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!
Looking for an affiliate marketing seminar? Join Stuart Ross on this affiliate marketing seminar by clicking on the image below. You’ll learn some of the key factors needed to build a sustainable online affiliate business from scratch. You’ll also learn why your mindset is so important to changing the way you work.
In Stuart’s seminar/webinar, he talks about how you can learn a simple skill set which can allow you to earn money without trading your time for it. So block out 90 minutes, turn off your phone and tune in to this affiliate marketing seminar.
Affiliate Marketing Seminar – Generate Income Online
Stuart Ross is an 8 figure online entrepreneur who was previously in a career in as a mortgage broker. In this seminar he discusses his previous career, cold calling, franchise companies and mortgage broking. He quickly realised he had joined a career which didn’t suit his personality. Despite a self sabotaging run, he turned things around and found an online business opportunity back in the early 2000’s.
This and a drive to change his situation turn things around quite dramatically within a very short time period. With a different mindset and by taking full responsibility for his life, he was able to build an online business and make a full time living within a year of starting.
Affiliate Marketing Seminar- Topics
This seminar is broken down into three lessons:
Three lessons that made Stuart a millionaire
The greatest opportunity online right NOW
How YOU can turn a crisis into an opportunity
Affiliate Marketing Seminar – Don’t Trade Time For Money
With most jobs you get paid for turning up and completing a few hours of work. With this model, you can always only earn a limited amount of income. Your income is always capped by the amount of available time you have to give. Even in a well paid job, if you stop working, you stop getting paid.
In today’s world, you can only escape this trap by trading products, not time. So don’t trade time, trade products. With products you can generate income from selling something. So your income isn’t capped or tied to your time.
Lesson 2
Traditional sales doesn’t work today. There’s so much more access to information. People don’t respond to aggressive sales calls anymore because they can do research themselves and make more educated decisions about what to buy.
Why cold call when you can make automation do the work for you? Instead of spending hours on the phone, or selling things personally; use automation instead. Online marketing systems not only do the selling for you, but automate the process. This means you can scale up to a global audience once everything is in place.
Lesson 3 – Choose Upward Trending Industries
Not all industries are booming. In current circumstances though, some are doing far better than others simply because they offer solutions which dying industries don’t. If you position yourself in a booming industry, you can take advantage of the upward trend by selling products which people want and need.
You don’t need to have a business model or products of your own either. You can use other people’s products and services to earn online.
Coaching is the second fastest industry in the world. E-learning, coaching and teaching online are all part of the “wisdom selling” internet boom. If you’re not pivoting into the online world you could be left behind in the emerging digital economy.
By using knowledge, or aligning yourself with e-learning online communities, anyone can pivot to the online world to generate an income.
Coaching & Mentoring Skills
Coaching and mentoring skills to help people move into the online world are hugely valuable today. As old industries are crumbling, their digital counterparts are thriving. Many traditional industry employees will need to re-skill over the coming decades and will be seeking online education products.
These kinds of products understandably pay the most. But you can also align yourself with these kinds of products as an affiliate marketer.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the affiliate (you), can refer customers to someone else’s products and services online. In some cases, you can even earn 100% commission of a product’s cost.
Affiliate marketing is a simple business model. Simply refer customers to products online. However, you still need to learn this skill. You need to build marketing platforms, learn how to generate website traffic and these things take time to learn.
Affiliates can create interest in their affiliate products by either creating content (like this article), or running adverts using paid marketing. Typically an advert will send someone to a landing page where the affiliate collects a visitors email address. They then follow up with email marketing campaigns and help their subscribers in some way.
Many affiliates make the mistake of simply building their email list. But the money isn’t in the list – it’s in the relationship you build with your subscribers.
How Email Marketing Is Like “Push Button” Money!
Email marketing is powerful when done correctly – (see the power of email marketing). Once you build an audience (see how to build an audience for affiliate marketing), and give them value, you can promote any affiliate offer which is suitable to help them. With certain products in particular, such as high ticket offers and training courses, you can earn thousands from a single sale.
When you build an email list of tens of thousands of subscribers, and build a good relationship with them, they get to know, like and trust you. When this happens, even if only a small percentage of your subscribers make a purchase, you can still earn a lot in commissions.
Open Rates & Commissions
With high value training products and large commissions to earn, even a small open rate can earn you thousands in commissions. If you build trust and give value in your emails, you’ll stand out online among the spammers and sales people who are not giving value and just want your cash!
This, of course is a skill, but one which is well worth learning!
Why Digital Products Pay More
Digital products pay much more typically than physical products because there’s larger commissions paid to affiliates. Physical products incur more fees in terms of manufacture, handling, storage and delivery. Whereas digital products don’t have these so they can pass the savings on to affiliates.
A digital business also incurs less costs because there’s no physical premises to rent, or staff to employ.
Access An Online Business System and Training Community
If you’re serious about starting an online business from scratch. The SFM offers a tried and tested training community and digital product range anyone can promote as an affiliate.
Access here through the Mentors All in product for $99 and then $97 a month.
Here’s my list of 22 ways to promote affiliate products. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and you need to choose a strategy based on your own personal circumstances. With low value products, it’s difficult to use paid marketing to promote products and still turn a profit. (See affiliate marketing commission rates). So you’ll need to use cheaper or free strategies. With high ticket affiliate marketing, you can more easily use more paid strategies because you’ll recover your advertising expenses more easily – and ideally make a profit!
So, if you’re wanting to escape a corporate career, for example, and you have money but no time, paid marketing is the fastest strategy. If you have time but less disposable income, free marketing might be a better fit.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Fastest and Most Scalable
With paid marketing you risk losing capital while you’re learning what adverts work and which ones don’t. So you shouldn’t spend money you’re not prepared to lose. Over time as you get better, your adverts should give you a good return on investment. But in the early days, you should expect to lose some money while learning. Ideally, test adverts with a small amount of daily budget. Scale up those which bring a profit and cut off those which don’t!
Once of the best marketing strategies for a high ticket program is using YouTube paid marketing through Adwords. Run a YouTube campaign and drive targeted traffic towards a landing page. Collect your subscriber’s information by giving them something they want. Follow up with an email campaign. Here’s a video I’m currently testing on YouTube.
When someone clicks on the link in my video they land on my website where they can enter their details. They then get offered affiliate products through an automated email marketing campaign.
This took some time to learn and YouTube is expensive. So don’t consider it unless you have a high ticket products range to promote.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Adwords Search Marketing
Adwords is a great marketing platform which lets you target specific keywords relevant to your business. You only pay when someone clicks on your adverts, so if you’re wise with your targeting, you should only get interested “buyer” traffic clicking on your adverts. Plus, you can also limit your daily budget to amounts you’re comfortable with as you’re learning.
Adwords is particularly good if you have a specific product to offer which is already being searched for. You can use Google keyword planner to find the keywords which are being searched for in your particular niche. Sign up for an Adwords account here to get started. Adwords can be used in a similar way to YouTube to send people to a landing page, or send people directly to your website.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Bing/Microsoft
Bing, (now Microsoft), has a similar platform to Adwords and it’s a good place to start out if you’ve never used an advertising platform. You can also connect your account from Adwords to your Bing account and transport your data across.
Bing tends to be a little cheaper and less strict with their terms and conditions than Google. So for affiliate marketing Bing can be a good starting place. Again, like Adwords, Bing uses search traffic so you can specify which keywords you want to use on the platform to trigger your adverts.
With all paid marketing you should expect to test and measure your advertising for some time before you find the winning advert/s.
There’s many other social media sites which let you run paid advertising too. Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest etc. Take your pick. Choose one platform to start out with and learn one strategy first before moving on to another one. That way you don’t spread yourself too thin.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Shorten Your Affiliate Link
If you’re new to affiliate marketing and have just got your first affiliate link, perhaps you’re looking for some cheaper ways to promote it on the internet? A long, messy affiliate link doesn’t look very good for a passer by! One way to make your affiliate links look more pleasing is to shorten them. There’s various link shortening websites you can use to do this:
shorturl.at
Bitly.com
Cutt.ly
tiny.cc
tinyurl.com
A long affiliate link looks like this: https://longcode32362764789247892643789.hop.website.net/123242
The shortened link looks like this: tinyurl.com/qdncoh62
Link shortening helps to make your affiliate links look less messy. This is particularly important if you’re going to use your link on social media to promote products. It’s much better to make your links less messy and can give you more character space for sites like Twitter for example.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products
Link cloaking is a similar thing but while you also shorten your affiliate link you can also brand it with your domain name or website name. This gives your link a more authoritative look while simultaneously hiding potentially sensitive information.
Malware can be used to change affiliate links in order to steal your affiliate commissions too. Cloaking or shortening your links can help to prevent this from happening.
One simple way of doing this is to download a plugin called “page links to“. Then create a page on your website and point the url to your affiliate link.
Domain Name Forwarding
Another quick way to make your messy affiliate links look more professional is to use domain name forwarding.
Look! Myspammylinkhere.com is free! I wouldn’t recommend this domain but you get the idea!
Purchase a domain name which is a good match for your affiliate products. The less words the better. Try and find a domain name which summarises your product. For example one I used was affiliate-marketing-mentorship.com which I forwarded to a pre-made landing page.
If you’re going to promote your affiliate link on social media accounts, for example, what looks better, a messy long link which means nothing, or a specific domain name which encapsulates the product in a couple of words? Of course you still have to promote your domain name, but more on this later.
Once you’ve purchased a cheap domain name, you can go to your dashboard in namecheap.com and click on manage domain. Then you can use the domain forwarding feature to forward the domain name to your affiliate link.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – A Niche Website
Many new affiliates look for ways to avoid building their own website. But this is a massive mistake. A website is a fundamental building block in your online presence. Why waste such a great opportunity to build an audience and generate free traffic?
One of my favourite tactics is niche website building. See how to build a niche website and get free traffic. Start by using Google’s free keyword planner to find a keyword in your particular niche. Purchase a domain name with your chosen keyword in it. Look for something (keywords) which has traffic already but less competition than most keywords.
Once you have a website, create content to attract the right audience for your products and services. See also how to rank an affiliate website.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Blogging
Blogging is one of my favourite ways to promote affiliate products. With a blog post, you can create content around your products, (or lead magnets) in order to draw your audience from: social media, your email list, search engines, other websites and many other areas.
Once you have some content, you can use that content and share it around as much as possible. If that content is well targeted to vibe with your target audience, they are more likely to sign up to your email list and become a long term fan! Once on your email list, you can build a relationship through your emails and promote your affiliate products.
22 Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Email Marketing
Yes of course this list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of one of the most (if not THE most) powerful marketing tactics available – email marketing. The power of email marketing should never be underestimated if you’re an affiliate. With a blog, or a website, a visitor has only a few minutes to purchase your product. But once on your list, this time period is extended by weeks, months and even years and decades.
The key to email marketing is to build trust and offer value. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are more likely to open your emails and purchase your recommended products and services.
There’s load of information available on getting better at email marketing. Over time with practice you’ll get better if you keep working at it. Here’s a tool I found recently which helps increase your email open rates: sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester
22 Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Free Marketing Strategies
Here’s one of my favourite techniques but it requires you to have already built a blog and created a few posts.
You can then use software to churn out your posts on all your social media accounts. Post planner and Revive Old Posts are two I use. With both, you can connect your blogs to your social media accounts. Post planner has a number of plans according to your needs and Revive Old Posts has a free version with the ability to upgrade for more functionality.
Social Media Share Plugin
If you have a blog or a website, it’s also worth getting a social media share plugin to make sharing of your posts easier for your visitors. There’s many of these plugins available for a WordPress website. Just click on “Add Plugin” in your dashboard and look for social media share buttons.
It’s a one time job to do and will help grow your online presence organically once you’ve done it.
Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Free Marketing Strategy On Facebook
Here’s a great little strategy I found using your Facebook profile. Start by cleaning up your profile and posts. You want to create a clean platform look which attracts people to your online brand. Change your profile picture to a professional looking one of you and link to your domain name in your bio.
You can also use a profile to link to your websites, ebooks, landing pages etc.
Once you’ve done this, your profile should have a clear call to action in it which lets people quickly see what you are offering. Here’s my profile:
I know it could be a little more professional looking! But you see my link in the bio?
Once you’ve done this you need to connect with people who you think are suitable for your affiliate product.
If your product is in the health and fitness niche, look for groups to join where these people hang out. Join those groups and start connecting and chatting with those people. Don’t spam your links, but genuinely connect with people and build relationships. As they come to your profile to check you out, they’ll see your link and what you’re about.
This takes a little patience and persistence. But if you dedicate some time to it each day over several weeks and months, you should see people coming to your profile and clicking on your affiliate link.
Using Quora For Traffic
Once you’ve built a blog and have some content, Quora is a great resource for generating traffic. With Quora, you can’t directly link to affiliate products. You’re likely to get your answers collapsed if you go spamming on the site. So instead, you need to give value first and Quora will reward you by allowing you to link to resources which help answer the questions – that is, your content!
Make sure you make a big effort to answer questions on the site and give real value. A short line answer with a link will get you flagged eventually. This is a long term strategy and one single link isn’t going to make your affiliate business. But if you make a daily habit out of answering questions which are relevant to your affiliate niche, and linking to your website content, you’ll see people clicking to your website. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Snip.ly – Social Media “Sniping”
Snip.ly is an awesome free tool which lets you take content and drop your link onto it. You can then share hot buzzing content (which isn’t your own) on social media. If you pick the right topics which both resonate with your customer avatar/perfect audience, you’ll get other people sharing your content – and your link!
I use Sniply to get people to my website or a landing page. It can be used in combination with trending articles or even videos. Pick a viral article or video which relates closely to your niche. I use sites like TheOnion.com, Dailymash.com and ThePoke.com – they are news satire websites. But I’ve also use other sites such as Buzzsumo.com to find trending articles within my niche.
Drop your link in it and share away! As more people share it, you get more people to link to your site. Of course the lick rate is often quite low, but if you stick with this strategy and become a master of it, you’ll see some business growth over time.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation deserves a mention here too. If you’re a blogger, you should optimise your content as you write it. You can do this by using an SEO plugin which helps you write content with your keyword in mind. It will help you get the keyword in your titles, image alt tags and throughout your content.
If you pick long tail keywords which have far lower competition than the others, you also have more chance of ranking your content. (See find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty). I use a plugin called Yoast SEO which helps me write seo friendly content. There’s many ranking factors used by Google and other search engines (Google being the market leader):
Content – without great content you won’t get links, shares and attention organically, so it’s the most important factor
Backlinks. -you can build backlinks through guest posting, social media marketing, blog commenting, forum posting and many other strategies. Backlinks are important for SEO and where they come from is as important as how many you have. One strong back link is better than many spammy ones.
Create more content and link to it using deep linking – deep links tell search engines what to rank your content for and come from your own content.
Visitor interactions on your content – Google sees how people interact with your content. So make it with your visitor in mind, not just the search “bots”
But if you don’t have a ready made lead magnet, you might want to create your own. Ebooks are probably one of the best ways to build your email list. Start by defining who your perfect customer is, keeping your affiliate product in mind.
Your ebook should be a good match for them, and lead them nicely towards your affiliate product. For example, I have a few ebooks. Some of them work better for making sales than others because they are more aligned with the products I promote.
Niche Blogging For Profit, doesn’t do as well for sales as Affiliate Marketing For Beginners. The reason is that the latter is more aligned with the needs of my target audience. Of course I found this out much later after having created both books! Save yourself some time and spend some time learning who your perfect customer is. Then create an awesome ebook to offer as a lead magnet.
Link Building – For SEO
Link building has always been my nemesis! It’s a boring and mundane task and I hate it! But links are a massive SEO factor and the more quality links you have, the more likely Google is to rank your site for your main keywords.
I’ve done some link building but not everything I should have done! Link building can be done through creating content on free article posting sites like ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com and Blogger.com etc. Link to existing content to build authority and traffic. Reach out to other bloggers in your niche area and offer to write guest posts in exchange for back links. You can also post blog comments. This does give you back links although the authority of these links is under some debate.
One strategy for link building I found is to use BuzzSumo.com to find influencers in your field. Contact them with content similar to what they already share and try to connect. I’ve recently bought a link building service from a company called thehoth.com which comes highly recommended. They have a variety of packages which are affordable for most affiliates.
Webinars
Webinars are a great way to promote affiliate products. Offer a free webinar to your email list and promote your affiliate products at the end for a discount to your attendees. Again, some affiliate programs offer webinars you can use as an affiliate. Or create your own webinars and advertise it through your email list or via one of the other methods listed here. Here’s a free webinar from Stuart, one of my personal mentors. (Click image to register).
PDF’s – Create PDF files and put them on your website
Pdf’s can be a good way to generate free traffic to a website or blog. I’ve created quite a few pdfs over the years and some of them are still bringing me free traffic and leads. You can use pdf’s as a traffic generation strategy, and try and get people to opt into your email list once they land on your site.
Here’s an example pdf I’ve created which still generates traffic even years later:
Obviously you also want to find pdf’s which are a good match for your target audience. Here’s a simple way to find what’s already being searched for to your niche. Just type in “your niche pdf” into Google and you’ll see some results.
Using YouTube
YouTube has already had a mention here. But YouTube can also be used to generate traffic organically, link to your blog and target specific keywords in your niche. The more obscure the keyword, the more likelihood of you ranking for that particular keyword.
Go to YouTube and type in search terms into the search bar. You should see search suggestions linked to your “seed” keyword. Find keywords which relate to your niche and create videos for them. Link back to blog content for extra traffic and an SEO link. Here’s an old video I created sharing the Snipl.y strategy I shared above. I still get leads from this even years after having put it on YouTube.
Watch the video by clicking on the image below.
YouTube Commenting
Yes YouTube commenting! One mentor who’s course I purchased years ago taught me this strategy. Create a YouTube account and link it to your affiliate product somehow. Ideally use the domain name forwarding strategy at least, if you don’t use your own website. Build your channel out with your link somewhere easy to see.
Take some time to make it look professional and use images which relate to your product or your own picture to make it personal. Then find videos which are hugely popular and have over a million views. Comment on the videos and join the discussion. Make a habit out of this and over time people will click on your name (in the comment) and this takes them through to your channel. Here, they see your link and can click through to see what you’re promoting.
This is similar to the Facebook and Snip.ly strategies in that it is something which requires persistence. Make a habit out of it and over time you’ll reap the rewards. Get involved in the discussion and contribute rather than just saying something generic and innocuous. Aim at 20 comments a day for a couple of months at least to give it a chance.
Google Places / Google My Business
Google My Business is a free listing for locally placed businesses. It’s really meant for physical businesses. However, if you are in a particular niche and you can add a locally placed business to your home address, you can potentially make some sales here!
Create a service, attach it to your address and build a niche website around it. This is a useful strategy if you already have an existing business too. You can attach affiliate products to your website. Then promote your website locally with Google My Business. It’s worth spending some time using Google’s keywords planner if you’re going to try this strategy. Have a look and see if you can tie your affiliate business to a local search in your area.
Do this by putting your local city or town into the location option in the keyword planner. Then search for your main keywords in the keyword planner. Build a fictional business around your main keywords, and link your free listing to an affiliate website!
This isn’t a scalable strategy but it only takes an hour to set up and then you should get free traffic for life!
Summary
There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing as you can see. If you want more time and less hassle, choose a high ticket program and learn paid marketing. If you can’t afford this option, make habits out of doing the cheaper strategies. Build them into your daily routine and keep going. Focus on the activity and not the results. Ideally you should use recurring commission affiliate products in your product inventory. With recurring commissions, your income will build up more quickly and your efforts will compound over time.
Have you any more strategies which I’ve missed? ! Please comment below with your ideas and add to this article. I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface with the endless social media possibilities. Still, it’s better to get good at one thing than to be a master of none! Don’t spread yourself too thin! Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it!
A sustainable affiliate program doesn’t just mean one which is eco friendly! While eco friendly affiliate programs lay claim to being environmentally friendly, a sustainable affiliate program should be financially sustainable. So what does this mean?
Aren’t all affiliate programs sustainable? Well, no they aren’t! Many well known affiliate programs offer little in the way of commission. Take Amazon for example, and eBay. Both programs offer from 1% to 10% commissions on products you refer and despite some benefits of cookies and bonuses, this is still really low.
You can get lucky if you refer someone to a product on Amazon if they fill their cart the same day and go on a spending spree. But mostly you’ll get small commissions for your efforts. This means you have to deal in bulk and unless you’re way ahead in your affiliate journey, and able to come up with free traffic, this is unsustainable for many affiliates. They simply can’t make a living with this model, let alone a scalable income.
Sustainable Affiliate Program – Recurring Commissions
Of course it all comes down to the affiliate’s marketing strategy too. Unless you can find a strategy which works, your business won’t be sustainable whatever you do. But that aside, there are some affiliate marketing business models which are far more sustainable than others. With an affiliate commission structure which offers recurring commissions, for example, you’re in a far better place than with single commissions of only 3%!
If your product only offers you 3% on every sale, and is priced at or below $100, that’s $3 or less you’ll make on a sale! Unless you’re making hundreds of these on a regular basis, you’ll struggle to make affiliate marketing pay. However, with a product which offers recurring commissions, on a membership or software product, your income will grow for each sale you make. So, even if you’re making a loss in the first instance, a recurring income will help you recover more quickly.
Recurring commission affiliate products are a major key to sustainability with an online business. With recurring commissions you efforts compound over time. With single point of sale products, you always need to keep selling to keep earning.
Sustainable Affiliate Program – High Ticket
With low value physical products you can expect smaller commissions. But with high value digital products, it’s far easier to build a sustainable income. Digital products on the whole give you far larger commissions than physical. With a digital product you’re looking at 40% commission typically compared to 1-10% with physical. That’s a huge disparity. Sell just 10 products at $1000 commission and you’ll make the same as selling 1000 products which pay you only $10 commission.
You might say that digital products are more difficult to sell than physical ones. And perhaps that’s true. Physical products are more tangible and require less convincing to sell. But if you compare the work you’ll need to do to make $10,000 with physical products compared to digital ones and the answer should be obvious. You’ll need to sell 100 times as many products with the physical product example above. It’s not going to be 100 times more difficult to sell a digital product.
What Makes An Affiliate Program Sustainable – Support
With affiliate marketing it’s very easy too to reach burn out point and give up. What can make a more sustainable affiliate program is one which offers help and support to its members. By joining a community as an affiliate, you can benefit from the experience of others who have already become full time entrepreneurs.
On your own, it’s difficult to sustain the necessary effort to make your business consistently profitable. But with help and support, it can be easier to overcome the barriers to success.
During an affiliate training conference
By following a step by step procedure and listening to other market leaders and coaches, your affiliate journey should be a smoother one.
Learn more about a training and mentorship program and how to access a high ticket affiliate product “suite” here.
A High Ticket Product Range
I mentioned high ticket products earlier, but it’s also worth looking at a high ticket product range if you want a sustainable affiliate program. With a product range, you can refer someone to a single product and benefit from a number of “up-sells”, closed automatically by a built in sales team. This means you don’t need to do the selling personally and helps massively with a digital business system.
Simply refer people to your entry level product through a sales funnel using email marketing. Most affiliate products don’t offer this. With most affiliate products, once you have referred a sale you lose your customer to the product owner. They get a customer, potentially for life, and you get a single commission! The more sustainable affiliate programs reward you for life, with recurring commission products and a product range from which you can continue earning. See lifetime commission affiliate programs.
With a high ticket program, higher value products offer more value to the customer. For each subsequent sale closed in-house (by a built in sales team), you earn commissions of up to 40% (depending on your commission structure).
Having a product range is another way to make your affiliate business more sustainable over the longer term. See SFM Digital Business System for one.
More Sustainability Through Muli-Tier Commissions
A multi tier affiliate program offers commissions based on sales made by your referrals. So as you grow the number of member sales through promoting recurring commission products, you can also benefit from their success through using a multi-tier program. The SFM Digital Business system offers a muti-tier commission structure to those at the top tier of the business system.
Selling the below products can earn you up to 40% commissions at the top tier. You can also benefit from 10% commissions based on the sales made by your members.
Before finding this business model, I struggled for a long time with affiliate marketing. I sold products from Amazon and eBay by creating blogs and attempting to get traffic for free. But this business model has becoming less and less sustainable because the affiliate commissions are so low, and not everyone can have the top rankings for their content on Google.
There’s many other organic strategies you can implement with affiliate marketing, but free traffic is much more difficult to obtain and those low valued products don’t pay nearly enough to make it worth your while.
Paid marketing on the other hand is much more sustainable as a source of marketing (and it’s scalable). But you need a business model which can support it. With high ticket digital products, a product range, recurring commissions and a multi-tier affiliate program, you have a much more sustainable affiliate business than with the various other strategies you could employ.
Access a free video series to learn more about the SFM digital business system here. Or, get started and access Mentors All In here.
Affiliate mentoring is an important part of becoming a successful affiliate. Without it, you’re choosing to go it alone. Even the top affiliates have been mentored, so it’s important to park your ego and ask for help.
Before I found a mentor, I was the same. I was determined to go it alone and prove I could do it all by myself! But I spent years on bad strategies and tearing my hair out trying to make things work. Don’t make the same mistake – affiliate mentoring will save yourself a lot of problems.
Why You Need Affiliate Mentoring
Affiliate marketing is a pretty vast topic. There’s many ways to do it and if you’re not careful you can spend a lot of time on a strategy and still get nowhere. There’s many courses too which will take your money and still not give you the personal coaching you really need. I took many of them over several years. Read about them in my digital profit course review.
Once you hit a bump in the road, it’s far too easy to give up without someone to reach out to. An affiliate mentor is a “touchstone” to help keep you on track, motivated and buoyed up by the belief it is all possible. When you are on your own and things get tough, you can quit more easily. Your belief can drop and when your uncertainty takes over, it becomes much more difficult to maintain forward momentum.
With a mentor guiding you, your belief is much stronger. When you have a strong positive belief in what you’re doing, you can sustain your efforts for much longer. This is definitely needed with affiliate marketing, which can be a tough business.
Affiliate Marketing As A Beginner
As a beginner in affiliate marketing I spent a lot of time working on strategies which are now redundant. Back in the early 2000’s, I bought several online courses which taught affiliate strategies for building traffic. Some of them worked but mostly the results I got were disappointing.
This is the reality for many affiliates who start out with huge optimism. Over time, when they don’t see results from their efforts, they quit. But this is a mistake. They just need an affiliate mentor to help them breakthrough; and this can take some time depending on the strategies you implement.
Up to the point of the breakthrough, there’s a lot of time spent on learning and implementing strategies. If this time period is several months or even years before you see consistent results, many people will quit, thinking this is the “reality” of affiliate marketing and that it’s all a scam!
Affiliate Marketing Growth – An Analogy
I love this analogy for affiliate marketing and I even heard it from one of my mentors. The Chinese Bamboo tree needs a lot of nurturing, more than most plants. If you didn’t understand the tree’s needs, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was dead, and throw it away! This is similar to the path of the affiliate marketer and of those who quit too early.
In the first year of growing the Chinese Bamboo tree needs water and fertile soil. But we see nothing in terms of growth. The same is true in the second year, third and forth year of the plants development. In the fifth year the Chinese bamboo tree grows just 80 feet in 6 weeks! Of course the first few years of the trees development were vital to support the exponential growth of the fifth year.
The same is true of the path of the affiliate marketer. Setting up your foundations are vital to your growth. If you jump around from one strategy to the next, you’ll never see growth. If you’re impatient and throw a seed away before it takes route, you won’t see the magnificence of the bamboo tree!
Types Of Affiliate Mentoring
There’s various ways to get mentored in affiliate mentoring. You can access pre-recorded videos, download ebooks, purchase books online, join email lists and interact with 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring sessions online. If you’re lucky you can even meet mentors personally in live sessions and even befriend them!
The most common affiliate mentoring is through pre-made materials you can find online. However, there’s so much of this material available that it can be difficult to discern one “guru” from another. Who is telling the truth about affiliate marketing and which way is the “best” way to do it?
Conflicting advice on affiliate marketing can be a major problem when you’re getting started. No sooner have you joined one program when your inbox is filled with the next best thing – promising faster results for much less work! So you jump on to that course only to find the same problems! How can you navigate such a minefield of disinformation?! The answer is to get a mentor you trust, and stick with them, taking the action steps they advise!
Q & A Webinars
Some of the best mentoring I’ve received has been through question and answer webinars and seminars where I can ask questions directly to the host. Mastermind webinars too are really powerful and being part of a group of people is very powerful for your belief in what you are doing.
Without a community for support, you’re forever looking at videos and scraping the internet; trying to make sense of something all by yourself!
On a live mastermind webinar session with other online business owners.
Affiliate Mentoring 1 to 1
With Jay Kubassek in 2014 in London on a live event
In 2014 I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing mentoring. I met Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek during a live SFM meeting in London. Since then I’ve met many mentors (through the community) who have helped me build an online business through their support and encouragement.
There’s many affiliate marketing business models you can use as an affiliate. Not all of them give you the same benefits either so it’s prudent to do your homework. You could spend years working on your affiliate marketing business and make peanuts if you choose the wrong one!
Business models for physical affiliate products tend to pay far less than those for digital products, for example. Take for example Amazon and eBay who’s affiliate programs pay between 1% and 10% commissions. Compare this to digital products which pay from 40% to 100% commissions and you can see the difference isn’t a tiny one!
Amazon’s affiliate commission rates (as of 2021)
Sell just 10 products from Amazon at $40 a product and you’ll earn only $12 at 3% commission. But sell the same value of digital products and you’ll earn $160 (at 40% commission).
Obviously with the physical affiliate products business model you’ll need to deal in large volumes. But there’s more to consider too when it comes to affiliate marketing business models.
Affiliate Marketing Business Models – Recurring Income Products
Digital products also offer recurring commission on certain products. If you choose business tools you can even earn lifetime commissions on sales you make should your customer stick to the product for good! Recurring commission affiliate programs aren’t all alike either. Some only pay you the commissions for the first year. After that, your commissions end and you’ve sent your customer to the product owner, who could go on to earn a lifetime of sales from your efforts.
Recurring commissions are often found in business products and tools used for online businesses. Autoresponders, hosting providers, online marketing courses and SEO and keyword tools are just some examples of products which offer lifetime commissions.
It’s well worth choosing these kinds of products if you’re serious about making your affiliate business pay too. Compared to one-off commissions from single-point-of-sale products, you could save yourself a lot of hard work and make your life easier.
Affiliate Marketing Business Models – The Six Figure Sales Funnel
You can build a six figure business from affiliate marketing if you use the right business model. It’s a whole lot more difficult if you’re stuck with low paying physical products and a slow marketing strategy. But with high ticket digital products you can maximise your earning potential and scale up quickly using paid marketing strategies.
With low valued products, you’re stuck with cheap and free marketing tactics which are time consuming, slow and unscalable.
The six figure affiliate business model uses a range of products too, not just one. With a product range, you can offer your products to many people. A low valued “entry level” product is just the beginning of the sales funnel. A mid-range product and high ticket product should be a part of a six figure sales funnel. Add in recurring commission products and multi tier commissions and you have several income streams from a single funnel.
Multi-Tier Commissions, Subscriptions, High Ticket, Built In Sales Team
The SFM Digital Business System offers a high ticket product range paying up to 40% commissions on a range of digital products:
Affiliate marketing business models don’t often offer this in terms of commission levels. In fact most affiliate business models will pay out $1 a month for each subscriber you get on your email list. With The SFM model, you should average $5 a month per subscriber – 5 times that of the average sales funnel.
Of course this all depends on your advertising. Once you have set up your sales funnel, you’ll need to market your online business. The SFM offers training and education for anyone wanting to start an online business from scratch using this system and strategy.
You’ll need a marketing budget in order to drive targeted visitors into your sales funnel. Or, create content if you have the time.
There’s various affiliate marketing business models out there. Free products are free, but often end up giving you less back than the high ticket affiliate products which are worth paying for.
With a high ticket product, you get a high commission. With a business model which offers high ticket, subscription commissions, a product range, multi-tier and a built in sales team, you will be able to earn far more than with a free affiliate product which only pays you once.
Whatever affiliate business model you choose, think about the hours you’ll be putting in making those sales. With often what amounts to the same amount of effort, you can earn a lot more using the right products.
I started looking for autopilot business ideas after working for some time on an eBay business strategy. The eBay idea, (I thought) was pretty clever, and involved finding cheap items on eBay that were badly listed. I then resold them and made a profit on the difference. The problem was it wasn’t a scalable business. I could purchase more valuable products and increase my profit with a larger mark up. You can read about the strategy in this article.
But I was stuck to my laptop all day answering customers questions. I had to physically post things out too which meant I was physically trapped by this business model and it didn’t give me the freedom I was looking for.
I knew the internet offered something better. So I looked for autopilot business ideas which could work for me whether I was at the computer or not. Here’s the short version (click on the image below).
Autopilot Business Ideas
The eBay business model came originally from an ebook I purchased from eBay. The purchase of this ebook stuck in my mind and I realised that it was an automatic transaction. The seller had created it himself and just set up a listing. He could also sell the same book over and over again with no printing or postage costs. So I decided this was an awesome autopilot business idea! See also how to sell ebooks on your own website.
I went to work and created an ebook about how to become a stuntman! Since I had joined the British stunt register some time earlier I though it a good idea to write about what I knew! I also created an ebook about being a TV Extra but despite a lot of website building and learning some online skills I didn’t sell either book!
I realised that what I didn’t know how to do was market my websites which sold the ebooks. So, I put myself on a marketing course online to learn how. Once joining a course, I soon realised there was a better business model than selling my own ebooks. It was a business model called affiliate marketing.
Autopilot Business Ideas – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is now my favourite of all the autopilot business ideas I looked at. What struck me about affiliate marketing was that you can sell almost any product available on the internet. I even learned how to sell the course I had bought to learn about it!
My ebooks were priced at $10 and I got 100% of the profit. But the course I promoted offered a lot more value and to a larger audience. It was priced at $100 and I could earn 40% commission. So for each sale I earned $40. This was four times what I would have earned selling my own ebook!
So I quickly dropped my ebooks and worked on the affiliate model strategy. Using paid marketing I built an email list and started making sales. I was just about to start scaling up my efforts using a larger advertising budget when I got my advertising account shut down by Google, and I couldn’t get it back!
No matter what I did, Google wouldn’t let me have another account. So I looked for more autopilot business ideas that I wouldn’t need a paid advertising account for.
After joining another course, I found a strategy. It meant I could still work online and automate an income by blogging! It was Adsense!
Autopilot Business Ideas – Google Adsense
Google Adsense lets you automate an income from anywhere by putting advertising on online content which you own. You can use Adsense from a blog, or upload videos to YouTube and monetise through using advertising. There’s many Adsense alternatives you can use too, but I used Adsense (and still do).
Adsense pays you a portion of advertising revenue collected by Google from advertisers. When someone clicks on your advert, (on your content), the advertiser pays Google for this advertisement and Google pays you a small percentage. This is usually a tiny amount (less than a dollar) but with a large volume of traffic you can make this a nice passive income with enough content.
Despite building a lot of content, Google Adsense didn’t pay enough to make it worth my while in the early days. It was only years later that I had enough content to make a regular passive income from it. Even, then it wasn’t enough to pay the bills!
Adsense is great if you have lots of content, or a willing to create a lot of content. But it’s a “slow burner” if you’re starting out. Plus, Google has pulled many accounts over the years and people have lost their livelihoods. So it pays to diversify.
Affiliate Business Models That Pay The Most
This takes me full circle back to affiliate marketing again. After experimenting with Adsense, I realised that affiliate marketing was going to be a better earner. I jumped on another affiliate marketing course in 2014 after finding a video online by a guy called Stuart.
Here he is on a pedalo in Mauritius. Watch the video here.
Stuart Ross teamed up with Jay Jubassek in 2010 and created an online mentoring program called the Six Figure Mentors. I was sceptical, of course, since I’d already been here before and failed several times. But I was struggling getting work as a stunt performer and fed up of the other jobs I could get (office work, HGV driving, hired hand etc.)
So I took a leap of faith and joined the community.
On a mastermind call with other online business owners through the SFM community.
The Six Figure Funnel
The SFM Mentors uses affiliate marketing as one of their business models. Although they also teach marketing for other businesses and import exports business models too. Many members also have their own marketing businesses as a result of the education they received from the SFM.
I was interested in their affiliate marketing model because I was looking for autopilot business ideas. What was different about The SFM’s business model was that it had multiple earning strategies in it.
Most affiliate products only pay you once. When I promoted products from the likes of Amazon, for example, I only earned for each sale. With the SFM’s business model, you can earn recurring commissions for affiliate sales. With recurring commission affiliate programs you can sell once and earn an income for potentially a lifetime. Each sale therefore gives you an income rather than a single commission. Other earning strategies using this business included:
High ticket digital products – earn up to 40% commissions on products valued up to $20,000
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
Subscription products – (recurring commissions from previous sales)
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
A product range – a number of products you can promote to existing customers.
Are you wondering how to build an audience for affiliate marketing? Building an audience to promote affiliate products can be done in a few different ways. But the key to getting your messages in front of as big an audience as possible is to build a list of email subscribers.
Once you have an email list, and a strategy for growing that list, (and communicating with your subscribers), you can take your affiliate business forwards in leaps and bounds. Until you do so, you’re forever stuck either paying for traffic or building content in the hope someone will find your content and purchase a product from it.
Building an audience for affiliate marketing with an email list.
But most people don’t purchase affiliate products from a website. On a website, someone only has a few minutes before they are gone forever. In that small window of opportunity, they are unlikely to buy from a link or banner on your website. They came to your website to find something out or read some content. They didn’t (necessarily) come to buy a product. So, they are usually gone in under 10 minutes.
How To Build An Audience For Affiliate Marketing
But get their email address and things change. Once someone enters their email into a form on your website, you can extend this time period dramatically. With an email list, time spent on a website can be extended to days, weeks and even months, years and decades. You can build a relationship with your audience and most importantly build trust.
It can take some time to do this however. Your email messages need to be congruent with the intent which your subscribers had when they opted in. You need to provide value and genuinely offer to educate, inspire and entertain your subscribers. If each email you send out has a link saying “buy this”, it’s pretty uninspiring. That’s not going to help build your audience and build trust.
You may sell products but you won’t build trust. Arguably trust and building long term relationships is worth far more than selling the odd product. If your audience trusts you, they’ll buy products from you and keep buying (if you’re trust-worthy!).
A landing page for email marketing.
It can of course take a little time to get used to writing to your email list. Provide value as your priority and you’ll build confidence in your audience. There’s one or two emails in my inbox which I never open! That’s because I know they are from someone who is trying to sell to me and I’ve decided that their tactics are untrustworthy!
In particular I hate the “time is running out” theme and other scarcity tactics of that ilk! Everyone is different though and of course these strategies obviously work, otherwise, marketers wouldn’t use them.
The emails I do open are those from people who talk naturally in their emails, as if I were their friend.
How To Build An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Building Your List
Building an email list can take some time and, in particular, it’s difficult at first when nothing much happens! A lot of activity can amount to not much in the way of traffic when you first get started. But, if you stick at it, over the longer term you’ll start to see some traction.
You can build a list very quickly if you use a landing page and paid advertising. If you’re a blogger, or using free marketing strategies, expect it to take much longer. See get traffic to your website free.
Here’s one of my YouTube adverts which I use to drive traffic to a landing page. See the video here.
One of my favourite strategies has been creating ebooks and offering them up as list building tools. See ebook lead magnet. An ebook is a great tool for building your audience for affiliate marketing from a blog.
Ebooks make great lead magnets and lead website visitors onto your email list.
At first, with less than 1000 subscribers, your uptake of affiliate products will likely be fairly low. At this point, it’s easy to become disheartened with your affiliate business. But stick at it and you’ll start to see some sales coming in if you contact your email list regularly and offer useful insights to help your subscribers.
Over time, the people who opted into your list early on should get to know, like and trust you. So you should see more sales coming in from longer term subscribers as you get better at building your email list.
Keep the long term strategy in mind when writing your emails too. Short term thinking can put people off opening your emails. Think about your subscribers as you would a friend. Offer up a few valuable emails before asking for the sale. If every email has a link to purchase something, your subscribers will soon get the measure of you, and stop opening your emails!
Blogging To Build Traffic
Once you have a lead magnet such as an ebook, you can create more content around your ebook to draw traffic from the search engines (and other platforms). This is a slow strategy but over time your efforts compound and you’ll start seeing a steady increase in your daily leads if you keep at it long enough. A good strategy to do this is discussed in my ebook “Niche Blogging For Profit“.
Basically this strategy involves finding long tail keywords which relate to your ebook in some way. Use Google’s keyword planner to find them and write content around your keywords. Then, promote your content through social media sharing and link building. Over time, some of your content will attract free traffic from the search engines and you’ll get some leads who find your ebook and sign up to your list.
See also how to sell ebooks on your own website. It takes a bit of time to create an ebook, but in truth, not much longer than writing a good quality article. Plus you can outsource the ebook cover using Fiverr.com and easily convert a document to pdf using free online tools such as freepdfconvert.com.
Summary
So, how to build an audience for affiliate marketing? Building an audience for affiliate marketing can take some time depending on how you go about it. The fastest way is to use a paid marketing strategy and offer a valuable giveaway on a landing page which is specifically designed to capture emails. On a website, there’s far more choice, so less people will sign up. With a landing page, there’s only two options: sign up or leave.
With paid marketing you can scale up your traffic too. Which can build a list very quickly with enough budget. But you also need the right affiliate products and strategy on the “back-end” in order for your enterprise to be profitable.
Once on your list you should build confidence with your subscribers by offering value. Educate, inspire and entertain your audience and build trust for the long term. Don’t just spam your list with products because you’ll lose trust and people will stop opening your emails!
For every product you promote, you should be sending out a few value packed emails first. Otherwise, your audience will quickly lose faith and trust in you. Then, you won’t see any opens, let alone sales!
If you’re serious about taking your affiliate business to the next level, access a free video series by clicking the link below. You’ll meet one of my personal mentors Stuart and you can access a community of online business owners and affiliates.
How much traffic do you need for affiliate marketing? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and you will definitely need some traffic to sell affiliate products. How much traffic you need will depend on a number of variables. Generally you should be able to convert 1% of traffic from a website into sales. But how you do this can have an effect on your numbers.
There’s a few variables which will determine your success as an affiliate. Traffic is a major factor and you’ll need traffic to get anywhere with affiliate marketing. Generally the more traffic you get, the more sales you get too! But you also need to consider the type of traffic you’re getting. Whether your traffic has been pre-sold on your product, how you communicate with your visitors and whether you capture your visitor’s emails, all factor in to your conversion rates.
How Much Traffic Do You Need For Affiliate Marketing? – Types Of Traffic
Without traffic you won’t make any sales. So you’ll definitely need to prioritise getting traffic if you want to make any money as an affiliate. However, some traffic is better than others. Targeted traffic is really what you want as an affiliate. A good example of targeted traffic is through using a review website. With reviews your traffic is very targeted. A review website is often the last piece of information someone looks at before making a buying decision. So if you can create a review which gets traffic, you’re in a good position to make sales online.
The flip side of this equation is that you can create a lot of content which gets traffic but doesn’t convert into sales. If you create content which is vaguely related to your product, your conversion rate is likely to be much lower than with a very targeted piece of content like a product review. So for affiliate marketing specifically you’ll want your visitors (traffic) to be very targeted. See how to know your target market.
You can also generate targeted traffic by using what is known as the pre-sell. The pre-sell is an advertising campaign which gears traffic up to be very targeted. It pre-sells the product you want to sell on your website or through your email list. With a good video advert, for example, you get very targeted visitors coming to your website ready to sign up and purchase. With a piece of content which only vaguely relates to your product or service, it is going to be a lot more difficult to sell something.
An example of a pre-sell advert on YouTube. Watch video here.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is an important factor too. Even with targeted traffic, if the path for your visitor to the product they want is unclear, they might leave your site to continue their search. If your link is broken, they’ll look elsewhere. Even if your website is too slow to load, they can easily click away to look for their answers.
A good customer experience is congruent with your visitors needs. So if they are looking at a review website, they want to get the answers they need to make a purchasing decision. If your site doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll click away.
A sales funnel involves an advert, a landing page and a follow up series of emails. If anywhere along this journey there’s a disconnect from the initial message to the final product,(or the message is incongruent), the visitor is less likely to convert into a customer. But if there is a congruent message which continues throughout the customer journey, the visitor is more likely to become a customer.
For example, if someone signs up for a free ebook on affiliate marketing, they should expect to receive emails on this same topic.
Choice Of Product
A high ticket digital product pays far more than a low value physical product. Physical products pay from 1%-10% commission, on average, to their affiliates. Whereas, digital products pay more like 40%-50% commissions. Compare a low value physical product at $20 to a high value digital product at $2500 and you see a massive discrepancy in your earning potential: 0.60 cents (at 3% of $20) compared to $1000 (at 40% of $2500).
With the same amount of traffic, you can make $0.60 or $1000! When you also consider the use of recurring commission affiliate products, you can see it pays to work smart, not just hard. Recurring commission products are software products and memberships. You can earn ongoing commissions potentially for life with these kinds of products. (See lifetime commissions affiliate products). With physical products you need to continually sell more and more of them to keep your income coming in.
So, with even a smaller amount of traffic, you can make affiliate marketing work harder for you with the right kinds of products. You’ll still need traffic, but a smaller volume of sales can give you a larger income with the right kinds of products.
Email Marketing – Converting Traffic Into Leads
With a website your traffic can evaporate as quickly as it came. If you don’t have the right kind of traffic, or your content is only slightly connected with your products, it’ll be harder converting that traffic into sales. Most people don’t browse the internet with the intention of purchasing something. The internet is an information gathering too. So unless you specifically build a website to review products, for example, chances are good that your content won’t necessarily lead people to the checkout!
Some affiliate products are more obtuse than others, too. With a toy from Amazon, you know what you’re getting. But if you’re choosing to sell digital products as an affiliate, it can be harder to get customers to understand the value in those products.
Most website traffic won’t convert into sales. Usually around 1% or less of website traffic will actually make a purchase. But you can substantially improve those odds if you build an email list from your website. A website visitor usually only hangs around for 10 minutes or less.
So you’ve only got that amount of time to turn them into a buyer! With an email list, you get to capture your visitors email address, in exchange for giving them something of value. This dramatically extends the time period with which they can make a purchasing decision. You can build a relationship with your subscribers, and offer them products for months, years and even decades!
You can also use your emails to better help your subscribers understand your products and how they can help them.
Summary
So, how much traffic do you need for affiliate marketing? With the right kind of traffic, a good lead magnet, email mail follow up series and range of products, you need far less traffic than you would using low value products, badly targeted traffic and no email list. Of course you still need traffic and lots of it. But with a good strategy, products and proper targeting, you won’t need as much traffic to make the same income.
If you’re selling single products which only pay once, you’ll need a continuous flow of traffic to keep those sales coming in. But with subscription products you can make ongoing income from the same customers. So you’ll need fewer clients to make your business pay.
Traffic is massively important of course to make an affiliate business work. But it’s also part of a larger whole. To make an affiliate business work, it’s worth knowing which pieces to get right first, before starting out. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time chasing traffic only to make peanuts when you actually make a sale!
If you’re serious about building a realistic long term income from affiliate marketing, you can join a training and mentorship program here.
There’s many affiliate revenue model examples you can look at before building an affiliate business. With affiliate marketing, the affiliate refers customers to a product online.
When someone buys from an affiliate’s unique link, the sale is tracked back to that person and they get a commission. To do well as an affiliate you need to learn how to sell through your affiliate links. Once you can do this well, you can repeat the sales you’ve made quite easily, having learned from your experience.
Top affiliates learn how to sell online and then scale up this success to sell multiple products. But there’s various affiliate revenue models you can choose from, and it’s wise to know which products will give you most commission for your hard work.
Affiliate Revenue Model Examples – Amazon
Amazon pays affiliates between 0% and 10% commissions depending on what kind of product they sell. Let’s use the example of a 3% commission. As you can see in the image below, products such as toys and home improvement items fall into this category.
So let’s say our example affiliate is selling from the toys category. Small value toys will only earn tiny commissions. So an astute affiliate will choose products which can earn them a larger commission. Since we’re looking at affiliate revenue model examples, let’s take this as the first one. The drone below sells for £947 on Amazon (about $1300). The affiliate commission on the sale would therefore be £28.41 (or $39).
So obviously if you choose to sell from Amazon, you’ll need to sell a lot of products in order to make your affiliate business a worthwhile enterprise. But if you can sell a lot of products, from a niche website for example, and automate the process, it could be worthwhile. The other thing to consider with this example is that your margin is very low. So if you intend on using paid marketing, you only have $39 of leverage to play with your marketing.
Affiliate Revenue Model Examples – Hammacher Schlemmer
Hammacher Schlemmer offers affiliates 8% commissions on products from its site. Again, this isn’t great but with some of the more expensive items like that pictured above, you can earn larger commissions. You’ll earn $15,200 on a flying hovercraft if you managed to sell one through your affiliate link! But of course not everyone is in the market for a flying hovercraft. You might sell more of a lower priced product which is more affordable.
Here’s an other example which will likely sell in greater numbers than your flying hovercraft will!
Looking at the ride on Children’s Jaguar convertible, you’ll earn $20 if you sold one through your affiliate link. So you’ll need to sell a fair few of these to make a realistic income. Compare the 8% commission rate to Amazon and you’d expect to make $7.50, given Amazon’s 3% commission rate on toys. That’s quite a lot less than with Hammacher Schlemmer.
Affiliate Revenue Model Examples – Digital Products
Digital products tend to offer the affiliate larger commission percentages than physical products do. Let’s look at affiliate revenue model examples using Clickbank. Clickbank is a digital marketplace where you’ll find thousands of digital products to sell. You can also find digital products on JVZoo.com and Click2Sell.com.
Here’s an example of a Clickbank product I found at the top of the Health and Fitness niche in the Clickbank marketplace.
As you can see, you’ll earn $25.13 on a sale of a $46.20 product. That’s a little over 50% commission on the product! Quite a dramatic step up from a 3% commission from Amazon.
So how can digital product afford to give so much to the affiliate? Well, simply put digital products don’t spend so much on postage, manufacturing and handling costs. Their main costs are therefore advertising, which is what the affiliate does.
Affiliate Recurring Commissions
Another consideration with affiliate marketing is affiliate recurring commissions. Certain products on Clickbank offer recurring commissions. You can find them using a website called CBEngine.com. Just scroll down the left hand side and click on the recurring tab. You’ll find multiple digital products which offer ongoing commissions for memberships and software products.
Recurring commissions are awesome for affiliates because you can continue to earn a regular income from sales you’ve made previously. It’s a great way to stabilise your income as an affiliate marketer.
If you choose wisely when you come to promote affiliate products, each membership or software product you sell can potentially earn you an income for life. See also lifetime commissions affiliate program.
High Ticket Digital Products
High ticket digital products are the best kinds of products to sell in terms of income and affiliate commissions. Given that physical products pay the least in terms of percentage commission, and higher value products pay more (whichever products you promote), a great way to monetise an affiliate business is through the use of high value digital products.
With high value digital products you get the best of both worlds: high percentage commission and large value products. So a sale of a $2500 product can earn you $1000 in a single sale, for example. A $20,000 product can earn you $8000 for a single sale. The downside of using high ticket digital products is that you’ll need to purchase the products yourself in order to benefit from the highest commission possible.
Using A Product Range
A product range gives you larger earning power as an affiliate than with only a single product to sell. With a single product you can only earn a single commission per customer. So you’ll need multiple customers to make a business out of your sales.
With a product range, you can benefit from multiple products within a range and sell products to existing customers. Most business models have customer loyalty – returning customers who purchase again and again.
But most of affiliate marketing product you refer someone to a product and they become loyal to that company, not to you as an affiliate. With a product range you simply refer the customer once, and can benefit from later purchases they make within a product range.
Affiliate Revenue Model Examples – Summary
So as you can see, there’s a variety of affiliate revenue models available for affiliates to choose from. Physical products from Amazon pay from 0% to 10% commissions. Digital products typically pay around 40%-50% commissions. You can also use recurring commission products and high ticket digital products to maximise your revenue potential.
The highest paying affiliate products offer multiple earning strategies including:
Digital products which pay up to 100% commissions
A product range – a number of products to “up-sell” to existing customers
An automated affiliate marketing system can make your life as an affiliate a whole lot easier. With an automated system you can benefit from pre-made products, email setup and sales funnel. You can use existing an sales team and a proven product range. All you need to do is setup your sales funnel using a modular step by step process. Then, learn how to send qualified leads into the system. Start here.
If you venture into affiliate marketing without an automated affiliate marketing system, you could spend years figuring it all out. You’ll need a marketing strategy and to choose affiliate products to sell. What if your marketing doesn’t work, or you choose the wrong kinds of products? How will you handle hurdles when things don’t go as expected?
These are the things you don’t have to consider when you use a pre-made system and get the help and support you need.
Automated Affiliate Marketing System – Products
There’s literally thousands of products to choose from as an affiliate marketer. Unless you have experience, it’s easy to choose the wrong kinds of products to promote and get lost trying different marketing strategies. Physical products tend to be the “go-to” products to use as a beginner. But it’s a mistake because they only pay tiny commissions. Physical products pay from 3% to 11% commissions in most cases. So selling a $100 product will usually only make you some pocket change ($3-11$).
Digital products offer larger commissions but can be less tangible for many online customers. Most people have bought something physical online, from the likes of Amazon, for example. But far fewer have purchased digital courses or trainings which can be accessed over the internet. Still, more people are getting comfortable purchasing online and digital products pay far higher commissions than physical one. Typically you can earn 40-60% on a digital sale you refer. So for the same valued product ($100) as the previous example, you would earn $40-$60 per sale compared to $3-$11. See also affiliate marketing commission rates.
Digital products have another ace up their sleeve too though. With digital products you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales. Recurring commission affiliate products offer ongoing support, membership or software which can be used for building of online businesses. Physical products simply can’t compete with the commissions since they have more costs associated with postage and handling not to mention manufacturing costs.
Automated Affiliate Marketing System – Range Of Products
Another advantage of selling digital products as an affiliate is having a range of products in your automated affiliate marketing system. A product range means you can benefit from your referred customers even years after they initially purchase with you. The automation in a product range automatically shows your range of products to each customer. Plus, with a built in sales team, sales are closed on your behalf without you having to do the selling yourself.
Most traditional businesses benefit from repeat custom. An affiliate business should offer the same. If you only sell a single physical product as an affiliate, you’ll have to keep selling consistently to make a consistent income. With a product range, and subscriptions, you have a built in recurring income. The SFM Digital Business system offers:
A ready made sales funnel – just follow the modules to set up with your own email autoresponder, product range and pre-made email messages.
A range of digital products to offer your email subscribers – including subscription products. See SFM Digital Business System.
High ticket product range – as an affiliate, a high ticket digital product range can dramatically increase your earning potential
Multi-tier sales – at the very top level you can benefit from multi-tier commissions which are commissions based on sales made by your members. See multi-tier affiliate program.
Training and mentorship – even with an automated affiliate marketing system like the one the SFM offers, you’ll still need to learn how to market your sales funnel (send qualified leads into your funnel). Training and support is therefore vital if you’re serious about building a successful online business which will last.
Marketing Your Sales System – The Vital Ingredient
Even with an automated affiliate marketing system which has all the bells and whistles, you still need to market your funnel effectively for it to work. Without a driving engine to feed subscribers into your funnel, the best funnel in the world will still fail to make sales. Marketing can be done in a number of ways:
Paid marketing PPC Pay per click marketing can be done on YouTube, Facebook, Adwords, and a number of other paid marketing platforms
Organic marketing – this article is an example of content marketing which can grow organically. Organic marketing (video or article) will take much longer than paid marketing for it to work
Social media marketing – using social media platforms to generate leads can be done in a number of different ways
The main purpose of your marketing campaign is to find qualified subscribers who want what you’re offering. You can then offer them a free giveaway product to encourage them to subscribe to your email list. The SFM offers a free video series where you can learn more about what their automated affiliate marketing system can offer you. Checkout the free video series to learn more here.
Automated Selling
As your subscribers enter your email marketing funnel, they will receive automated emails which are set to go out on a predetermined schedule. The SFM Digital Business system offers a pre-made set of emails which you can use in your funnel.
Once someone enters their email into your landing page (software included), you’ll see their details appear in your autoresponder software. They will automatically be offered the first product in a range and subsequently other, more expensive products which they might find useful. With The SFM’s product range, there’s also a built in sales team who do the selling on your behalf. Your main job then as an affiliate is to find qualified leads and send them to your landing page or website.
As you get better at this skill, you’ll be able to increase the volume of qualified subscribers entering your sales funnel.
