Category: Affiliate Marketing Mentor Blog

Here’s my affiliate marketing mentors blog! I’ve been an affiliate marketer since the early 2000’s and I ran into a lot of problems which, perhaps you have too?

I tried all sorts of strategies at first from building niche websites, running Google Adwords ads, blogging and using free blog platforms such as Hubpages and Blogger.com.

The struggle was pretty real but I was determined to make affiliate marketing work for me because life was so difficult in the many jobs I juggled to keep the wolf from the door!

In 2014 I found a community of online marketing mentors. I decided to start agains from scratch and “empty my cup”. It was tough and it’s hard to let go of thinking you know something when you really don’t!

I don’t consider myself an affiliate marketing mentor, although I hope that this website helps people who are learning. No, I’m still, and always will be a student, which means I can keep emptying my cup when it gets too full of the idea that I know something. The online world changes a lot and very quickly. So just when you think you are getting somewhere, everything is different and you’re starting all over again!

Welcome to affiliate marketing mentors!

Clickbank Passive Income

It is possible to earn Clickbank passive income by selling products from Clickbank. But it’s not easy! The best way to earn a passive income from an affiliate marketing program is to choose products which pay you a recurring income. Recurring commission affiliate programs tend to be things like software packages and memberships.

To find recurring income programs on Clickbank, goto CBEngine.com and scroll down on the left to find recurring commission programs.

Click on the CB Recurring tab on the left and this should bring up a huge list of products you can sell which offer recurring commissions.

Recurring commission affiliate programs are far better than the others. They can give you a passive income if you sell products to the right people. Potentially, a recurring commission program can give you an income for life! See lifetime commissions affiliate program.

Clickbank Passive Income – Choosing A Product

Choosing a product is pretty important because you’re going to be creating a resource website based on it. There’s many ways you can promote affiliate products, but with a low paying affiliate product, like you’d find on Clickbank, it’s best to use the cheaper strategies.

So, you’ll need to create content based on the product for the strategy I’m going to share. See also get traffic to your website free, for more strategies.

Once you get to the product page, scroll through and look at products which jump out as something you can use. Ideally, you’ll be interested in the topic or product yourself. It’s much harder to create consistent content for a topic you don’t have some kind of affinity with; so this is worth taking some time over.

Clickbank Passive Income – Gravity

The gravity is denoted on each product you see in the stats section under “grav”. “Grav: is short for the GRAVITY™ performance statistic. This number represents a unique calculation by ClickBank that takes into account the number of different affiliates who earned a commission by promoting this product over the past 12 weeks.

A high gravity isn’t necessarily a good thing, because it also means a lot of competition. Too low a gravity means the product isn’t being sold, or it’s just newly released. See also, how to use Clickbank market stats.

A gravity score under 20 might not sell very well, or it might be a new product. A gravity over 100 might be a little competitive, in terms of other affiliates promoting the product. More recent transactions are given a higher number for gravity, so a high score can mean an item is selling well. Ideally, choose a product which you want to promote and which has a gravity score between 20 and 100.

Choose A Program With Longevity

Ideally you’ll also want to choose a program which offers massive value and has longevity. It’s going to take some time to promote it using the strategy I’ll be detailing. So you don’t want your product to drop off when you’re just getting started.

It can be an idea to read a few reviews about your product first, before choosing it. Ideally purchase it too, so you can review it and get to know how good, or bad it is! If you don’t like the product, I wouldn’t recommend promoting it. You need a program you can genuinely get behind and endorse. Otherwise, you’re incongruence will show in your content and it’ll be much more difficult to keep building your website and/or YouTube presence.

There’s a huge amount of crap on Clickbank, so make sure you choose a program which is good and which you can genuinely get behind! Again, this is pretty important for a number of reasons:

If your product isn’t great, it won’t sell whatever you do
If you don’t believe in your product, or genuinely like it, it’s going to be difficult to create content and sell it congruently.
Choosing a product which doesn’t last means you’ll waste your time if it shuts down
If you don’t buy your product, and get to know it, it’ll be very difficult creating content about it, and reviewing it genuinely.

So make sure you do your research and find a product you like and which fits the above criteria. Don’t rush this part. Rushing it, or choosing a bad product will lessen your chances of making a Clickbank passive income for its sale.

Here’s An Example Product I Found

Here’s a product I found which meets the main criteria:

Gravity: (40.62) – Between 20 and 100

Longevity: Health and fitness niche is very popular and it’s been around since 2016

Recurring commissions – yes!

The only downside it that this is a popular niche and it can present a problem if you’re creating content. Too much competition limits how well you can do getting website traffic. But I’ll use this as an example.

Example #2 – Clickbank Passive Income

Here’s another product I found which is more suitable for this particular piece of content (Clickbank passive income). Plus, it’s more aligned with my website in general too.

However, on closer inspection it doesn’t meet our criteria for gravity and this could present a problem.

Recurring commissions – yes
Gravity – score is less than our minimum (1.97)
Longevity – first seen 2013 so has been around a while. But with such a low gravity this could mean the sales page isn’t working very well, or that something isn’t working with the product.

Clickbank Passive Income – Selling Your Product

Once you’ve chosen a product to promote, you can start to look at building an information resource around the topic of your product. If you’ve chosen a yoga product, you’ll create a website around that topic. If you have chosen something else, such as the Clickbank Passive Income course, that will be the focus of your website.

It’s worth keeping in mind too, that certain topics are much more competitive than others. Top niches such as money making online, health and fitness, dating and relationships are usually pretty competitive and this makes it harder to gain traction in your niche. This is partly why you’re choosing recurring income products. It takes fewer sales of recurring income products to make a good income, than from one-off commissions.

Take your main keywords from your product and paste it into Google’s keyword planner. In the case of the yoga product, you could use “yoga burn challenge”, or “yoga burn” as your seed keyword. In the case of the other product (Clickbank passive income), you could use that as your seed keyword.

Find A Keyword Or Phrase Which Encompasses The “Idea” Of Your Niche Site

Ideally choose a keyword or phrase which encompasses the idea of your website. With a keyword domain name, you can get a ranking advantage with the search engines to give you more traffic. It’s only a small factor, but it can make a difference. Here’s a few keywords which came up when looking at “yoga online”. Have a look through keyword ideas and identify a keyword which you would like to build a website around.

I like the idea of “Yoga class online beginners” as it seems to meet our target audience. With the Yoga product above, you’ll want lots of hungry buyers for your product. This could be people looking for these kinds of phrases. With a niche website, we’re going to attempt to get a website up and ranking, so it gets free traffic and you make sales.

A quick online search with and without quotation marks can give you an overview of your competition. Here’s what came up for “yoga class online beginners”.

There’s clearly a lot of competition for this term and a lot of paid advertising too. If you browse through the websites which show for paid advertising, this can also be another way of finding a suitable product to promote, too.

Ideally don’t choose keywords which have heaps of advertising at the top of the search. This will mean that even if you rank your website, it will still be buried under all the paid advertising listings! Not great for traffic! If you find there’s too much competition for your idea, go back and find another keyword or product. Then start researching the keyword data and competition again.

Using The Clickbank Passive Income Example

With the other product “Clickbank passive income”, Google’s keyword planner shows only 30 searches a month for this. That’s not really enough traffic to build an entire website around. Ideally you want to have over 50 searches for your main keyword each month. When you search on Google, you want less than 10 million competing pages, and less than 20,000 phrase match pages.

Here’s what the number for phrase match looks like:

numbers of competing pages for keyword terms

Clickbank is also a trade name, so it could be an issue using it in your domain name.

Finding a good domain name with your main keyword in it can take some time. This website was built in the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors online“. I wanted “affiliate marketing mentor/s” but the domain was already taken. The key is to find a good name for the site which doesn’t have too much competition. Again this is worth spending some time on. If you choose a keyword with too much competition it will be much harder to rank your website and get traffic.

Equally, if you choose a keyword which doesn’t get many monthly searches, you may not get enough traffic either.

Building Your Resource Website

Once you find your keyword which gets monthly traffic and hasn’t got too much competition, buy a domain name with your keyword in it. If you can’t get the exact domain, get one which is close or has some extra words at the end. This article explains the process of building a niche site and creating content. If you’ve chosen something you have a passion for, this is so much easier. To find keywords which you can create content around, use your seed keyword and look at the related keywords which show up on the keyword planner.

Here’s a few keywords which came up for the “seed keyword” passive income:

Go through the same process as you did for finding your domain name. Use long tail keywords which have the fewest competing results on Google. Remember too, that you can pick up free traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and other search engines which are less popular than Google.

Clickbank Passive Income – Summary

So, to earn a passive income from Clickbank, you can do many things. You don’t need to use this particular strategy as there’s lots of others. Checkout how to get free traffic to your website for some more ideas.

The strategy I’ve shared has worked for me, but it takes some time and effort before you’ll see it working. Ranking websites on Google can be tough, and you should expect this strategy to take several months before you see sales coming in. To help generate a passive income from Clickbank, it’s worth using programs which offer recurring commissions.

If you don’t have the patience to use a niche website, I suggest using high ticket affiliate programs and using paid marketing.

Once you’ve built your website, you can promote products directly from your site using banners and you can create an email list of subscribers. I definitely recommend building an email list because it will make a massive difference to your sales. Offer something of value to your website visitors and get them to opt in to your list. See the power of email marketing.

If you want more help with your affiliate marketing efforts, you can join an online community, access a range of products and learn from the experts. Access a free video series to learn more by clicking on the image below.

Affiliate Marketing For Seniors

Why is affiliate marketing for seniors? Affiliate marketing is perfect for anyone who wants a flexible way to work from anywhere. Seniors are perfect for affiliate marketing. Whether someone is retired or semi retired, it doesn’t have to mean the end of working altogether.

In fact, seniors are well placed to become affiliates; they have plenty of time, disposable income and they have heaps of knowledge which they can share through their content. They often have specific knowledge on subjects they can use in their affiliate marketing business too.

Seniors appeal to other seniors, too. Have you even seen a TV commercial with a teenager trying to sell something to a senior person? It doesn’t happen because advertisers know to present an authority figure. They need to be relatable for the target audience (customer). Seniors are more relatable to other seniors.

Perhaps you’re a senior and you’re thinking affiliate marketing might be a good fit? This will depend on your capacity to learn new skills and be self motivated. If you enjoy writing, or creating video, you can use either strategy to build an online business from scratch. Or, learn an entirely different approach with using paid marketing, list building and promoting products online which you can align yourself with.

Affiliate Marketing For Seniors – Retirement?

Not all seniors want to put their feet up and relax for the remainder of their lives! Most people need something more than that to keep them occupied and motivated, whatever their age. But at the same time, seniors have earned the right to do things in their own way – to be autonomous.

Affiliate marketing ticks this box. As an affiliate, you can work for yourself, choose your own hours and working style and work when and where you choose. Work from a laptop in your pyjamas if you want! It’s one of the most autonomous businesses available.

There’s many ways why affiliate marketing is suitable for seniors. It can be a great way to focus on something productive and meaningful and bring a new passion and fulfilment to life in later years.

Let’s have a closer look at what affiliate marketing for seniors really means, and some strategies which can work.

Why Affiliate Marketing For Seniors?

I first found affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s because I was looking for a strategy I could pick up and drop when I needed to take work. My work at the time was in the TV and film industry as a stunt performer. See my stunt website here. Work was sporadic, and I needed another income stream. Taking other jobs presented a lot of problems. Bosses didn’t want me taking off at a moments notice for a stunt job, and casual work was hard to find.

So the internet fitted the bill because I could work at it part time, and drop it at a moments notice when the phone rang. Seniors don’t have this problem usually! However, it fits the bill for someone who doesn’t need to work and can pretty much please themselves, too.

When you get autonomy, it’s hard to give it up for a boss, or a working routine of someone else’s choosing. I imagine it’s a similar scenario for seniors who are basically choosing how to spend their later years – on their own terms. There’s a lot of freedom in that, which is hard to give up.

Affiliate Marketing For Seniors –

Affiliate marketing for seniors works is because you can work in any area as an affiliate marketer. Whatever your passion or area of interest or expertise is, you can use it within an affiliate marketing business.

With affiliate marketing you only need to be open to learning new skills. You don’t need any products of your own, just a willingness to learn and grow. As an affiliate, you can create a business based around working on the things you’re passionate about.

Some Affiliate Marketing For Seniors Paths

One strategy of affiliate marketing is to create a business around a passion or hobby you might have. Write about things which interest you or which you know about. Whether your passion is playing the piano, knitting or gardening, playing golf or travel, you can create a passion based business around it.

You can do this in several ways too:

By building an information website (like this one)
Through creating a YouTube channel and uploading videos you’ve recorded
By running advertising and building a large list of followers
Through email messaging and sharing your knowledge.

However you want to work as an affiliate, you can tailor make your affiliate business so that you can choose your working hours, your focus of activity and your business model.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Whether your affiliate marketing for seniors business is build around blogging, video marketing, or some other strategy, you’ll need to get your message in front of people to earn money as an affiliate.

There’s many ways to do this including:

Email marketing – build a big list of followers who want your content and promote affiliate products to it. See the power of email marketing.
Blogging – Creating written content on a website
Video marketing – either through paid marketing on YouTube or by building your own channel of organic content
Running paid advertising – run adverts to generate traffic for your website or simply to build an email list.

Fastest Way To Build A Business Online

The fastest way to build an affiliate marketing for seniors business is through the use of paid marketing and high value digital products. With high ticket affiliate marketing, you can earn larger commissions from sales and this makes it far easier to use paid marketing. It’s also worth using a product range which gives you multiple earning strategies for your affiliate marketing business:

High ticket digital products – pay the most (digital products pay 40% + compared to physical products)
Recurring commissions – ideally choose affiliate products which pay you a recurring commission for sales you generate. (memberships and software type products)
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
Use a product range and built in sales team – a product range means you can earn from later products purchased by existing customers.

For more on this business model see SFM Digital Business System.

Join An Online Community and Get Help

The best way to start an affiliate marketing for seniors business is to get help and support. You can access all the tools and software you’ll need, products and the help and support of an online community. Click on the image below to access a free on demand workshop video series to learn more.

Affiliate Loophole Secrets

Looking for the affiliate loophole secrets to make your life as an affiliate marketer easier? So was I. For years I jumped from course to course, looking for the affiliate marketing “secrets” which were going to make me rich! But the harder I tried, the more success eluded me.

Each course I bought, told me it was going to be easier than the last time! So I bailed on courses which were underway. Why wouldn’t I? Each one said it was easier than the last! Why spend months or years blogging when there’s an “easier way”?!

The trouble was, none of them “worked”! I blogged, I created videos, I ran advertising campaigns, but I couldn’t find the “affiliate loophole” which was going to make my life easier!

Affiliate Loophole Secrets

The affiliate loophole secrets I’m going to share in this article, are not so much “loopholes” but a better understanding of how to make affiliate marketing work for you.

In my early days as an affiliate, I thought that hard work and perseverance were enough to have success with affiliate marketing. But it’s more than that. The real affiliate loophole is understanding. Understanding how to connect the right customer with the right product, and letting go of preconceived ideas about what affiliate marketing is.

I had many preconceived ideas about how easy it was going to be. This is fatal to your building a successful affiliate marketing business. If you’re looking for a “loophole” perhaps you think the same. It can be easy, yes. But it gets easier the more you understand it. Rarely does the newbie affiliate marketer make a huge business success overnight. It’s usually after months or years of work when they get their “overnight success”. The hyped up claims on those sales pages are simply that – hyped claims with the goal of making the sale!

You can make a great living from affiliate marketing. But you need to go about it in the right way.

Affiliate Loophole Secrets- “Affiliate Marketer Makes a Million”!

You’ve probably seen the headlines which read “Single Mom makes a million and quits her job”, or some such claim. The problem with these articles is they don’t share the years of work that person put in previously! Or they are completely made up!

This kind of news headline is misleading and makes newbie affiliates believe they can make huge amounts overnight – which they can’t. If they only invested in such and such product, then they’d make it too!

>>>Click link here to buy<<< is usually what’s at the end of these kinds of articles!

The truth is rather less sensational, although there are affiliate marketing loopholes which can help you build an online business much faster. Just be aware though that affiliate marketing is a real business. As with any real business, it takes time to built it.

Affiliate Loophole #1 – Traffic

The first affiliate loophole I’m going to share is about traffic. One of the major problems with affiliate marketing is attracting traffic to your affiliate offers. Most affiliates struggle getting enough people to their products. When they can’t do it, they quit. Newbie mistake number 1.

Traffic can be bought or it can be earned. Paid traffic is expensive and so you’ll need a strategy to recoup advertising spend if you choose this path. Paid traffic is far more scalable than organic traffic too.

So, if you want to build an online business fast, you’ll need to use paid traffic. If you don’t want to, or can’t use paid traffic, you’ll need to come up with another strategy – such as content marketing, or some other social media strategy. See get traffic to your website free.

Paid Traffic Loophole

To use paid traffic is difficult for many aspiring affiliates. You simply cannot use paid marketing with certain products and still make a profit. Amazon, for example only pays affiliates 3-11% commissions on sales they make from the site. This kind of markup doesn’t allow for a paid marketing strategy. So you’ll need to come up with another one if you’re using this kind of program. Organic traffic is a much longer slower route and most wannabe affiliates don’t have the patience for it.

To use paid traffic you need to find products which offer high value products and large payouts. This way you can offset advertising costs in the commissions you make:

Use high ticket digital products – high ticket means they are priced at over $1000 and digital products typically pay 40% commissions and above.
Recurring commissions programs pay you ongoing commissions for the lifetime of the customer. Even with small regular ongoing commissions, this soon adds up and gives you a solid income which can be reinvested into paid marketing to gain traction.
Two Tier affiliate programs pay you for sales made by your referrals.
Use a product range not just a single product – a product range means you can earn ongoing commissions from later purchases made by your existing customers.

Ideally choose an affiliate program which offers at least one of these benefits if you want to use paid marketing strategies. It will help heaps! See SFM Digital business System for a product range which offers all these benefits.

Affiliate Loophole # 2- Organic Traffic Loophole

Of course a strategy like the one described above can work well with organic traffic too. You just need the patience, and a good strategy, to make organic traffic work for you.

If you’ve tried blogging or organic video marketing already, you’ll know it’s a difficult journey getting any traction in your website traffic. Here’s an article about getting traffic to your website free using some standard practices. But it’s tough with all the competition, especially if you’re in a competitive niche.

This article, and many others are specifically chosen for the low competition for the keywords in the titles. Find the keywords through using Google’s keyword planner and targeting only the low competition keywords which you have a chance of ranking for.

Organic Traffic Using PDF’s

Organic traffic is hard to come by in almost any niche these days. Google is constantly changing their algorithms and unless you’ve been at it for a while, chances are your content won’t rank very well. Google uses many signals to determine whether or not to rank an article. Main obvious ones are:

Content quality
Time people spend on your content
Back link profile
Where these links come from
Length of your content

But you can get round spending months or years on content by aiming for the long hanging fruit. Use long tail keywords which don’t have much competition or create pdf documents which are being searched for in your niche.

Pdf’s often have very much less competition than other keywords within most niches. To find the ones being searched for already, type in your main keyword into the planner and add a pdf keyword. Here’s a few I created on this site:

A practical guide to affiliate marketing pdf., Affiliate Marketing Books PDF , Amazon Affiliate Marketing PDF, Affiliate marketing for dummies, Affiliate marketing 101 pdf, Affiliate marketing pdf, Clickbank Secrets pdf, affiliate marketing secrets pdf, learn affiliate marketing step by step pdf, affiliate marketing blueprint pdf.

Organic Traffic – Niche Websites & Keyword Domain Names

Another “affiliate loophole” you can use to get organic traffic is keyword domain names. A keyword domain name contains the keyword you’re targeting within the domain name you use to build your niche website around. See also how to build a niche website and get free traffic.

15-20 years ago keyword domain names were the big fad. You could purchase a keyword domain name, build a 3 page website on it and rank at the top of Google for your main keyword with it. Nowadays things are a little different and the keyword domain name doesn’t carry so much weight as it used to.

You’ll still need to build some quality content on your site for it to rank on Google. But it still can make an impact on your ranking, even though it’s less than it was before Google updated its algorithms with updates such as Penguin and Panda.

Ideally, find a keyword which offers low competition. That’s where a keyword domain name can have the largest impact. I’ve used keyword domain names successfully too for local businesses to beat the competition. Here’s a few websites I built which used domain name keywords and where it helped with a ranking:

harrogate-photography.co.uk – This one smashed to other local photographers off the top spot for years, much to their displeasure!

affiliatemarketingmentorsonline.com – the domain name keyword has had an effect on ranking

bradfordwingchun.co.uk – This strategy works best for local businesses with little competition. Here’s my kung fu school based in Bradford.

Affiliate Loophole Secrets- Summary & Takeaways

So there’s a few of my affiliate loophole secrets which I’ve used to generate traffic and make more sales. I didn’t even mention the power of email marketing either! Email marketing deserves a mention in affiliate marketing loopholes. Although it’s technically not a loophole, but a genuine marketing strategy, it’s worth doing if you’re going to take affiliate marketing seriously.

Here’s my top loopholes to add to your business strategy:

Build an email list – affiliates should build a list because it’s the best way to grow traffic you own
Use long tail keywords and target them for blog posts (and videos on YouTube)
Choose products which offer larger commissions and recurring income. See high ticket affiliate programs and recurring affiliate commissions.
To use paid marketing, which is faster and more scalable, use the SFM Digital Business System.

To get started with training and a product range you can access, start here by accessing the SFM Mentors All In program.

Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions

Anyone can promote products online and earn commissions based on their referrals. Affiliate marketing is a business model which allows anyone to earn by making online referrals.

It’s a bit like recommending someone to your favourite restaurant. Only, when you refer someone to an affiliate product, you earn a commission if they make a purchase. Affiliates are everywhere online. In fact you’ve probably already made a purchase through someone’s affiliate link.

There are affiliate links on my site too. Should you purchase something through one of my affiliate links, either on the site here or through my emails, I earn a commission.

Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and learning how to promote their affiliate links. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions – Strategies

There’s various strategies affiliate marketers use to promote and sell products online. If you already have a website, you can even promote products from it, if you can find affiliate products which your visitors would like.

Some affiliates build information websites, like this one. Others build email lists and use paid marketing campaigns to drive traffic into their list. Then they promote affiliate products to their email subscribers.

List building is one of the best ways to do affiliate marketing. With an email list, you can send emails to your subscribers, promoting various products and services which they might like. If someone purchases something, you earn commissions based on the sale.

As affiliates get better at list building, they can build huge lists of subscribers – sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. By sending out a single email, they can sell hundreds of products simultaneously.

Some affiliates use blogging as a cheap strategy for getting traffic to their affiliate products, like me. You can also use YouTube videos, both paid and organic methods to get visitors to purchase your products.

Organic marketing strategies take much longer in general though than paid marketing. For blogging and organic video marketing, you need to create a lot of content over several months or years. Over time, once your content starts working for you, you can promote products online and earn commissions from work you’ve done previously.

Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions – Types Of Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join to promote products online and earn commissions from. Depending on the kind of content you want to create, or how you go about it will determine the kinds of products you promote. If you have an existing website, which already gets traffic, you can find suitable products by looking for affiliate programs in your niche. Just type “your_niche affiliate programs” into Google and see what comes up.

Affiliate programs are available in most topics and areas, so choose something which is suitable for your audience. For example, if you have a fishing related website, look for a fishing affiliate program.

As an affiliate marketer, it’s useful to choose a topic, and program you have an affinity with, especially if you want to be a content creator. Creating content to draw in traffic to your affiliate products does take time and effort. So you’ll need to choose something you like to create content around.

Types Of Products – Digital, Physical, High Ticket, Recurring

If you want top promote products online and earn commissions from them, it’s worth knowing that some products pay considerably more than others. For example, Amazon pays affiliates between 3% and 11% commissions on products they refer through the Amazon affiliate program. This is pretty low, and it’s hard to make a good income using only Amazon.

Digital products on the other hand pay considerably more: 40% and upwards typically.

You can also promote recurring commission products such as software products which carry a monthly fee. Or, membership products are also a good way of earning a recurring income from each sale.

High ticket affiliate products are those which offer a large value to the customer. These can be affiliate marketing coaching courses to help people build online businesses, for example. 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching courses offer the most value to people wanting to earn an income online. So they carry a larger price.

See also highest paying affiliate programs list for more of the top paying affiliate programs.

The Fastest Way To Become Profitable Online

Most people who want to promote products online and earn commissions, don’t want it to take years before they see a profit. Most new affiliates want to see results quickly. To build an online business in the quickest possible time is expensive because you’ll need to learn how to use paid marketing, and ideally purchase a high value sales funnel (like the one above).

Once you have a sales funnel up and running, with a range of products in it, you can learn paid marketing to send targeted visitors into it. Without either a high value sales funnel, or using paid marketing, your affiliate business will likely take much longer to take off.

There’s still ways to sell products online and profit from them, such as organic marketing. This article is an example of a slower strategy – blogging. With blogging it can take months or years before you see any traffic. With paid marketing, you can turn your traffic on the same day as setting up your advert.

Give Yourself An Advantage Online

Whatever strategy you choose to promote products online and earn commissions from the sales, you should at the very least have:

A recurring income product, ideally a product range
An email autoresponder – so you can build a list of subscribers
Your own hosted website – you can use free blog sites but these are much more difficult to generate traffic for. See create website and earn money.

If you’re ready to get started you can join a training program through this link. Or learn more about how an online business works through the free video series by clicking the image below.

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? The answer is an emphatic yes – you can! Many people are already making affiliate marketing their main income source and using the internet to escape their regular jobs. But affiliate marketing isn’t easy. It can be difficult to get traction as an affiliate, especially early on. See how difficult is affiliate marketing.

There’s a few affiliate strategies which work better than others too. So it’s well worth investing in your education so you know the best ways to go about it. In this article, I’ll share some of the best strategies which have worked for me, over my years as an affiliate.

Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? Yes you can. But in order to do so, you need to navigate affiliate marketing in the right way. Otherwise you can spend a lot of time and get nowhere!

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business strategies on the internet today. It’s a simple strategy where anyone can refer customers to affiliate products through their own unique affiliate link. When a customer purchases something through your link, you earn commissions based on sales you have referred.

There’s many ways to refer customers through your own affiliate link. You can start a blogging website (like this one), build an email list of subscribers, or even use paid advertising to generate traffic to your website (or to build your email list). You can even send people directly to affiliate products from your marketing too. Depending on the products you promote, your budget, and particular circumstances, you may choose one or all of those tactics.

Your strategy, choice of products and determination, all play a factor in determining how well you do as an affiliate marketer.

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

For a long time I struggled as an affiliate marketer. I don’t believe my journey is unique either! Affiliate marketing is hard, especially in the beginning. When you start out, you don’t know what you’re doing. Your belief is low, you’re sceptical, and you can easily spend a lot of time on the wrong activities.

You might have high expectations of what you can earn with little work too; which goes against you. And many affiliates will quit in their first year without having made any sales at all! But don’t let that put you off! The fact that many affiliates quit leaves less competition for those who persevere. Plus, I’m going to share some important strategies which can make a massive difference to your affiliate journey.

You really can earn a good living from affiliate marketing; if you stick at it, refuse to quit, and take the right action steps!

Using The Right Products – Recurring Commissions & High Ticket Items

When I began doing affiliate marketing, I joined Amazon’s and eBay’s partner networks. At the time, they were all I knew. But both these platforms pay very low levels of commission to their affiliates. Amazon pays between 3% and 11% commissions to affiliates who refer customers to their products. eBay is similar, although they pay a percentage of the fees they receive from auctions and sales. Both eBay and Amazon has recently cut affiliate rates and you’re better off not using them if you want to earn a living as an affiliate.

See https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-rates-for-affiliate-program.html

and https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2020/05/31/ebay-changes-affiliate-rates-a-second-time-this-month/

As eBay and Amazon have become more popular, they’re less in need of referral traffic, and are cutting their commission rates. So affiliates who spent years promoting items from these sites are losing out.

Instead, you should concentrate your affiliate efforts on programs which do reward affiliates appropriately. Items such as these are far better to promote for affiliates:

Digital products – pay larger commissions (40% and above)
Software products used by online businesses pay a recurring income to affiliates
Membership products which pay affiliates recurring commissions.
High ticket digital products – pay larger commissions on larger value items.
Multi-tier commissions – let you earn money through sales made by your referrals.
Product ranges – instead of promoting a single product (which only pays you once), you can promote a product range to earn more commissions from later purchases by existing customers
Use a product range with a built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.

Ideally, use a product range which offers all of the above such as the SFM Digital Business System.

Advantages Of High Value, Recurring & Digital Products

High ticket, recurring commission (digital) affiliate products have a few advantages which low value physical products cannot give you. Even high value physical products will only pay out lower rates of commission. Given manufacturing costs, postage and handling, physical products simply can’t compete with digital products in terms of rewards for affiliate marketers. See also highest paying affiliate programs list.

With digital products you can not only earn recurring commissions, which physical sales can’t give, but you can also earn 40% and above commissions. Some digital products even pay 100% commissions on sales you refer. (See All In Package commission rates below).

Commission structure as an essential member of The SFM

With high ticket commissions, there’s another advantage besides the obvious monetary one. With a high ticket sales funnel it’s far easier to use paid marketing methods in your advertising and still make a profit. For low value physical affiliate products, it can be very difficult, or impossible to run paid marketing campaigns and still make a profit.

But with a high ticket sales funnel, it’s much easier to come out with a profit and still use paid marketing. Paid marketing is far quicker, and more scalable, than other affiliate marketing methods you need to use with low value products.

Commission structure as a DEA Partner Member of The SFM

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Anyone can start doing affiliate marketing from anywhere with very little investment. All you really need to get started is a laptop and internet connection. There’s many cheap methods of marketing products such as content marketing: blogging, video marketing and by using the various social media platforms.

But if you want to make affiliate marketing your income, there’s many roadblocks too. Getting traffic is a major one which can be more quickly overcome with paid marketing. But having low value products can limit your ability to use paid marketing. So, it’s worth at least using recurring income products whatever you do.

You should also get your own website and build an email list too. An email list, a website and recurring income products should be the very least you do if you want to take affiliate marketing seriously.

You can access everything you need including training, products and support through the SFM digital product suite. Click on the image below to learn more and access a free video series, or join Mentors All In to get started.

Businesses That Run Themselves

Online stores are businesses that run themselves. Online businesses use websites, email marketing, sales funnels and other people’s products so that they can run completely on autopilot.

Anyone can build businesses which run themselves by pointing online traffic to affiliate products. This can be done through the building of websites or landing pages and/or the use of paid marketing or content marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a clever business model where referral sales earn commissions. Anyone can become an affiliate and sell other people’s products online.

There’s various strategies which affiliate marketers can use to build businesses that run themselves. The key principle though is driving customers to products online. Learning how to automate this can take some time, though.

Businesses That Run Themselves – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers use several strategies to drive online traffic to affiliate products:

Email marketing – can be automated and used to build thousands of subscribers
Building websites and blogging – websites run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Using paid marketing – which can be scaled up and run automatically
Finding traffic from social media platforms
Building back links to content, driving traffic to affiliate products

Once affiliates start generating sales from any given strategy, they “zone” on that particular strategy and do more of it. Over time, any strategy can give you automation in your online business. Some strategies however, can offer faster automation than others.

Businesses That Run Themselves – Fastest Strategy

Some affiliates use slow strategies such as blogging, or organic marketing methods. This can take months or even years before these strategies start bearing fruit. A much faster strategy to build an automated business is through the use of a good business model, list building and paid marketing.

Physical affiliate products tend to pay much lower commissions than digital ones. With a physical product you have product storage, handling and delivery costs attached. But with digital products, items can be delivered automatically over the internet.

Savings are passed to affiliates who can earn 40% of a product’s sale value. Compared to the commission of 3-11% commission on a physical product, that’s a massive difference.

If you also choose to sell affiliate products which offer recurring commissions, high value, have a built in sales team and offer multi-tier commissions, your return on investment is much higher. So you can therefore more easily use paid marketing which is much more scalable than cheaper methods using content creation. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this business model.

Affiliate Marketing Other Methods

There’s literally millions of products you can use as an affiliate marketer to build a largely automated business. Even a website offers the opportunity to build an automated business using the affiliate marketing model. The fastest method is to use a high ticket program and invest in paid marketing. But it’s not the only way to build an online business.

You can also build a profitable business online through blogging. Blogging is a slower strategy than using paid marketing. It’s also less scalable. But not everyone needs a massive income from their online business. Some people want a cheaper method to make money online.

Blogging satisfies this need.

You should expect to create a lot of content, and actively share it, for a good few months or years. If you’re consistent, and manage to make it work, your blog can be a source of free traffic, and sales for years to come. Initially though, not much happens. This is the hardest part of being a blogger, overcoming the “valley of disappointment”.

The “valley of disappointment” is the difference between what you expect to happen and what actually happens. With blogging, if you choose a topic you love, you’ll be able to keep going. If your only reason for blogging is the outcome, it’s much more difficult to overcome this barrier.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a great way to build businesses that run themselves. If you choose the right path for you, and use a good business model, you can earn commissions from recurring commissions, high ticket products, multi-tier sales and through using a built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf. Once you’ve made a few sales, you’ll be earning a recurring income from them.

If you automate the lead generation strategy, and use email marketing, you’ve got a means to earn an income which is completely automated and scalable.

Admittedly, it takes time and effort to get everything up and running. You need to test and measure your marketing strategies. Depending on your marketing strategy, it can take months or years to generate traction. But once you do, you can generate ongoing income from work you’re already done.

It’s much better than working a job, trading your time for money for the rest of your life!

If you want to get started with your own online business, checkout this online business package and get started. It comes with a full money back guarantee for 30 days. Click on the image below to learn more.

How To Know Your Target Market

When selling anything online, it’s important to know your target market. With online marketing, you effectively have a global audience to target your products or service to. So, it will be much more efficient and effective if you know who to put your marketing message in front of.

If you use the scatter gun approach, you just run advertising to everyone and hope for the best. This isn’t the best approach, because you’ll be running paid advertising to many groups of people who aren’t at all interested in your product.

While the scatter gun approach can give you data, it’s an expensive way to gather it and there will be a lot of wasted marketing budget. If you get clear on who your “perfect” customers are, you can be more like a sniper with your marketing; and less like a battlefront soldier. It will save you a lot of money on your marketing campaigns, if you get this right.

How To Know Your Target Market

Depending on your particular product or service, a target market can be fairly broad. Coca-Cola, for example, sell to a wide range of people. People of all ages and backgrounds buy the drink. But still, there will be a sector of the market which most of their advertising is aimed at, in order to advertise more efficiently. For Coca-Cola, his is mostly younger people who are 12 years old and older. This can often be determined through looking at the bulk of the existing customers.

If you don’t already have customers, look at your product and who it’s the best fit for. A home furnishing store will have a different customer “persona” to Coca-Cola. You would expect the average customer to be in a couple and over 20 years old, for example. See this home decorating retail market plan.

So one of the best ways to determine who your target audience is, is to look closely at the criteria that makes up your existing customers:

Age range
Location geographically
Interests
pains and problems
Family situation
Salary
Etc.

How To Know Your Target Market – The Buyer “Persona”

A company’s target market can be made up of a large section of people. One way of defining your target market more specifically is through a buyer persona. A buyer persona is also called a customer avatar. It’s a fictional character which represents one of your ideal customers.

How to know your target audience – identify your perfect customer persona or “avatar”

If you’re generating a marketing campaign for an online business, it can be a good idea to target a customer avatar. Spending some time getting to know your customer avatar is a good use of your time. It can help you to speak directly to that individual, with your marketing message, through the pains and problems which your product helps them with.

If you try and sell to everyone in your marketing message, it can have the opposite effect. This is because it doesn’t speak directly to the pains and problems which your unique product helps to solve.

Your Products/Service

What pains and problems do your products solve? And who is most likely to benefit from them? Once you know this you should have already narrowed down your target audience. Consider which sub-section of your potential customers are the most likely to need and want your product. Who is it most important to and why.

What assumptions have you made about your target audience, and are these true? Have you tested these assumptions with real marketing and got the data to prove it?

Until you actually run a marketing campaign, and get the feedback to prove or disprove your assumptions, you could be barking up the wrong tree. So, one way to know your target audience is to run campaigns and gather data. You can run paid marketing campaigns to a website or a landing page. Collect data as you start making sales through an email marketing campaign. This is done through tracking and measuring your advertising and sales.

But before you run a campaign, it’s worth considering who your idea customer is, where they live, can they afford your products and what are their pains and problems which you can help to solve.

Get To Know Your Existing Customers

Your existing customers are already putting their money where there mouth is! They already purchased from you. Getting to know why they bought from you is a simple and cheap way of gathering data on your perfect customer and target audience.

Conduct market research with your customers and get to know more about them. As you do, this will tell you more about their pains and problems which your product or business helps them with.

How old are they? What are their interests and passions? How did they find your company? The more you know about your existing customers, and the larger your customer based grows, the more you will understand them and how to find more like them.

Try Different Marketing Strategies

Adwords is a popular marketing strategy for online businesses which lets the marketer target people by their search queries. If you own a hardware store in Lincoln, it’s pretty obvious that you’re a good fit for someone typing “hardware store”, who lives locally to you!

Use Google’s keyword planner to find other keywords which are a good fit for your business.

Facebook and YouTube are great platforms too, which let you target people by a number of criteria:

Age
Location
Interests
Income
Sex
Groups and connections
and so on

By targeting certain criteria which are relevant to your business, you can zone in on the type of people who are most suited to your business. Not everyone you advertise to will purchase something from you. If you’re on a budget with your advertising, you’ll want to make it go further by making it more efficient.

At first, as you’re learning marketing, you will tend to spend more because your marketing will be to a larger group of people. As you gather data, and start making sales, you can use this information to learn who is the most likely type of person to buy from you.

How To Know Your Target Market – Summary

The best way how to know your target market is through testing and measuring of your advertising campaigns. Those adverts which don’t generate sales, cut them! Those ones which work the best, keep them running. Learn from your data and test and measure advertising continually.

But before you run any advertising campaign, it’s a good idea to get to know existing customers, if you have any. The better you get to know them, the more you’ll know who to target in your marketing campaigns and this will significantly reduce your cost. You’ll be able to target these kinds of people more specifically with your marketing – saving you a lot of money.

You can also define your target audience through looking closely at your products. What problems and pains do they solve? Who is this mostly likely to impact if they choose to become a customer?

Question your assumptions about your target market. How old are they? Where do they live? Identify your buyer persona, or customer avatar and talk to this fictional character in their language when you create a marketing campaign.

Is SFM A Scam?

A common question I’ve had from my email subscribers is “is SFM a scam?”. As a Six Figure Mentors affiliate, of course you would expect me to say “no”.

Having taken many dubious courses over several years, I found SFM back in 1014 and had the same doubts. The first meet up I went on, I was highly dubious and so sceptical that I didn’t believe anyone would show up!

To my surprise I met several other affiliates who had joined the company. I was able to go to my first event organised by Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek in 2014 too, in London. There were hundreds of people there, some of which had joined the company when it began in 2010 and made their full time living through SFM.

Is SFM A Scam?

Jay and Stuart regularly turn up for their members in person. This was something I never had experienced on the many other courses I took before finding them.

Pre-pandemic, they hosted events regularly throughout the year, all over the globe. Since 2020, they have had to alter their training curriculum to make the many events available digitally over zoom conference calls.

I’ve been with The SFM for over 6 years now and building an online business hasn’t been plain sailing. You can read more about my experience in my article Six Figure Mentors Affiliate.

But the SFM doesn’t claim to be a “magic bullet” or a “get rich quick scheme”. This is what sets them apart from some of the more shady courses which promise the moon! The SFM offers training and education for people who want to build digital businesses. It’s not a get rich quick scheme!

That being said, the SFM has turned out some very successful affiliates. But results are not typical and are never guaranteed.

If you think you can use SFM for quick riches, without putting in the work, you’re in the wrong place and it’s probably not for you.

IS SFM A Scam? – SFM Collaborations

Microsoft Lynda (Under the Linkedin umbrella of companies) recently partnered with SFM as a way to offer their own 6,500 training courses as part of the SFM curriculum.

DigitalMarketer (The world’s longest standing and most highly respected B2B and B2C marketing training company) also partnered with SFM and now offer their own training as part of the SFM curriculum.

Do you think these companies would partner with any organisation that wasn’t providing huge value and wasn’t 100% above board?

You can also access a wealth of training an information through the SFM Mentors All in package for only $100 and then $97 a month, (training worth well over $2000). Click on the image below for details.

Will You Be Successful Using SFM?

This is another question similar to the “is SFM a scam?” question. If SFM isn’t a scam, will you therefore be successful if you follow the training? The answer to this will depend on a number of factors. Many businesses fail in their first 3 years and an online business is no different.

In fact, 60% of new businesses will fail in their first 3 years. Here’s why. Those who persevere, decide never to quit and continue no matter what are the ones who succeed. No one can guarantee you will be successful.

A good analogy is the gym. If you join a gym how long will it take to get six pack abs? Some will never achieve it and some will do it in a matter of months. The SFM offers all the tools and training and even support for someone to build an online business from scratch. But ultimately it’s up to the individual to immerse themselves in the training and community, and put in the necessary work. Not everyone will be determined enough to do what is required, and many will quit before they see any results at all.

Earnings Through The SFM

My earnings varied dramatically through selling the SFM product range. As soon as I could, I upgraded my account so I could earn from the high ticket products. At a basic member level, you can still earn commissions based on the entire product range offered by The SFM. But your commissions are more limited, so you can’t earn as much from each sale. Once you purchase the higher level products, you can also earn larger commissions.

sfm earnings — SFM Basic Membership commission structure

I started making sales within a few months through the SFM and had even made a high ticket sale in my first year. But I struggled to use paid marketing because my earnings were so sporadic.

This was because I didn’t have a full time income source. So instead of focusing on paid marketing, I used content generation. This is notoriously slow! I’ve seen many members fly past me far quicker when they had a bigger reason (and a regular income). They used paid marketing to build their businesses quickly, and positioned at the top (invested heavily).

Investment and Potential

You can invest in the top level training and product range and this places you as a partner member. This means you can access personal 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching, and more personal and in-depth training and support. It also means you can access the higher level commissions and earn more.

This in turn lets you use the more expensive marketing platforms for your advertising. Without the higher level commissions and high ticket products in your sales funnel, it’s difficult to use paid marketing techniques.

DEA commission structure — DEA Partner commission structure

So according to your “buy-in” level, you may need to adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Before I invested in the top tier products and commission levels, I used blogging for my marketing strategy. It’s a free strategy but it does take much longer and requires a commitment of months or years before you see any traction.

With paid marketing, you can can have a profitable business inside a year if you do well, although this is still a challenge. Of course you will spend money on advertising while learning what works. So it’s advisable not to risk capital you can’t afford to lose while doing this.

Is SFM A Scam? Summary

So, is SFM a scam? No, it’s an education and training program for people who want to become entrepreneurs. The SFM also offers their own digital business system which members can choose to promote if they wish. But you can also use SFM training resources to help in any entrepreneurial endeavour.

When I first started with the SFM back in 2014, I was able to use the training to help me build up a failing kung fu school in Bradford, UK. Later, I was able to make a 5 figure commission through the SFM using it’s own digital business system. Read more about my SFM journey in Six Figure Mentors Affiliate.

If you’re serious about earning an income online, The SFM can help you. But it’s not a “magic bullet” or “get rich quick scheme”! The SFM offers everything you need to transition to earning online through many strategies. But you need to be serious and committed to putting in the work if you want to succeed online. As with any business, there’s risk involved and it takes a huge commitment to build a profitable online business starting from scratch. It’s definitely not for everyone.

If you want to get started online you can access the SFM Mentors program here. There’s a 30 day month back guarantee so you can claim a full refund if it’s not for you.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs

Affiliate marketing startup costs can be very low. Anyone can get started in affiliate marketing for very little. You can buy and domain name for less than $5 and hosting package for under $10 a month. With your own website you can start promoting affiliate products from anywhere; you just need to generate traffic to your site. You can even get traffic to your website free, if you work hard enough generating content.

You should also purchase an email autoresponder too, which you can do for around $10 a month to start. Get one here. An autoresponder collects emails and sends out email marketing messages automatically.

But a lot of affiliates don’t get the traction they really want, and give up before they get anywhere. Even if you create your own website to promote affiliate products from, and join a free affiliate program, you can get lost down the many rabbit holes there are in affiliate marketing.

You can of course do affiliate marketing completely for free too! Using a free blog platform (Hubpages.com), I made one of my first sales online after writing a product review. But I wouldn’t recommend this if you want to build a serious income, as it can be very difficult.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – Training & Support

It’s worth investing in your education if you’re going to take your affiliate business seriously. It can take much longer, and it can be more difficult, if you go it alone. Jumping from free video to free video, learning from many different strategies can be hard. Especially if you have no-one to turn to when things get tough.

Joining an online community and plugging yourself into a group of like minded people, can be the best money you will spend. You can access the Mentors All In program for $99 and $97 a month. This program gives you website hosting and a website builder, training and products to sell, a simple modular step by step process and basically everything you need to learn how to sell products online.

You can access a free video series here to learn more about this program.

Within this program you can access multiple training courses and also a product range from which you can earn up to 101% commissions on.

Here’s the commission structure on the digital product range you can access as an affiliate for the SFM Mentors. The more you invest, the higher levels of commission you can earn, and the more support you can access.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – Commission Structure

Many affiliate programs can be joined completely free. However, they don’t offer support and training. You’ll just have to figure out how to sell products by yourself. So it’s worth joining a program which helps you with this. Free to join programs also often have a criteria for joining, such as owning your own website or having a required number of subscribers on your list.

Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs which anyone can join for free. However, you will have to have your partner program approved and the terms and conditions for approval often change over time. Before you can get approved by Amazon’s affiliate program, you’ll need to have your own website with a number of quality articles on it. Have a look at this article for more on this.

But Amazon isn’t the best program to join either because it’s commission rate is so low. Promoting products from Amazon will only earn affiliates between 3% and 11% commissions. This is pretty low when you consider that many digital products will pay out 40% and above in commissions to affiliates.

High Value Digital Products

You can spend more on affiliate marketing startup costs if you want a better business model. Using high ticket affiliate programs can give you a massive advantage when starting out as an affiliate.

If you choose to sell physical products you can earn 3-11% commissions. Digital products will pay 40%+ commissions. But with high ticket products, you can earn 40% commissions on products valued up to $10,000 and above.

These kinds of products are those such as mentorships and coaching products – giving you more access to top affiliates who have spent years learning the best methods of building online businesses. 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring for affiliates is well worth the investment if you’re serious about building a full time income online, and can afford it.

To access the high ticket products as a re-seller affiliate, and qualify for the larger commissions, you’ll need to invest in the products themselves. You can choose your level of investment through the SFM Digital Business System which includes mentorship and coaching items worth up to $20, 000. Selling a product like this can earn you a very nice commission, according to your positioning in the business model.

Marketing Your Products

Affiliate marketing startup costs also involve marketing costs too. If you’re going to use paid advertising to sell your products, you’ll need to factor this in. Paid marketing is more suitable when you have a high ticket product range in your “digital store”. A good product range includes:

One or many high ticket products
Recurring commission products
A product range
A built in sales team
Multi-tier sales

Without a range of products, and earning strategies like this, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing to sell affiliate products and still come out with a profit. Look again at Amazon products which typically pay between 3% and 11% commission.

To use paid marketing to sell these kinds of products will be very tricky! If you sell a book from Amazon at $10 and only make $3% commission, that’s only $0.30 cents commission! To sell this product using paid marketing (and come out with a profit) is near impossible! But if you have a sales funnel with multiple earning strategies, it’s much more realistic.

How Committed Are You?

There’s a variety of affiliate marketing startup costs, so you can choose a level of financial commitment which suits your budget. Generally speaking the more you invest, the more committed you will be and the more help you’ll get. If you just want to “give it a go”, you can do it for free.

But if you’re serious about turning affiliate marketing into a serious income, and becoming financially free, it will take a lot of commitment and sacrifice.

On a scale of 10, how badly do you need affiliate marketing to get you out of your current circumstances? It’s often your “why?” which will determine your success in affiliate marketing. Remember there’s a huge drop out rate for affiliates too. Most quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. Those with a big enough “why?” make it happen because they have to!

Summary

So if you’re wondering about affiliate marketing startup costs, as you can see, you can invest heavily for mentorship, training and support, and for high ticket sales funnels, or you can go it alone and join an affiliate program for free!

I started out doing everything for free and found it incredibly difficult. See how difficult is affiliate marketing. I created niche websites and used free blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger.com and Hubpages.com. Ideally, at least purchase your own website and hosting, since this is a better way of generating traffic. It also positions you as more of an authority, than by using free blogging platforms.

Some affiliates become bloggers and this is a cheap way to get started. Others upload videos to YouTube to get traffic. Getting traffic and knowing where to promote your affiliate link are the biggest challenges for affiliates, so it’s worth getting help and training before you start out, if you don’t know what you’re doing!

You can access a free video series to learn more about The SFM through this link.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers

The highest earning affiliate marketers have been at it for years; affiliate marketing is more than just a job to them. Many affiliates quit before getting anywhere, but the top affiliates kept going.

Two of the highest earning affiliates are the co-founders of The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) Jay Kubassek and Stuart Ross. They created an online community for others to learn how to become digital entrepreneurs back in 2010. Before this they were both affiliate marketers who became successful promoting other people’s products as affiliates themselves. Stuart and Jay’s community has also produced many top earning affiliates over the years too. Join through this link.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers – Neil Patel

Neil Patel is also one of the highest earning affiliate marketers. He’s also pretty prevalent on Google too. If you’ve ever Googled anything to do with affiliate marketing, Neil will undoubtedly pop up somewhere near the top! He’s the co-founder of NP Digital and Subscribers.

The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies.

Neil’s a New York Times bestselling author. He’s also been recognised as a top 100 entrepreneur by President Obama and the United Nations.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers – Martin Lewis

Martin Lewis is the founder of moneysavingexpert.com and despite him being an English journalist and television presenter, the website he founded also makes him an affiliate marketer.

The site gives help and advice in all money saving matters and makes revenue from affiliate marketing.

So how does MSE generate revenue?

Companies cannot pay to appear on the site. The intention of the site is to help people save money, before profit. Finding affiliate links to the products is secondary to this intention. See how MSE makes money.

Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn was one of my mentors and I found his site years ago. He created a niche website competition, which I joined. It was a site based around the topic of security guard training. Sadly, my site didn’t take off but I learned a lot from doing it. Read about building a niche website here.

Through keyword research he found the security guard topic which had little competition. He created the website smartpassiveincome.com. He also created hundreds of podcasts to help out other aspiring affiliates and digital entrepreneurs. Read about Pat here.

John Chow

John Chow is one of the highest earning affiliate marketers and runs one of the biggest money making blogs in the world!

He has been featured in

The Vancouver Sun,
the Globe and
Mail,
the New York Times,
Entrepreneur Magazine,
Ming Pao Magazine and
BC Business Magazine.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers

So from this list above you can see that the highest earning affiliate marketers are also entrepreneurs, authors, broadcasters and presenters. So, do you need to become an author or a presenter to be a top earning affiliate? Not at all. In fact one of the best things about affiliate marketing is you can have a fairly low profile and still do very well.

Many affiliate mentors who have helped me through this program are pretty normal! Unless you’re an affiliate marketer, or see them on YouTube, they fly below the radar. Of course it can help affiliates to write books or appear on television shows. It raises their profile and positions them as the “expert”.

But anyone can create an ebook and use it on a website to create some authority! Here’s one I made. If I can do it so can you!

What’s The Fastest Way To Become A High Earning Affiliate?

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing. Some of the top earning affiliates discovered high ticket products and recurring income affiliate products. Struggling affiliates often struggle because they use the wrong products and marketing strategies. With high value sales funnels and paid marketing, anyone can get traction much more quickly than by using low value products and organic marketing. See fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing.

If your sales funnel looks like the one above, it’s much easier to get traction and use paid marketing strategies. If you’re just linking your website to a couple of physical products on Amazon, you’re not going to get the traction you really need to make it work.

Access a free video series to learn more and get started here.