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!

Internet Marketing Ninjas

“Internet marketing ninjas” are the secret assassins of the digital world! They are the new breed of entrepreneurs who are earning a living though selling products and services over the internet. Anyone can learn affiliate marketing to better equip themselves to become more financially stable and build an income from the internet.

But exactly how do “internet marketing ninjas” make online sales? What do they do to get people to products and services online? And how do they make sales? In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the marketing methods which internet marketing ninjas use to get free and paid traffic to their products and services.

Internet Marketing Ninjas – Free Traffic

Many affiliate marketers make a living from selling other people’s products and services on the internet. With certain products you need to find free traffic in order to be profitable. Free traffic is much harder to generate than paid traffic but unless you have high ticket affiliate products to sell, you’ll most likely need to use free strategies.

A simple free strategy which many affiliates use is blogging. This website is an example of a blog. The more content you put on your website, the more traffic you can potentially find for your products and services. But there’s a key strategy which marketing “ninjas” use to get more traffic for less work! I describe this strategy in more detail in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit, but this is a basic overview of the strategy:

Find long tail keywords which are suitably targeted to your audience and product range. I use Google’s free keyword planner to do this.
Compare the competitiveness of this keyword with a quick Google search using both phrase match and a general search. This should give you a basic idea of how competitive your keywords are.
Once you find a low competition keyword, you can create content around your keyword. Make sure you use an SEO plugin to help you optimise your content for the search engines. I use Yoast SEO.

Paid Traffic

Other internet marketing “ninjas” use paid traffic and drive tens of thousands of people into their sales funnel to make sales online. Marketers spend tens of thousands of dollars every single month in their marketing budget. How can they afford to spend this much? Simply because they have tested and measured a sales funnel and learned how to put in $1 and make $2. Once they understand this, they slowly start to scale up their marketing budget.

If their sales system makes them $2 for every $1 spent, it makes sense to spend as much as possible to increase your income.

The marketers who do this are the real internet marketing ninjas! They spend their time building a sales funnel with a range of high ticket products in it. See SFM Digital Business System.

With a sales system which contains high ticket products, recurring commission products, multi-tier commissions and a product range, marketers can spend huge amounts (once they are profitable), knowing that they will make a profit on the back-end sales.

Internet Marketing – Social Media

There’s also plenty of scope for internet marketing “ninjas” to find customers for products through the various social media accounts available online. One strategy is to use Facebook to find suitable people online to showcase your products and services to.

Here’s a little “ninja” tactic I picked up from an online community I belong to.

Start with your basic Facebook profile and use an image which relates to your product or services in your bio. I use an ebook I put together to help people learn a little about affiliate marketing. Then link your image to a landing page where you can collect your visitors email address in exchange for the ebook.

Once on your list, you can send messages to your subscribers (email marketing) helping them out and leading them to your affiliate products.

In order to get people to your bio, you’ll need to do some work. Join groups through Facebook which are places where your target audience might hang out. So for example, I might join an affiliate marketing group and make connections with people.

Don’t hassle them or spam them with links or anything like that. Just be helpful in the groups, participate in discussions and genuinely connect with people. If you do this often and spend some time each day, you’ll start to generate some traction of people visiting your profile to learn more about you. Then they should see your image (ebook or other hook) and visit your website/landing page.

Marketing “Ninjas” – The Email List

To call yourself an internet marketing “ninja” you’ll need an email list of subscribers. If someone lands on your website, they only have a few minutes to browse around before they leave – potentially forever. Internet marketing ninjas know this and encourage their website visitors to opt in to their email list with a legitimate bribe. It could be an ebook, like in the previous example, or something else of value and related to your product.

Once on your list, you have the opportunity to connect with your subscribers and build relationships with them. This time period can extend to months and even years. If you genuinely offer value to your subscribers and help them, promoting products which have helped you, you can build trust and make sales. This can all be largely automated too and you can set up your emails to go out at a pre-determined time every single day, for years potentially.

As your email list grows, so should your affiliate sales. Many internet marketers use the email list with great effect, building 6 and 7 figure incomes from their list of subscribers.

Join a crack team of internet marking “ninjas” by accessing the free video series below (click on image). You’ll earn how you can build an online business from scratch.

Affiliate Marketing Playbook

In this “affiliate marketing playbook” I’m going to discuss some of the main strategies the top affiliates use to generate income online. When I first started learning about affiliate marketing, I didn’t know most of what I’m going to share. I believe there’s many affiliate marketing newbies out there too, who are struggling to make any money at all.

I was the same for years; and apart from the odd sale here and there, I was getting nowhere. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And unless you get the right help and support, it’s easy to struggle along in the dark, making the same mistakes over and over again.

Affiliate Marketing Playbook – Get Help

Top affiliates don’t get there by themselves. They find help and support and learn to use the right products and marketing strategies. When I started out, I bought a few courses which taught several conflicting marketing strategies. I spent years jumping from one strategy to another.

One of the strategies I learned was building niche websites and attempting to rank them on Google. I’d say about 1 in 10 of my websites got to the first page of Google for their main (or some) of their keywords. That’s not great when you’re on your own and struggling to make money as an affiliate. It’s pretty demoralising.

It wasn’t until I was years into my journey that I found an affiliate marketing mentorship program which helped me learn the key strategies which top affiliates use to earn a full time living from the internet. Still, even with a bunch of mentors at my disposal, I still had to wade through my own scepticism, doubt and fear before I would take the appropriate action steps.

Affiliate Playbook – Business Model

I started out using low cost products from Amazon as an affiliate. However, what I didn’t know was that this wasn’t the best business model to use. I got paid a tiny fraction of what I sold, and I wasn’t great at selling either! Amazon pays its affiliates between 3% and 11% commissions on sales they make. I was selling books valued at less than $10! It was no wonder I was massively failing as an affiliate – looking back.

I moved to Clickbank after learning that digital products paid much more than physical products. Clickbank products pay around 40% commissions to affiliates. Despite this, I found Clickbank products were much harder to sell than physical products from Amazon. People didn’t trust Clickbank products in the same way as they trusted Amazon. Plus, a physical product is easy to understand. Many Clickbank products offered training or something intangible.

I later learned about subscription products which paid recurring commissions. Once I started using recurring commission affiliate programs, and making sales, things really began to change for me with my affiliate journey. Then I discovered high ticket products and multi-tier sales and this opened up a new world of affiliate marketing I didn’t know existed.

Marketing – The Key To Affiliate Success

All of my marketing efforts up to this point had been organic marketing – blogging and other free strategies. I simply couldn’t afford to spend more money on marketing since my products paid so little. But once I discovered high ticket products, multi-tier commissions and recurring commission affiliate products, I was better positioned to use paid marketing and make a profit.

Up to this point, I had created a lot of content online, most of which didn’t bring much in the way of affiliate sales.

This is the “key” which top affiliate marketers know about that I didn’t! They use high paying affiliate programs with recurring commissions and paid marketing strategies to drive traffic. Lifetime commissions affiliate programs offer ongoing support and business tools and products which affiliates use to build lifetime businesses with. Once they are profitable, they will always maintain their memberships and use the products you’ve recommended. So it pays to choose the best possible products and services which help people the most.

Paid Marketing

I was always a little afraid of paid marketing for a number of reasons. Firstly, my income was sporadic as I was working in the film industry for a number of years. See my about me page. I’ve met people who transitioned into an online business much more quickly than I did, simply because they spent a lot of money on marketing their online businesses. But I didn’t have much to risk at first so I stuck to organic marketing for quite a long period of time.

When I did venture into using paid marketing, I was pretty tentative. I spent a little and then backed off. Top affiliates, I learned, spend tens of thousands of dollars each month on paid advertising campaigns.

But they only do so after a lot of testing and measuring with a low, affordable budget which they are prepared to lose. I just didn’t have the money to spend initially, and then, I was afraid of losing it. It was money I needed, not money I could afford to lose, so it inhibited my ability to learn paid marketing strategies for quite some time.

But also my sales funnel didn’t initially allow me to spend money on paid marketing either. It was only when I further invested in the higher ticket items and I could earn the larger levels of commissions that I could afford to spend on paid marketing.

The Six Figure + Business Model

Eventually I invested fully into the SFM Digital Business System and this allowed me to earn 40% commissions on products valued upwards of $10,000.

I still had to make the sales of course, and I was still pretty tentative doing so, despite the earning potential of the sales funnel I now had at my disposal. After a lot of hesitation I eventually took the plunge and started using YouTube’s marketing platform, running paid marketing into my sales funnel. For a while nothing happened, then I started making sales!

When you’re spending money to make money it’s pretty nerve racking at first. What if you don’t make any sales and you’re quickly building a money pit in your marketing? The key is to test and measure using a small, affordable budget you can afford. I learned this through following a number of affiliate marketing mentors and learning from those who had already achieved success online.

Access The SFM Mentorship Program

You can access the SFM and learn more about the mentorship program they offer through this free video series. You’ll see how their online business training and community can help you to build an income online through selling affiliate products.

Click on the image below to access the free video series and learn more.

Summary – “Affiliate Marketing Playbook”

Did I leave anything out of this “affiliate marketing playbook”? Here’s a quick recap of the strategies I’m recommending for affiliate marketing success:

Get the help of mentors and coaches who have already succeeded online here.
Use recurring income products, high ticket products and those which offer lifetime commissions.
Learn how to use paid marketing – it’s far more scalable than organic marketing and much quicker!
Keep learning and growing and your online business will keep growing too!

Affiliate Marketing Newbie

If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie here’s a few things you should know. When I started out as an affiliate, I made a lot of mistakes. I got distracted, trapped in learning mode, became a “busy fool” and wasted time. As an affiliate you need to focus on doing the work which is the most productive use of your time. Without sales you don’t make any money so it’s vitally important to keep your focus right and move your online business forward.

That being said, it’s also important to get the right knowledge before setting out too. If you jump straight in, you can also waste a lot of time and effort like I did! Getting the right knowledge upfront can save you heaps of wasted time, money and energy.

Affiliate Marketing Newbie – Use Recurring Commissions

For starters you should definitely use recurring commission affiliate programs. Most affiliate programs don’t offer recurring commissions. If you rush into affiliate marketing like I did, you might be tempted to join the first affiliate program you hear of. For me this was Amazon and eBay’s partner programs. But unfortunately these aren’t the best payers.

Amazon affiliates only earn 3-11% commissions on sales they make from Amazon. If you’re going to be doing a lot of work finding customers for products, don’t you want to be paid the most you possibly can? Amazon products too are difficult to sell with paid marketing.

This means you’ll need to create a lot of content in order to get traction. With recurring income products you only need to make a couple of sales and you’ve got a recurring monthly income. A couple of sales from Amazon will only make you a few pence/cents depending what the products are.

High Ticket Products

If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie you may not have heard of high ticket affiliate products. With high ticket products you can earn a lot more than the standard product you might promote. Clickbank.com is another starting point for affiliate marketers. However, most Clickbank products only pay once and products are generally valued at around the $100 mark. With a 40% commission (much more than physical products) you’ll make around $40 on a sale. If you do use Clickbank, use a website called CBengine which will help you find recurring commission products.

High ticket products give you a number of advantages when learning affiliate marketing. For starters you’ll earn a lot more for a sale. High ticket items are generally priced upwards of $500. With digital products you’ll earn more commissions than for physical products, too. See highest paying affiliate programs list for some examples. Digital products are no more difficult to sell than physical products. You’re going to learn a skill either way when you learn affiliate marketing; so why not learn how to earn the most from your time?

Affiliate Marketing Newbie – Multi-Tier Sales

A multi-tier commission is a commission you get for sales made by your referrals within a program. Most programs don’t offer multi-tier commissions and it’s not essential to have them. However, if you’re going to be doing affiliate marketing for a living, it’s worth a mention.

Within the SFM Digital Business system you can opt to position yourself at the top of the business structure. This means becoming a partner member of the company. If you decide to take this step, you can access multi-tier commissions and earn from sales made by your members. See best two-tier affiliate programs with recurring commissions.

Here’s what the commission structure looks like:

Affiliate Marketing Newbie – Marketing

Every affiliate marketing newbie struggles with their marketing. It’s almost like a rights of passage! Whatever marketing you decide on be prepared for a certain amount of failure! But don’t call it failure – call it learning or “failing forwards”. Without failure you’ll never learn anything. Only by trying and failing do you learn what doesn’t work so you can learn to focus on what does work.

As a child you learned how to walk. You probably fell over a thousand times but you kept getting up and eventually you learned to walk. As an affiliate marketing newbie it’s much the same with learning marketing. You’ll want to give up a thousand times and it’s painful and traumatic when nothing seems to work. But those who succeed in affiliate marketing keep this analogy in mind and keep getting up!

Whether you’re a blogger, use paid marketing or social media, keep at it and gain experience by doing. Blogging and organic marketing will take a longer period of time than if you’re using paid marketing, though. Using paid marketing can be costly while you’re learning, but eventually you’ll have a more easily scalable business if you use it. However, you’ll need a good business model such as the SFM Digital Business System in order to use some of the more expensive marketing platforms.

With cheaper affiliate programs which offer lower levels of commission, it’s much more difficult using paid marketing and making a profit, so you’ll need to use cheaper or free marketing strategies.

Get Help

It’s worth investing in getting help and support if you’re an affiliate marketing newbie. It’s one of the most important things you can do for your future and affiliate business. Without help and support, there’s a million rabbit holes you can venture down as you trial all the multiple methods and strategies out there. Before I found an online training program and community of support, I jumped from course to course without really having a clear direction. Each course led me down a different route. I wasted years on strategies which simply didn’t work.

Access an online training platform and community through this free video series.

Online Business Mentors

Online business mentors can help you build an internet based business from anywhere. You don’t even need any experience or to have your own products either.

Before I found a community of online business mentors, I struggled to earn any money online. I tried various strategies including Forex marketing, buying and selling from eBay and even selling my own ebooks. After putting myself on a training course, I eventually found a business model which anyone can use called affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing, anyone can earn from the internet by selling other people’s products and services online. But this isn’t an easy thing to do; especially alone. You need online business mentors to teach you how to do it properly if you’re serious about building a profitable online business which can replace an existing income.

Online Business Mentors – The SFM

The SFM Mentors offers an all in one digital business system and training program which anyone can benefit from regardless of experience. You can promote an existing business model which includes multiple digital products and resources (see SFM Digital Business System). Or, learn digital marketing strategies through their online training programs to promote physical products or your own business.

The SFM online business mentors program includes access to a variety of coaches and mentors through their various programs. Access a free video series here to learn more.

The SFM was founded in 2010 by Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek to help people earn through the digital market place. Since then they have built a community of thousands of people from all over the world.

I was able to meet Stuart and Jay at an event in London shortly after joining the community. Here’s me with Jay at Momentum Day in London 2014.

Online Business Mentors

Prior to the 2020 pandemic, The SFM offered regular events and training seminars around the world for their members. Since 2020, things have changed a little and they have altered their online business mentors program to give more value to their members online. Through online events, webinars and 1 on 1 affiliate coaching and mentoring sessions, the SFM offers a number of courses to help online businesses.

Here’s a mastermind event with several other members and coaches:

Here’s me on a local meet up in Chester, UK (pre-2020) with other SFM members. (I’m in the red jacket).

Help With An Existing Business

Before building an affiliate business with the SFM, I joined the community to help me understand marketing for my own business.

I was struggling to build a martial arts school back in 2014, when I joined The SFM. Joining several groups, I learned how to promote my martial arts school with various online marketing strategies.

If you have an existing business and want to learn the marketing strategies to grow it, there’s a variety of trainings and resources within their training curriculum which can help you. See their All In Package which offers a huge variety of trainings and resources for business owners with an existing business.

Online Business Mentors – Without A Business Of Your Own

If you don’t already have a business of your own, or any products to sell, you can build a business from scratch using SFM’s own business model. As an affiliate of the SFM you can benefit from:

Recurring commissions from membership sales
High ticket affiliate products – offer larger commissions and a high value to the customer
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
A built in sales team – closes sales on your behalf.
A product range – means you can earn commissions from later purchases by your existing customers.

You can choose from a range of digital products to place in your own digital “store”. Earn commissions by promoting your sales funnel (you’ll learn this through the trainings and groups).

Why You Need Online Business Mentors

Depending in your background and previous work experience you may have zero experience as an entrepreneur or business owner.

Even if you own a physical business, a digital business is very different. With a digital online business your potential for growth is huge. You can access a global audience through your digital business and build a 6 or 7 figure business online.

This of course takes time and investment but it also requires personal growth to overcome any limited thinking you bring to your online business. Certain psychological factors can limit the growth of your online business. If, for example, you are transitioning from an employment role, it can be easy to bring your work habits into your business. This isn’t always a good thing, and the key skills and habits that work for a job, don’t always work in business.

A Business Is Limited By Your Thinking

Online business mentors have been through a lot of change often to grow their online businesses from nothing. They know the roadblocks and problems which stand in your way.

In contrast, you often don’t see the problems in your own thinking which dramatically limit your own progress. So without an online business mentor to help you, you’ll often repeat the same limiting thinking which controls your actions. Then, you wonder why your results don’t change!

what you don't know about online business

Online business mentors can help you see and change your perspective to grow your business beyond what you believe is possible. If you don’t believe something, there’s very little change you’re going to bring it about. Your own doubts and fears will keep you inside your model of the world which is comfortable. But nothing grows in the comfort zone – especially you!

In a globally scalable business, the “glass ceiling” of it’s growth is often only the thinking you bring to it.

Access a free video series to learn more about the SFM Mentors here.

Or click on the image below to join one of my personal mentors on a live webinar.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing Pdf

So here’s my Amazon affiliate marketing pdf. You can download it here. Amazon was one of the very first programs I used as an affiliate marketer. Anyone who joins Amazon’s partner program can promote any of the thousands of products on the site and earn revenue share based on the sale.

Through the partner program, affiliates can earn between 3% and 11% commission depending on the particular product they’re promoting. Here’s the affiliate commission run down as of the current time:

There are, of course, better paid affiliate programs you can join. See highest paying affiliate programs list and what is high ticket affiliate marketing. But Amazon offers so many products, it can be a useful addition to your affiliate toolkit to become an Amazon affiliate.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing Pdf

If you’ve already got a website which generates traffic in pretty much any niche, Amazon offers another way to monetise it. Just join their program, grab some products and drop them onto your website. Pre-pandemic, I ran a local martial arts school. To help monetise the school, I use products from Amazon which I recommend to my students.

Anyone with a local business can add another earning strategy by placing some Amazon code on their website and leading their visitors to products on Amazon.

I don’t make a lot of sales through this site, it has to be said. But it’s another passive income “trickle” for not much work.

In order to make more money from Amazon, you need more traffic. You can generate traffic in a number of ways. However, with Amazon’s commissions being from 3% to 11%, you need to generate traffic fairly cheap in order to still come out ahead.

Marketing With Amazon – Review Site

One simple marketing strategy using Amazon is to create a review website. Review websites are great for affiliate marketers because they bring in visitors who are geared and ready to purchase something specific. They just need a bit more information to see whether the product is right for them.

If you own a review website you can compare several similar products and give an honest comparison between them. Each review will have an affiliate link to one or more products on Amazon.

As people find your reviews, some of them will click your links and hey presto, a sale! Getting people to your website is key. You can spend a lot of time building a website to sell Amazon products and still get nowhere; so it’s important to do your research before hand so your time isn’t wasted.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing PDF – A Niche Website

Another option, other than a review website, is to build a niche website which specifically focuses on a particular niche you know about. As you build your site, and offer information on your topic, you will attract visitors who are interested in your topic.

You can then place products on your site which your visitors would be interested in. Like a review website, it’s worth doing some research beforehand so that you give yourself the best possible chance of success.

This starts with your topic and product. Of course there’s thousands of products on Amazon, how do you choose one? Start by looking at your own purchasing history. Ideally, you’ll choose a product which you know something about, or in a niche you know about or have an interest in. That way, when it comes to creating content, you have something to write, or v’log about (video blog).

Researching Your Topic

What you want from a niche website is to rank highly in the search traffic and attract free visitors. Then, visitors see your content and click on your affiliate links. But this isn’t an easy task. In the image below you’ll see a “camera review website” search brings up a few results and a number at the top of the page: 1,440,000,000.

You can apply this same search for a number of other product types to see which offers the least competition.

Here’s another search for earphone review website.

But how many people are searching for earphone reviews? Look at Google’s keyword planner to find out:

Earphone review website doesn’t get much traffic as you can see. So perhaps this isn’t the best topic to choose. But this can give you an idea of what you’re looking for. Ideally choose a topic which gets plenty of traffic and has the least competition. That way, you have more chance of ranking your site on Google (and other search engines) to get free traffic.

Think of a topic or subject which you would be happy writing about. To get a site ranking on Google does take some time and effort, so you’ll need to work at it for the long term to make it work.

See Niche Blogging For Profit for more on this strategy and also best micro niche for blogging.

Amazon Commissions

Amazon’s affiliate program doesn’t pay huge commissions – paying between 3% and 11% commissions to its affiliates. This doesn’t leave a lot of scope for using paid marketing strategies so your marketing tactic will usually have to be cheap or free. Blogging and niche website building are only two marketing strategies and there’s plenty of others. Plus, consider using digital products too which pay much larger commissions (40% and above).

See also free traffic sources for Clickbank for more product ideas and marketing strategies.

For more training on affiliate marketing access a free video series here.

Download this article as a pdf file here.

A Practical Guide To Affiliate Marketing PDF

Download a practical guide to affiliate marketing pdf here.

A practical guide to affiliate marketing pdf should contain some marketing strategies. But, your marketing strategy will depend on your particular situation and the product or products which you promote. So before I go into marketing ideas, I’m going to discuss affiliate products.

When I first started out as an affiliate I ran ahead without getting the right knowledge. I promoted anything and everything; convinced I was going to “make it” quickly! I was wrong! It was years before I even earned a regular income from affiliate marketing. So I also feel duty bound to also discuss some of the mistakes I made, so you don’t have to make the same ones!

A Practical Guide To Affiliate Marketing PDF

Affiliate marketing is the business model which lets you sell other people’s products and services online for a share of the profit. It’s a great business model too because it can allow you to replace your existing income, work from anywhere and grow your earnings over time in an uncapped way – and without having to trade time for money.

But initially there’s a lot of work involved and you’ll need to keep going for long enough to break through. Before you hit the breakthrough stage, it’s easy to think that what you’re doing is a waste of time. A good analogy of an affiliate business is the Chinese Bamboo tree.

The Chinese Bamboo tree doesn’t show a peep for four years. When you plant the seed, it would be easy to think you have a bad seed and to quit nurturing it. But come the forth year, within 5 weeks it grows up to 90 feet!

I know this article is “a practical guide to affiliate marketing pdf”, and you’re probably thinking, where’s the practical advice? But this is one of the most important things to understand with affiliate marketing. All the practical knowledge in the world is no good to you if you quit when nothing happens in the first few months, or years (depending on your route).

A Practical Guide To Affiliate Marketing PDF – Products

I’d be doing you a massive disservice if I didn’t mention products. The products you choose to promote as an affiliate marketer are vitally important. Choose the wrong ones and your time is wasted. You can spend months or years, as I did, working hard to promote affiliate products which outright don’t sell. Even if your products do sell, you could earn peanuts from those sales. So here’s a short look at some affiliate products and what they mean to your business:

Physical products (e.g. Amazon) – pay you between 3% and 11% commissions
Digital products – pay upwards of 40% commission
Recurring commission affiliate products – pay you ongoing commissions for customers who maintain their membership (potentially for years with the right products and customers)
High ticket products – pay you upwards of $1000 per sale.
Multi tier products – Earn from sales made by your referrals
A product range – lets you earn commissions from products purchased later by your referred customers

So, if you’re going to be working for months or years on a marketing strategy, which products would you prefer to have? Of course the answer should be those which pay you the most. See highest paying affiliate programs list.

Product Choice

Of course your choice in products will depend on a number of factors and not just income. But if you’re wanting to make affiliate marketing pay, it’s advisable to go for the kinds of products which at least offer recurring commissions.

Your marketing strategy and budget will also be a factor in the products you choose to promote. High ticket product ranges which offer multi tier commissions will require an investment. Whereas lower value affiliate products can be sold without purchasing them yourself.

But if you want your affiliate business to replace an existing income more quickly, you’ll need a high ticket product range in order to more effectively use paid marketing strategies. Otherwise you’ll be stuck using free marketing strategies which take a lot more time to work.

Ideally, choose a product to promote which you, yourself would purchase. You’re much better aligned with a product or service if you’re using it yourself. Plus, you can’t very well create content and write, or create videos about a product you know nothing about.

If you’re going for a cheaper marketing strategy such as blogging or content creation, choose something you know about or at least have an interest in. That way you are aligned with your content from the start. It’s difficult coming up with fresh content about something you have no interest in.

Blogging For Profit

Blogging is a simple cheap strategy you can use to make affiliate sales. You can use free blogging platforms such as Hubpages.com, WordPress.com or Wix.com. But if you’re serious about affiliate marketing you should build your own blog on your own website.

Google and other search engines will give more credit to own-hosted sites over the free ones. Free hosted websites tend not to do very well in the eyes of the search engines and traffic can therefore be a problem.

Once you have a site up and running, (see this article) you can use blogging to find potential customers. One strategy is to find long tail keywords which are being searched for and which relate to your product in some way. Do this using Google’s free keyword planner. See also Niche Blogging For Profit for more on this strategy.

Blogging is most definitely a slow strategy and you should expect to create a lot of content before you see any results. It can take years to become a successful affiliate through blogging alone.

A similar route is to use YouTube. Upload videos regularly for several months or years and over time you’ll see more people seeing your videos. If you build a following you can then recommend products and services to your followers.

Using Paid Marketing As An Affiliate

Using paid marketing is a strategy which can build an affiliate business much more quickly than with organic marketing (blogging or v’logging). However, you’ll need a good business model such as the SFM Digital Business system in order to be profitable while spending on advertising.

With paid marketing, affiliates send traffic to products to make commissions. Initially they will test and measure their advertising until they find a campaign which brings in a regular profit. Then they can scale up their marketing to make more sales.

Read more about paid marketing in the ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.

Get Started

Access step by step practical affiliate marketing training and use an existing digital business model to generate online sales.

Start here by accessing a free video series to learn more.

You can download this short guide in pdf format here.

Affiliate Marketing Books PDF

Here’s a collection of affiliate marketing books pdf format which you can access for free. I’ve created a few pdf affiliate marketing books over the years. They’re a great way to help you consolidate information you’ve learned but also great lead magnets you can use to get people to subscribe to your email list.

The first of my affiliate marketing pdf books is niche blogging for profit. In Niche Blogging For Profit I discuss a blogging strategy I picked up from several online courses I took years ago. You can checkout my digital profit course review which details some of the courses I took. A few of the courses taught this strategy which is based around ranking content, (or a website) for it’s main keywords.

Affiliate Marketing Books PDF – Niche Blogging

Niche Blogging’s basic strategy is based around a couple of courses I took. One of them taught how to rank a website on Google using keyword domain names. The same strategy can be used when blogging, to get your articles ranked on Google and other search engines.

Basically you use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords which get traffic. Then, look on Google to find the “low hanging fruit” – that is, the keywords which offer less competition than most. Then build your content, or website around those keywords. It doesn’t work every time, but if you keep at it, you’ll find some of your content will rank. Access Niche Blogging For Profit here.

Affiliate Marketing Books PDF – Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

The next ebook I wrote is called Affiliate Marketing For Beginners. I wanted to write about my experience as an affiliate and what I had learned. Specifically I wanted to share the most important things I would want to tell myself if I could go back in time and start again! It would have saved me years if I had only have found this book when I began with affiliate marketing.

I made a lot of mistakes like using the wrong products and marketing strategies; not getting help and mentorship.

One of the things I discuss in this ebook is to use recurring commission affiliate programs. When I started out as an affiliate, I used cheap physical products which only paid me a tiny percentage of the sale value. This was a big mistake and it took me a long time to realise I was wasting a lot of time! Just this one tip would have changed my trajectory and put me ahead. With recurring commission programs, you can earn residual income even years after you have referred someone to a program.

The Ultimate Guide – Paid Marketing Ebook

Having spent rather a lot of money learning marketing strategies through an online mentorship program, I thought writing a book about marketing would be a good way to help me remember the strategies I was learning about.

The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing came about after several months of training courses.

In this book I’ve included some free marketing strategies I discovered when learning how to build up my martial arts school. I also go into the various paid marketing strategies too such as Google Adwords and Bing. Paid marketing is the fastest way to build an online affiliate business. However, you need a good business model such as the SFM Digital Business System in order to be able to use paid marketing and make a profit.

Affiliate Marketing Ebooks – PDF Downloads

Affiliate marketing secrets came about after using the keyword research I talked about in Niche Blogging For Profit. I found that one particular keyword which offered some traffic also had very little competition.

affiliate marketing secrets pdf — 40 hits a month is not much traffic, but it’s worth a shot!

So I created affiliate marketing secrets as a bit of an experiment to see whether I’d be able to rank my website for that particular keyword.

I’m still ranking for this keyword several years later! Checkout my listing:

Affiliate marketing secrets pdf was born! 40 hits a month is not much traffic, it has to be said. And when it’s spread out among the top 4-5 search results i get hardly any traffic still. But with a few hundred, or thousand of similar listings, it proves the “Niche Blogging For Profit” works – and it all adds up!

Affiliate Marketing PDF Downloads

Here’s another book I put together for similar reasons to the affiliate marketing secrets pdf. Although no listing yet but this was a more recent creation.

The affiliate marketing blueprint comes about also after following a number of successful online affiliates who have mentored me for several months and years now. Top affiliates have taught me to follow a different path that I started out with. They think differently to many affiliates who get stuck with low paying programs and slow marketing strategies.

Before Affiliate Marketing – Ebay Profit

Before I became an affiliate marketer I found a digital downloadable book and bought it from eBay. It taught me a strategy to profit from eBay by buying and selling items using a misspell search tool.

I used this method successfully for several months before putting it down. I knew there had to be a better way to profit from the internet and that eventually led me to learn affiliate marketing. But here’s the eBay strategy if you’d like to give it a go!

If you’re interested in creating your own ebooks, I put together an article on how to sell ebooks on your own website.

Affiliate Ebooks – Why Create Your Own

As you get more experience in affiliate marketing, or if you already know about a topic, it’s worth creating your own ebooks. Ebooks offer a great way to build an email list by giving them away in exchange for your subscribers information.

Here’s a final ebook I recommend for your affiliate marketing journey. This one isn’t mine so I can’t offer it for free. It’s a book by a guy called Stuart Lichtman, who has helped thousands of people train their minds for success. See also Stuart Lichtman Pdf.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies PDF

Here’s a short “affiliate marketing for dummies pdf” manual covering some of the main things you need to know before you starting out.

Download this guide in pdf format here.

When I started out as an affiliate, I thought I’d be super rich very quickly. I rushed into building websites and joining affiliate programs.

But an investment in my education could have saved me years of wasted effort. Back then, it wasn’t clear how to do affiliate marketing. There were lots of courses you could buy. But most of them were just a few videos to watch. There wasn’t an affiliate marketing mentorship program you could join. Or, at least I didn’t find any back in the early 2000’s when I started.

So, instead of joining a program which gave me access to successful affiliates, I jumped from course to course, learning one different strategy after the next. I got nowhere fast despite building hundreds of websites and joining many affiliate programs. I just didn’t know what I was doing. Eventually I found a mentorship program and things changed. Here’s what I learned.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies PDf – Get Help

Firstly, as already mentioned you should get help. Affiliate marketing is just too difficult to do alone. There’s many paths you can take and get lost down. You need a mentor to help guide you on the journey. Access a training resources through this link.

Secondly don’t expect it to be easy. High expectations of huge financial outcomes for little work are one of the main reasons people quit. Expect to work consistently at your affiliate business for several months or years before you see any results financially.

This will of course depend on your investment. If you can afford to purchase a large value sales funnel, and use paid marketing, you can build a profitable business much more quickly. If you take the slower route of blogging, for example, and getting traffic organically, it’s much slower.

The products you decide to promote as an affiliate will have a huge bearing on how well you can do financially.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies pdf – Types Of Products

There’s thousands of products and services you can choose from as an affiliate marketer. So it’s a good idea to know what products are the best ones to earn from. Amazon and eBay were the first partner networks I joined but pay very low levels of commission. Amazon, for example pays between 3% and 11% to its affiliates. Unfortunately I didn’t know any better and spent a long time promoting Amazon products from a blog for peanuts!

Digital products on the other hand pay much larger commissions. They tend to pay 40% and upwards for sales made by their affiliates. One of the first places I found digital products was Clickbank.com. Clickbank has hundreds of digital products which can suit almost any niche you can think of. See Clickbank Secrets Pdf.

Then there are products with offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs tend to be things like memberships or software products. With a recurring commission, you can sell an item once, and benefit from commissions for years, even decades.

High ticket products are another thing to consider as an affiliate. With a high ticket digital product you can make up to $8000 on a single sale. See what is high ticket affiliate marketing. Obviously that’s a whole lot better than selling a book from Amazon at 3% commission.

Multi-tier commissions are also worth a mention here too. With a multi-tier program, you can earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals. See best two tier affiliate programs.

Using a product range is another consideration worth bearing in mind for affiliates. With a product range, you refer the customer to the entry level product. At any time, if your initial referral purchases another product from the range, you make a commission – even years later.

Marketing Strategies and Ikigai

As you can see, there’s many different types of products you can promote as an affiliate. Another consideration is how you are going to promote these products. There’s two main strategies for promoting products online: paid and free. Paid strategies are much faster, but you’ll need a good product range, or return on your investment (ROI) to make it work.

You can’t easily use paid marketing with Amazon products for example because they pay such low commissions. You’ll need a higher value product/product range.

Organic strategies such as blogging, or v’logging (video blogging), will take much longer to generate the same results you can see very quickly using paid strategies. But with organic strategies you can build traffic over time and eventually benefit from free sales through your content.

Depending on your values, you can choose a suitable and appropriate marketing strategy which suits you. If you have a corporate job, and are time poor, blogging might not be the best option. You’ll want to use paid advertising. But if you’re only working part time and affiliate marketing is going to be another income source, organic marketing might be more suitable for you.

Ikigai is a Japanese saying meaning “reason for being”, or purpose. If you’re going to be a content creator, it’s a good idea to align with your ikigai. When you are aligned with your values and purpose, work seems easy and flows naturally. When you’re fighting against your values, everything seems like a hardship. Since organic marketing takes such a long time, it’s well worth choosing a topic and strategy which is aligned with your ikigai.

Affiliate Mistakes – Choosing A Blog Topic

Expect to make some mistakes as an affiliate marketer. Mistakes are made when you take action. Uncertain action is far better than certain inaction. One of the mistakes I made was to build a niche website around a topic I didn’t know or care about. It was out of alignment with my ikigai and I was just desperately trying to make money.

I built a mushroom harvesting site and blogged on it for several months. Every blog post had to be researched and it was incredibly difficult keeping going. Eventually I ranked the site at the top of Google for its main keywords. But it didn’t make any money and I eventually gave up on it. So if you’re going to write about something and become a blogger, make sure it’s something you care about and can continue for a good period of time.

Affiliate Mistakes – Throwing Money At Marketing

Impatience is the enemy of an affiliate marketer. I’ve made this mistake myself. I threw a lot of money at a marketing campaign because I got fed up of getting no sales! I got myself into financial trouble with a credit card and deep in debt running paid advertising on YouTube.

Affiliates who use paid advertising do so carefully at first. Only when they have a consistently profitable campaign do they increase their budget. Super affiliates often spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on their marketing campaigns. But they have done their research starting from $10 a day and slowly built up when they know they have a profitable campaign.

Beginner affiliates can get impatient and think throwing money at the problem is the solution! But Google, or any marketing platform will take your money regardless of whether you make any sales or not! So beware!

Affiliate Mistakes

There’s a lot to learn as an affiliate before you can even make your first sale. One of the main problems is getting stuck in learning mode. It can become a bit of an addiction watching videos and learning new skills. But learning doesn’t move your business forward. You also need to implement what you’ve learned as you go, otherwise you’ll find months have passed and you haven’t moved your online business forward.

I hope this affiliate marketing for dummies pdf has given you some insights into the affiliate marketing business. Hopefully it will better prepare you for your affiliate journey if you choose to accept this mission!

If so, you can start by clicking this link to access a free video series.

You can also download this guide in pdf format here.

Sniply Affiliate Program

I just had a look for Sniply affiliate program. It turns out that they don’t have one currently (November 2020).

I did however notice this on the official Snipl.y website, but this was over a year ago. so perhaps Sniply do have plans for an affiliate program in the future.

Sniply Affiliate Program – What Sniply Does

Despite the nonexistence of a Sniply affiliate program at the current time, affiliates can use Sniply to create “snips” to promote their affiliate products. I first discovered Sniply a few years ago as a free marketing tool.

You can use Sniply in conjunction with another great affiliate tool called Buzzsumo.com too!

With Buzzsumo, you can find the best performing content which is trending on social media sites and creating the most engagement within your niche.

Buzzsumo then lists the content which is doing the best. You can then take this content and put it into the Sniply tool.

Take a look at the image below which shows the top ranking articles/content for “affiliate marketing” when I typed it into Buzzsumo.

Then, I can take the top article and paste it into Sniply, adding my own pop-up advert to my affiliate products. (See below).

Sniply Link

I then take my Sniply link and paste it thoughout my social media sites, and wherever I can online. As the content is already clearly trending, there’s a high chance it will be shared and each share has your pop-up advert attached.

You can also email your Sniply link out to your email list too, if you have one. If not, email to friends if they would be interested in the content.

In an ideal world your Sniply link will go viral and get thousands or tens of thousands of shares online.

Using Sniply like this can be a good addition to any affiliate marketers daily habits.

Choosing Content To Snip

It’s important to choose content which is relevant to your affiliate link, or website. Ideally choose a topic which relates closely to your own. People who are interested in reading about knitting, for example, won’t want to necessarily buy your affiliate marketing course. On the other hand, if you offer health and fitness related products, you could use a trending article in that niche to attract potential buyers.

You can of course use Sniply with any piece of content – even your own. If you regularly post your blogs throughout social media, it can be worth putting your pop up on it too. It can add another opt-in option to help build your email list.

Sniply Affiliate Program

I would personally recommend Sniply to anyone who wants to get more traffic and sales online. I created a video about Sniply years ago and it still brings me leads to this day. (see below).

I apologise that there’s no Sniply Affiliate Program available and I’d certainly welcome a program if and when they do create one. In the meantime, why not use Sniply to generate more traffic to your website.

Here’s a short video explaining one strategy you can use with Sniply:

If you’re interested in other free marketing strategies check out my article the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing.

Passive Income Affiliate Programs

Not all affiliate programs are passive income affiliate programs. Some programs only pay you once for a sale. Recurring commission affiliate programs are an example of how to earn passive income as an affiliate. These tend to be membership products and software products, and they can be harder to sell than physical products which people immediately understand.

With a physical product from Amazon, for example, you know what you’re getting. Memberships can take a little more persuasion, especially if someone doesn’t understand the product.

Digital products too, are much better for affiliates, especially if they offer some form of passive income. Amazon pays it’s affiliates between 3% and 11% for sales. Compare this to digital products and you see why many affiliates go down this route; 40% – 50% commission is typical for digital products, some even pay more.

Passive Income Affiliate Programs

To earn passive income from affiliate programs you’ll need to have sold products already. Then, you can keep earning if you’ve chosen the right products to sell. There’s other ways to earn passively through affiliate marketing too, besides using recurring commission products.

You can also benefit from passive income if you use a product range. With a product range, you refer a customer once. If they choose to purchase another product from that range, even years later, you still earn the commission.

The best way to earn passive income with affiliate marketing is to use multiple strategies which give you an “autopilot income”:

Recurring commission programs – business tools for online marketers, for example
A range of products – see SFM Digital Business System
Multi-tier commissions – multi tier commissions offer the opportunity for affiliate marketers to refer members into a program. They they earn commissions on sales their members make. See best two tier affiliate programs.
A built in sales team – having a sales team built into the business you’re promoting as an affiliate means you benefit from sales closed by your team. You still get credit if your referred the customer originally.

Building A Passive Income Online

Of course you still need to sell an affiliate product to benefit from the recurring commissions you can generate from membership and software products. Once you get good at selling other people’s products online, you’ll be able to automate this process too. So in a way, just learning how to sell products online is a form of passive income.

Automation is built into online businesses to allow owners to work on them in their own time. Initially it takes quite a lot of effort to get an affiliate business off the ground. There’s a period of testing and measuring of advertising or learning how to generate content and get it seen. But after a while you’ll see what’s working and concentrate on the right actions which generate sales.

Paid marketing is an example of using automation to build an online business. Although paid marketing isn’t exactly passive, it’s not far off once you’ve got a profitable sales funnel and are running paid adverts generating sales. You can simply leave your adverts running on complete autopilot once you know a campaign is proven to be profitable.

Some Passive Income Programs

Ideally find a program which offers a lifetime value to the customer. Products like business tools which are needed for online businesses are really good because they are essential for the operation of a business. Once someone is profitable online, they’re definitely not going to cancel their membership if they need the software/tools.

Here’s a few examples of passive income programs which offer at least a recurring commission from referrals:

The Six Figure Mentors – Digital Online Business Mentorship Program.
Aweber – For email marketing
Leadpages- For custom landing pages
Get Response – Email marketing
Elegant Themes – WordPress website themes
Social Pilot – Social Media Tool
SEM Rush – SEO tool
Snip.ly – Conversion/opt-in tool
HostGator – Hosting provider
Shopify – Online Store Builder

Get Started

Depending on the affiliate program you join, you may be able to use paid marketing in order to drive traffic into your sales funnel. This is the fastest way to build an online business. Passive income affiliate programs are great if you can make your marketing work and sell them. Over time, as your sales grow, so does your income. Even a small monthly commission of $20 can give you a good passive income once you’ve got several of them coming in every month.

Access a training and education platform and learn how to sell recurring income products online using a pre built digital business system and online mentoring program. Click here for the free video series.