the margin is too small to use paid marketing (which is scalable). You’re therefore stuck with trying to get traffic to your products through slower, laborious tactics such as blogging and organic marketing. Although this tactic can be built upon over the longer term, and can eventually increase your sales exponentially; it’s still slow and less scalable than through using paid marketing tactics.
As a repeatable business model, organic traffic generation isn’t great. Most people aren’t prepared to work for the necessary time it takes to make organic marketing work. Plus, content creation isn’t for everyone either as it takes a bit of creative imagination to do. So what’s the answer when using the affiliate marketing business model?
Repeatable And Scalable Business Model
The answer is to use affiliate marketing but to use a different business model than is offered by the usual suspects. eBay, Amazon and most of the physical products you can sell as an affiliate won’t pay you enough to use paid marketing. Or at least it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and still come out with a profit.
However, there’s many other affiliate products you can find online. Digital products pay much more in the way of commissions – 40% and above in some cases. This gives you much larger commission margins to play with.
High ticket digital products offer larger commissions still. Some of which offer commissions of $1000-$8000 per sale! With products like this you can much more easily use paid marketing and come out on top. Subscription products too offer a better way to earn with affiliate marketing. With a subscription product, you can earn ongoing commissions for your previous sales. This compounds over time to generate larger earnings more easily. Compare this to selling low value physical products and you’ll have a much easier time with subscriptions.
The same work can produce much better results if you choose your affiliate business model wisely.
The Best Affiliate Model For Scalability
A product on Amazon sells for $100. You make 5% commission when you refer the sale, (or $5). To sell that product in an easily scalable way, you’ll need to spend less than $5 on advertising to make the sale. That’s a very tight margin of error. Most new affiliates simply won’t be able to repeat that, and even experts may struggle too!
However, using a high ticket product, you can sell one product and earn $1000 in commissions. So you only need to spend less than $1000 on your marketing in order to have a profitable advertising strategy which is scalable. That’s much more room for testing and measuring a profitable campaign than the low value item.
A good affiliate business model has more than just the high ticket products going for it too. It also offers other income generating strategies to help you earn:
A product range– a number of products you can earn from within a range which are automatically offered to your referrals (with a built in sales team closing sales on your behalf).
The SFM Digital Business system offers multiple earning strategies within the affiliate business model. What this means is that you can use paid marketing to generate sales, which is imminently more scalable than other marketing strategies like blogging, or using other free strategies.
