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!

Super Affiliate Handbook

I wish I would have had a super affiliate handbook back in the early 2000’s when I first heard the word “affiliate marketing”. Back then I was struggling trying to sell my own ebooks, with very little success. I put myself on a course and since then was hooked on the idea of making money online through selling other people’s products.

I ditched the ebook idea and started promoting a course I had bought by a guy called Peter Lexis. He’s not around anymore in the online space, or at least I don’t think he is. But I learned a few things from him and from the many other courses I took.

Super Affiliate Handbook

Despite working for several years, jumping from course to course, nothing seemed permanent from affiliate marketing. I made the odd sale here and there, but really, I didn’t know what I was doing! I needed a super affiliate handbook – or some guidance from the “super affiliates” who had made it online! Eventually after a lot of failures online and many attempts, I found an online business community which gave me the direction and support I desperately needed.

This was in 2014 and I was pretty broke at the time, so wasn’t able to invest much initially. But I was able to access a number of mentors and coaches and online trainings which anyone can access through this link.

Skip to 2020 and I’m still there! Still learning and growing my online business. But now I’m armed with much more knowledge and experience through having had the support of an online business community. I’m not a “super affiliate” myself, but I’m learning from several mentors who could be called super affiliates. Here’s what I’ve learned that super affiliates do differently.

Super Affiliate Handbook – Get Support

Affiliate marketing is tough. I struggled for years before making a consistent income from affiliate marketing. I did many things which were a waste of time and didn’t understand the different business models of affiliate marketing. One of the wisest things I did was getting support. I was able to join webinars and seminars which were run by 6 and 7 figure affiliates who had already failed more times than I had tried!

Getting support was the best money I spent online. It’s not a business that can be learned from a single course and a few videos. It’s a pursuit which can take several years to get good at.

Me and Jay Kubassek on a Momentum Day in London with The SFM

Use The Best Business Models

Another mistake I made was jumping straight in without getting the right knowledge up front. Again this comes down to getting the right information. The wrong information can cost you dearly as it did me! With the wrong information you can struggle for years, as I did.

I spent months and years building content and throwing it up in the hope Google would rank my websites; picking the wrong kinds of products too, (initially using Amazon and eBay), like many new affiliates do. Amazon pays between 3% and 11% commissions on its products which is a tiny percentage. With digital products you can earn 40% + on your sales; by using recurring commissions products, high ticket products and multi-tier commissions, you have a more profitable business model which can be more effectively scaled up quickly.

By using only physical products with low commission levels, you’re stuck with slow marketing strategies which can take years. You can’t afford to use paid marketing with many of these kinds of products because you simply won’t be able to profit while running paid adverts.

I made this mistake early on as an affiliate. I spent months and years creating content, pointing my affiliate links to companies who paid peanuts. My content disappeared into the stratosphere and never got seen!

Super Affiliate Handbook – Position At The Top

Super affiliates position themselves at the very top of a business system so that they can earn the most commission from their effort. Take a look at the business structure below which shows a product range and level of earning potential from commissions.

To position yourself as an affiliate to earn the best commission levels means investing in a business system like this one. The more you invest initially, the more you are capable of earning through sales you make.

Super affiliates realise that a greater earning potential means more can be spent on advertising while still being profitable.

With smaller valued products and services, you simply can’t spend as much because you won’t recoup your budget on sales, let alone make a profit. Super affiliates know this so they put themselves at the top of the commission structure.

Super Affiliate Handbook – Marketing

Once you have a business system (sales funnel) set up and running, you can send visitors (leads) into your sales funnel. There’s many ways to do this, but super affiliates think big! They know that with a digital product range and globally accessible audience, they can scale up and sell to many people all over the world.

With smaller value products you need to create content and work a lot harder to generate sales which aren’t worth as much. But with a six figure sales funnel, you can use paid marketing and scale up very quickly.

So, super affiliates start by testing and measuring their funnel with paid advertising. Initially they’ll start with a small budget which is easily affordable. As they run paid adverts from advertising platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Google Adwords, they’ll collect data. With enough data they can make informed decisions as to whether a campaign is working or not. With those which aren’t working, they cut. Those which are profitable are scaled up through increasing their daily budget.

Knowing Your Numbers

A good digital business system will produce $4 for every $2 spent on advertising. Once you have such as system, you can easily increase your budget, sending more targeted visitors into it. Providing you’ve done your homework and know your numbers, you can start increasing your daily budget.

Super affiliates don’t start out being super affiliates. They start small just where everyone else starts out. But over time once they are consistently making profit by spending money, they simply up their budget and spend more money to make more money!

Super affiliates can spend upwards of $20,000 a month driving targeted leads into their sales funnels. This amount sounds ludicrous, but of course a smaller budget will have been meticulously scrutinised over many weeks/months of sales and slowly increased.

Super affiliates don’t just throw money at their business without good justification. That’s just gambling. Instead they learn to “play” with small amounts first. When they know a consistent marketing strategy regularly produces a profitable outcome, they scale.

Tracking All Leads And Sales

Everything an affiliate does should be tracked. That way, when an affiliate makes a sale, they know where it came from. Pareto’s principle of 80/20, means that 80% of the outcomes come from only 20% of the causes.

Many of an affiliate marketers attempts will fail. Often 80% of advertising campaigns will fall flat! The super affiliates know this but keep going. They only need to find the 20% which work, and they have a winning lottery ticket! Once they discover the advertising campaign which produces a profit consistently, they can simply leave it running and scale up.

By tracking all their adverts, leads and sales, they get to learn where their sales come from. Over time and with consistent effort, they can learn from their data and determine which adverts are best to focus on and which are best to end.

Modelling Success

This “super affiliate handbook” wouldn’t be complete without mentioning modelling of success. Without the help and support of others who have already succeeded online through affiliate marketing, it’s so much more difficult to take the right steps and keep going when times get tough.

With other super affiliates to help and guide you, you only need to choose never to quit and eventually you’ll succeed! There’s so many facets to affiliate marketing that it’s very difficult to do alone.

Get the help of others who have already succeeded online. Join an online community and get started today. Click this link to learn more and access a free video series.

You can also join a free webinar with 7 figure online entrepreneur Stuart Ross by clicking on the image below.

Earn Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

You can earn passive income with affiliate marketing in a number of different ways. Of course, when you have put in the work upfront, your affiliate business should run largely by itself anyway. In general, the longer you have been working on your affiliate business, the easier it should get. Automation is one of the main perks of having built an affiliate business and there’s automation within affiliate marketing already through

Websites, landing pages and email marketing autoresponders
Digital or physical products which can be sold directly from emails and websites
Third party companies fulfil the delivery and customer service so the affiliate doesn’t have to.

Earn Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

Website content can bring in customers to affiliate products around the clock and 365 days a a year. Autoresponders collect emails automatically and send people into sales funnels where products are sold and products delivered. All this is done while you sleep, if you’re done the work already and built in the infrastructure of your affiliate business.

But there’s other considerations too, which can help you earn a passive income from your affiliate business. Choosing the right products or product range is a huge part of this. Ideally, there’s a number of considerations you should take account of before starting out promoting affiliate products:

Use a product range not just a single products – single products pay you only once. With a range of products, you’l get credit for sales purchased even years after you’ve referred your customer.
Choose recurring commission affiliate programs. With membership products or software products you earn commissions based on ongoing payments for subscriptions. So you’ll earn an ongoing passive income from each sale.
Use high ticket affiliate products – this has a couple of main benefits; a) you can more easily use paid marketing for your advertising (which can be automated and scaled), and b) you can build a profitable business more quickly through reinvesting your profits and scaling up.
Multi-tier commissions let you earn from sales made by your referrals.

So you can earn a passive income with affiliate marketing much more easily with a business model like this one. See SFM digital business system for more on this.

Earn A Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing – Advertising Strategies

Of course you can earn a passive income with affiliate marketing without using such a business system. It’s just that this kind of business model gives you many more earning strategies and more potential.

With any affiliate product though, you can still earn passively. Ideally though at least use recurring commission affiliate products. With a recurring commission products, you can earn a passive income from each sale, not just a single commission. And potentially this can be for a lifetime; if you choose the right products.

Earn Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

But before you’ll be able to earn anything from affiliate marketing there’s work to be done. Affiliate marketing does take some time to learn and master. To sell products online you can use websites, advertising platforms, paid marketing and organic marketing (content marketing). All of these can run completely hands free, despite taking some time to set up.

This piece of writing, for example, will be around a long time after I write it. Hopefully, it will generate some traffic too, and sales! Although blogging and article writing takes time and effort, over time your work compounds to generate passive income trickles, if you connect the right audience to products they would find useful.

Advertising Platforms – Paid Marketing

Paid marketing is the fastest way to build a passive income from the internet. But at first you obviously need to invest in building an email list and a product range too. With cheaper value affiliate products, it’s free to join a program. But these products often don’t offer nearly enough in the way of earning potential. To sell a $100 affiliate product using paid marketing, for example, is much more difficult than selling a $2500 product using paid advertising.

Given a 40% commission on each product, it’ll be much easier to make a profit on a product paying you $1000 than only $40. If you’re running paid marketing, you’ll want to be coming out on top – with a profit. Otherwise you won’t carry on very long with your marketing. Once you do start generating a profitable outcome with paid marketing platforms, you can simply leave campaigns running, forever.

Again, here’s another way affiliate marketing can offer a passive income. Providing you test and measure your advertising carefully in the first instance, and it proves itself, you can increase your budget and scale up. Leave your adverts running 24 hours a day, and in multiple countries even.

How Easy Is It?

Of course it takes some time to earn passive income with affiliate marketing. There’s a lot of work which needs to be done before you can earn a passive income. But affiliate marketing is far better than working a job, once it’s working. The trouble is, most affiliates will give up too easily because they don’t take the long term view of affiliate marketing. They do some work, don’t see any results so assume it doesn’t work, and give up! Back to the day job!

Within less than 5 years you can have built a passive income with affiliate marketing, depending on the steps you take. Or, you can still be stuck in the 9 to 5, or worse, corporate career for another 20 years! 3-5 years hard work for a passive income for the rest of your life is pretty good if you ask me!

If you’re interested in learning more about affiliate marketing, access a free video series here, or join Stuart on a webinar using this link.

Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing

What are the best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing? There’s many free marketing strategies affiliates can use to get people to visit their websites or landing pages:

Blogging
SEO – search engine optimisation
Niche website building
YouTube organic marketing
Social media sites

It’s a good idea for affiliate marketers to build email list so that they can keep in touch with their subscribers and build a relationship. On a website a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. But once on your email list, you can extend this time frame to weeks, months and even years.

Once you know this you can make traffic work harder for you, as an affiliate. But getting that traffic in the first place is one of the biggest challenges for affiliate marketers.

Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing

Free traffic is slow traffic which is an unfortunate side effect of it being free. With paid traffic, you can see results very quickly. What can take days or weeks with a paid marketing strategy can take months and years with a free one. But not everyone wants to use paid marketing. Many of the cheaper affiliate products only offer small levels of commissions and so don’t allow the option of using paid marketing.

With a high ticket product range and recurring commissions, paid marketing platforms can be more within reach. But if you don’t have this luxury within your affiliate products, you’ll need to use free marketing.

One of my favourite free traffic sources is Google, through blogging and building niche websites. I’ll come back to the niche websites later on and talk about blogging first.

Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

Blogging can work wonders for your affiliate marketing business. However, it’s most definitely a long term strategy. Expect to work building content for several months or even years before you start to see any kind of regular traffic or sales.

If you’re in a less competitive industry it can be much quicker but it’s hard to put a definitive time frame on blogging sine it depends on so many variables. Affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive industry, so it’s a long road if you’re building a blog in the affiliate marketing niche.

One blogging strategy I use is explained in my ebook (above) Niche Blogging For Profit. Basically it involves finding long tail keywords which get monthly searches using Google’s keyword planner. Then, I check to see what the competition looks like on Google. If the content looks like I have a chance of ranking it, based on the competition, I’ll go ahead and create some content around that keyword.

Best Free Sources For Traffic – SEO

Once you have some content up on a website, you can build out more content, linking back to your older content. As you continue to do this over time, Google should recognise your link profile is gaining more backlinks; and hopefully reward you with a higher ranking (if appropriate).

You can also use a plugin to help you build content when you create it. I use Yoast SEO and it helps me to write SEO friendly content and get better traction from the search engines.

You can also link to your content from other sites such as:

Ezinearticles.com – write content and link in your bio back to your website
Hubpages.com – another article writing space to build backlinks
Quora – I use Quora to answer questions in my niche and leave links back to my content. Although these are no-follow links, this can still help people find your content and you’ll gain traffic if you do this enough. But it doesn’t help your SEO because of the no-follow.
Forum posting – answer questions on forums which relate to your niche. Most allow you to link to your bio which you can link to your website
Blog commenting – blog commenting is a simple way to build backlinks to your website and can increase your SEO score over time. Ideally post useful comments which add to the discussion. That way your comments are more likely to be allowed and other readers will often click through to see more of your content.

Best Free Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing – Niche Websites

I’ve built a few niche websites which I use to “feed” traffic back to my main website. A niche website can be used to target specific keywords which relate to your niche in some way. Often, by choosing a seed keyword and using it in your domain name, it can give you some extra weight with the search engines for that particular keyword.

As you can see, this website has affiliate marketing in the domain name. This can sometimes give it extra credibility with Google for certain long tail keyword phrases I’ve used in some of the articles on this site.

Of course you still have to create some useful content and you can’t rely on a keyword domain name doing all the work for you! But it can help you if you put in the work. Building a website for free traffic can work wonders if you do it right and choose the right keywords.

Again, check for the relative competition using the niche blogging strategy I mentioned above.

YouTube Organic Marketing

Another excellent free strategy to get free traffic is YouTube organic marketing. With YouTube, you upload videos in the same way as you would build a blog. With thousands of videos you’ll start to see more and more people seeing your content, subscribing to your channel and of course visiting your affiliate products through either a website or an email list you’ve built.

Some YouTuber’s create many videos for their channel every day and build huge followings just from organic traffic alone. But again, this is a slow process and you need to stick at it for the long haul before you’ll see regular traffic and sales of your affiliate products.

Your content has to be super relevant for your products too. If your visitors don’t convert into customers, it can be because you haven’t got enough visitors or that you’re not using the right kind of content.

Social Media Sites

There’s no more social media sites than you can possibly need and each one offers an opportunity to get free traffic if you’re an affiliate marketer. Ideally, stick to one platforms and master a specific strategy before moving on to another one.

One strategy I found is to use Facebook to build an audience through groups. Join multiple groups in your particular niche. Then, interact with people in those groups on a regular basis, forming friendships and helping people with genuine problems.

Use your affiliate products to further help them when appropriate and set up your Facebook profile to showcase your product/website. When people look at your profile from your interactions, they’ll see what your offer is and potentially click through to sign up to your email list.

Offer your giveaway product on your Facebook profile in exchange for your subscribers email address

Again this is a long term “slow burner” so it’s worth sticking at. Create a spreadsheet of time spent in the groups every day and look at your daily routine in terms of building connections. After a few weeks or months of consistent activity, you should see some traffic if you’ve picked the right groups and approach it in the right way. Of course it goes without saying that you shouldn’t spam groups with your affiliate links! You’ll get banned most likely if you do this.

But if you do it right, and offer to genuinely help and connect with people, you’re more likely to make this into a long term traffic generating strategy.

Get Support

One of the best things you can do for your affiliate business is get help and support from others who are further ahead than you with affiliate marketing. Access an online community of mentors and coaches and get the support you need to take your affiliate business to the next level.

Access a free video series to learn more here.

Done For You Affiliate Funnels

Looking for done for you affiliate funnels? A good affiliate sales funnel will have more than one strategy for earning income. Many funnels only offer one product in them. With only one product, you have to continually rely on traffic flow and constant sales.

But with affiliate recurring commissions, high ticket products and through multi-tier commissions you have multiple earning strategies. So even in the quiet months you’ll be earning from previous sales. This kind of funnel gives you a larger earning potential, and more choice in your marketing strategies.

With low value products, and/or lower commissions, you’re stuck with cheaper marketing methods. It’s a much tougher journey for an affiliate.

Done For You Affiliate Funnels – Choose Your Products

With The SFM Digital Business system you can access a range of done for you affiliate funnels, according to your level of investment.

Choose from a number of earning strategies and commission levels from a range of high value digital products. These pay up to 101% commissions (Mentors All In program offers 101% commission on sales generated). As a partner member, earn up to 40% commission on products ranging up to $20,000 in value ($8000 per sale).

You can choose from a number of commission structures, according to your investment. Here’s the commission structure at a basic (Essential) member level:

done for you affiliate funnels commission structure

As you can see, you can still earn from multiple earning strategies; including recurring commissions and high value digital products. An essential member can still earn 5% on high ticket products they sell up to the value of $20,000 ($1000). To earn the higher commission levels there’s a number of options according to your budget.

Done For You Affiliate Funnels – Setting Up Your Funnel

To set up your funnel you’ll need to join The SFM through purchasing the Mentors All In package here. Then, access the back office and work your way through the modules to set up your funnel and autoresponder.

There’s 7 modules you’ll work through in order to set up your sales funnel. You’ll set up a website, autoresponder (email deliver and collection service), and product range. Once everything is set up you can work through a number of training resources. You can also access live online sessions to learn how to market your sales funnel.

The entire sales funnel, complete with email follow ups and affiliate links, is built in to the system. You only need to follow the steps to set it up with your unique affiliate links.

Marketing Your Sales Funnel

According to your individual commission structure and level of investment, you’ll need to decide on a marketing strategy. With a low investment, you can still benefit from recurring commissions and commissions on the high ticket product range. However, with a lower commission structure you’re more limited on how you can market your funnel.

Expensive marketing platforms such as YouTube are less accessible if you can’t earn higher levels of commissions. But there’s many options as far as marketing goes.

So if you’re only a basic (essential) level member, you will need to use cheaper marketing options.

Blogging or V’Logging

Blogging and video blogging are two cheaper marketing strategies which affiliates can use. With blogging, you write content on a website with the aim to bring traffic to your site. Blogging is a much slower strategy than using paid marketing. But if you’re using lower valued products, or have lower commissions in your sales funnel, it’s an option.

Video blogging is another slow marketing strategy. Video marketers create content for YouTube and use keyword placement on their videos for maximum exposure. If you’re creative and good on video, it can be a great way to generate content and build an audience.

Your marketing strategy will depend on your particular sales funnel structure and earning potential. It will also depend on your circumstances. With money to spend on a marketing campaign, and invest in high ticket products, you can get up and running quickly. If you’re on a tighter budget, you won’t be able to use paid marketing, or you’ll need to be more careful.

Access A Sales Funnel & Training

If you’re ready to get started you can access a full toolkit for building an online business from scratch:

Done for you sales funnel
Ready made affiliate links and email campaign
Full training and support

Access the Mentors All In program for only $99 and $97 a month (current pricing at time of writing). There’s a full money back guarantee for 30 days if you’re not happy.

Affiliate Marketing Autopilot

Wouldn’t it be great to place an “affiliate marketing autopilot” on your affiliate business so you don’t have to work at it? Well, in a way you can do this. Websites run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on autopilot. Autoresponders send automated emails out whenever you want them to. In fact you could say affiliate marketing was already an autopilot method of selling products online.

But there’s still work to do with an affiliate business. Most of this work is set up though and ultimately you want your business to work for you, not the other way round. The fastest way to do this is to build a funnel which offers multiple methods of earning.

Affiliate Marketing Autopilot

The ultimate outcome from an affiliate marketing autopilot machine is of course income. You want to sell affiliate products and services and make money. To do this requires some work but ultimately that’s the end goal; an autopilot cash system!

To automate traffic flow is probably the most difficult part of a sales funnel. Some affiliates will create content and slowly build up traffic over months and years. But to do it faster costs money and you need to know that you’ll get more money coming out the other side than you’re putting into your advertising budget.

Unless you’ve already tested and measured a sales funnel, and product range, you won’t necessarily know how well it works; or even if you’ll make any sales at all!

Small value affiliate products won’t always give you the necessary revenue to learn PPC (pay per click) marketing. With a small value product you will need to be very good at marketing immediately or you’ll lose money while learning. The best way to learn marketing is with a high ticket sales funnel like this one (below), using a “done for you” affiliate marketing sales funnel.

Affiliate Marketing Autopilot – The Six Figure (Plus) Funnel

Most sales funnels offer one product at a set price. You only earn once from a sale so you’ll need to get more sales consistently to make more income. But with a six figure funnel you have multiple earning strategies built into your product range:

Recurring income affiliate products such as membership and software products
High ticket items offering much larger commissions than most products
Multi-tier commissions – give you an income from sales made by your referrals

See SFM Digital Business System for more on this funnel.

Of course just having a funnel like this one doesn’t give you an affiliate marketing autopilot income. It just gives you the product range and software to build one. Once set up with your affiliate links and autoresponder, you only need to learn how to drive traffic into your funnel. To automate this you can use a marketing platform which lets you pay to send traffic into your funnel.

Depending on the value of products within your chosen funnel, you may or may not be able to afford the more expensive marketing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

Marketing Your Funnel

With a fully loaded product range which offers multiple high ticket products, you’ll be more likely to recover your marketing budget and make a profit. With a smaller value product range, it’s more difficult to do so by using paid marketing strategies.

But even with the best possible product range and system you still can get it wrong with your marketing. This is something which you’ll need to learn. Access a training and coaching program here.

Most beginner marketers will start small with a reasonably affordable marketing budget. Once they see sales coming in, and have a consistent profit, they can then scale up their advertising budget to send more people into the funnel.

Over time, and once they’ve made a number of sales and successfully built a working campaign, they simply leave it running and build many more. As people go through the funnel, they purchase products and you generate income from:

Recurring income products (memberships)
High ticket product sales
Multi-tier commissions
A range of up sells – sales closed by an in-house built in sales team

Hey presto! You’ve now got an affiliate marketing autopilot system!

Other Marketing Strategies

Paid marketing is definitely the fastest marketing strategy to use for affiliate marketers. But what if they don’t have such a sales funnel with large value products in it? With lower value products and fewer earning methods, you may have to use other, cheaper marketing strategies.

Some affiliates use free marketing strategies such as content marketing. This article is an example of content marketing. You can also use videos and upload them to YouTube to gain traction with an affiliate marketing business.

However, organic content marketing is much slower than paid marketing. Although you can get traction through free marketing strategies, on the whole it usually will take months or years to see the same impact as you can see with paid marketing within days or weeks.

Blogging As A Marketing Strategy

Blogging is one of my favourite marketing strategies because it’s free to do and I enjoy writing. However, it’s not easy to gain traction with affiliate marketing through blogging. You have to keep at it for a while before you see any real traction from your efforts. Here’s a strategy I picked up several years ago and stuck with it.

Ranking Content On Google For Long Tail Keywords

Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find long tail keywords within your niche. Then compare your keyword phrase on Google with a simple search. Look for the number at the top of the page. I generally look for those phrases which give a result of less than 10 million:

Try the same search again only with quotes around your key phrase like so:

This number should be less than 10,000 and denotes the competing pages for your particular search phrase. The fewer the better.

Once I’ve done a bit of digging into the key phrase, I write some content with the keyword in mind and using an SEO tool to help me write. Some of my content will make its way to the first page of Google with this little strategy. Of course I’ve written a lot of content which didn’t have the desired effect too! It’s a long term strategy and some will hit and others will miss. But the key is to write quality content which will stand the test of time.

You can also use this same strategy for building niche websites too. For more on this strategy checkout this article on creating niche websites.

Best Two Tier Affiliate Programs With Recurring Commissions

Looking for the best two tier affiliate programs with recurring commissions?

I would never have though to look for affiliate recurring commissions or even knew what two tier programs were 10 years ago. I bumbled into affiliate marketing looking for a way to escape working the 9 to 5. After several failed attempts and jumping from one course to another, I eventually found a group of online mentors called The SFM Mentors.

The Six Figure Mentors offer a range of digital products which include multiple earning strategies:

High ticket product range
Recurring commissions on sales
Built in sales team
Training and ongoing support
Multi-tier sales

Read more about The SFM Digital Business System.

Best Two Tier Affiliate Programs With Recurring Commission

A two tier program is one which offers the opportunity to earn commissions from sales made by your referrals. This is beneficial in a couple of ways:

It offers you an opportunity to generate leverage by building a huge team online and generate a passive income online – (from sales made by your members).
You are also motivated to help those people who join the business within your team. And your sponsor is motivated to help you with your online business.

Within the SFM community this has helped develop an atmosphere of help and support and this is shared throughout the community; even from members who aren’t directly connected to your commission structure. Founders of The SFM Mentors Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek have created a nurturing support culture built on helping beginners start (and build) online businesses from scratch.

Best Two Tier Affiliate Programs With Recurring Commissions

The monthly membership of The SFM is $97 a month and as a referring affiliate you get $20 (a month recurring) for each member you refer. There’s also a number of other products and high ticket items within The SFM business system you can use to generate income from.

Affiliate recurring commissions are great for affiliates because they compound over time; especially with programs which offer huge value. With only 5 referred members you’ll be able to break even on your membership fees of $97 a month. Plus, you can make $100 commissions as a member referring the Mentors All In program for $99 (at current time). That’s 101% commission!

Here’s a few recurring commission programs. (Only SFM offers Multi-tier commissions from this list):

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

Accessing The Two Tier Commission Structure Within The SFM

As a normal member of the SFM you don’t qualify for the two tier commissions. You only qualify for these commissions as a partner member. This requires investment into the DEA Mastermind Experience level, where you’ll be able to earn the highest levels of commissions (40%) on products ranging up to $20,000 in value.

As a DEA reseller, you’ll also be eligible for multi tier commissions. This means that your referrals’/members’ sales will count towards your earnings and you will earn $10 for each member referred by your team. You’ll also earn 10% commission on each of the high ticket products your members sell. See chart below.

This is of course in addition to the high levels of commission you can earn as a DEA reseller. As a DEA reseller, you’ll be eligible to earn 40% commissions on all the high ticket product range:

ELITE Influence Membership ($2,500)	$1,000**
ImportXperts Membership ($2,500)	$1,000**
Marketing Mastery ($8,000)	35%***
Brand Incubator ($11,000)	35%***
Mastermind Experience ($20,000)	40%***

Summary

The SFM digital business system offers one of the best opportunities to earn on the internet today. With it’s multi-tier program, high ticket product range and affiliate recurring commissions, it gives an online marketer one of the best ways to earn through affiliate marketing. The SFM also offers full training and ongoing support through its mentorship programs, 1 on 1 coaching and mentoring sessions and catalogue of resources, software and trainings. It’s an all-in-one business system training and online community.

Access a free video series to learn more.

Affiliate Recurring Commissions

Affiliate recurring commissions are a major key to affiliate marketing success. With recurring commissions you have an income from each sale you make, not just a single commission.

Most programs don’t offer recurring affiliate commissions but it’s worth finding those that do. Even a recurring commission of $10 a month per sale can soon add up. With 100 sales you’ll be earning $1000 a month passive income. Plus there’s no limit to the number of sales you make.

Recurring commission programs are good for beginner affiliates especially. Once you see a few recurring commissions coming in regularly, it gives you more belief and hope in affiliate marketing in general.

Affiliate Recurring Commissions – Product Types

You’ll usually find affiliate recurring commissions attached to software products and membership products which offer ongoing value.

Choose products which are massively useful and are most likely to result in lifetime customers. Most of these products listed below are business tools and help online business owners with their businesses. Once someone’s online business becomes successful, there’s no way your members and referrals will give up their memberships, either.

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

A standard affiliate product from the likes of Clickbank.com will give you a 40% commission on a $100 product. So you’ll earn $40 per sale. But most Clickbank products won’t offer ongoing commissions. To find those which do, use CBEngine.com and click on the link for recurring commissions on the left had side.

Recurring Commissions Vs. Standard Products

A standard Clickbank product will earn you $40 for each sale you successfully refer. Let’s compare this with a recurring income product which pays you only $20 a month for each referral.

In the first month we will use the example of 10 sales of each, assuming you already know how to market products online. 10 sales of your $40 product gives you $400. But 10 sales of your membership product at $20 gives you only $200. So in the first month, you’re down with the affiliate recurring product.

In the second month you make the same amount of sales. So for the $100 product you make another $40 per sale which amounts to $400. You now have $800 in total commissions from the standard product (assuming 10 sales a month).

With the recurring income product you’ve made another 10 sales too, and make another $200. But this time you also make the $200 from your previous referrals – monthly recurring income.

The Power Of Compounding

Month 3 and the same applies. Another $400 from the standard product but with the recurring income product you make another $200, plus your existing memberships amounts to $400 from 20 previous sales. So you now make $600 in month 3 for the recurring income product. Month 4 and you make $200 + $600 = $800.

Each month the recurring income product compounds due to the recurring income; whereas the standard product always pays the same amount. By month 4 the recurring income product has overtaken the standard product in terms of commissions. Standard product earns $400 X 4 = $1600. Recurring income product $200 + $400 + $600 + $800 (each month adds on the previous members commissions). So the recurring product wins with $2000 total commissions over 4 months (all other things being equal).

Obviously over a long timescale you’ll see the affiliate recurring commissions overtake the standard commissions by a long distance due to the power of compounding commissions.

Recurring Commissions + High Ticket Products

Recurring affiliate commissions aren’t the only consideration here. There’s other strategies which can make your income rise too with affiliate marketing. High ticket digital products are one of the best ways to increase your earnings as an affiliate. Most affiliate products are valued below $100. Amazon, for example has thousands of products you can use as an affiliate marketer. However, they only pay 3-11% commissions. This means you’ll have to set a huge amount of products in order to make it pay you a proper income.

Digital products pay larger commissions and you’ll find the typical payout on Clickbank for their range of digital products are around 40% and upwards. But for a $100 product this till only means you’ll earn $40 per sale. Without recurring commission affiliate products, or high ticket items it’s much more difficult to market these lower paying products.

With a high ticket product range you have products which offer larger commissions on the larger valued products. Products ranging from $2500 to $20,000 which also offer 40% commissions can give you a huge payday. A $20,000 sale with a 40% commission means you can earn $8000 from a single sale! See SFM Digital Business System.

High Ticket, Recurring & Marketing

With a product range which offers both high ticket products and recurring commission products, you can also use paid marketing much more effectively. This gives you more opportunity to quickly build and scale up an online business. Without such a product range, and with lower valued items, you’ll need to build content and build an online business more slowly.

Here’s some more benefits of The SFM Digital Product range:

High ticket product range – a number of high ticket digital products
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
Recurring income membership products
Multi-tier sales – earn commissions from sales made by your referrals
A training and education program with community of support

How To Rank An Affiliate Website

Wondering how to rank an affiliate website? Whether you can rank an affiliate site or not will depend on a couple of main things:

The search competition for the keyword or phrase you’re targeting
How much time and effort you’re prepared to put in

Before going after a keyword domain name and building your site around it, it’s worth doing your research first. Will your site even have a chance of ranking at the top of Google? If not, it’s really not worth putting in months of effort just to see it fail. Of course Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo are also search engines too! Don’t they get a say? Most of the search traffic comes from Google, but yes you will get some traffic from other search engines too. And often with a lot less effort than with Google!

It’s worth mentioning that a keyword targeted domain name isn’t the be-all, end-all of building a niche site that ranks. But it can help to give you site a slight advantage.

How To Rank An Affiliate Website – Research

Before building an affiliate website it’s worth doing some research. (See keyword research for niche sites). You’ll want your topic to have enough monthly searches to make it worth your while. Ideally, choose a topic which is close to your heart. That way, you’ll be able to build a lot of content around your niche.

Choose something which you at least have an interest in. There’s nothing worse than building a site around a topic you have zero affection for. Remember you’ll be spending a lot of time creating content to rank your affiliate site. So you better make it enjoyable. See also highest paying affiliate niches for viable topics which are more likely to money.

I made the mistake of building a site around a topic I had no interest in. I was determined to rank a site and earn affiliate commissions from it. So I chose the topic of garlic harvesting after a fellow affiliate told me he had some success from a potato themed site! I got creative with my keyword research and came up with Whentoharvestgarlic.com.

I did rank my site after spending several months on it, but it was hard to monetise and I had to research every article I wrote, which wasn’t fun. After a few months I was burned out and didn’t want to work on it any more. It quickly fell off the search rankings and disappeared!

How To Rank An Affiliate Website – Competition

Choosing a topic is the hardest thing when it comes to ranking an affiliate website. With a competitive topic, such as affiliate marketing, you’ll have your work cut out. It’s tough in a competitive niche.

Expect a long road if you choose a topic which is competitive. On the other hand, less competitive niches (such as mushroom harvesting) are harder to monetise and aren’t evergreen. An evergreen niche will have traffic all year round. Whereas a topic like garlic harvesting is seasonal. So half the year you won’t even get any traffic!

Once you have chosen a topic to build a site around, use Google’s keyword planner to choose a keyword which is suitable. You can pick a domain name with your keyword in it. I have had some success with this strategy although it’s not entirely necessary. Google uses multiple data points to decide where to rank a site; a keyword in the domain name is just one of them. As to how much weight they put on it is anyone’s guess. I’m guessing very little but it can make a difference.

Ideally you want a keyword which gets traffic (use Google’s keyword planner) and has fewer competing websites/pages than most.

Purchase Your Domain Name & Hosting

Once you’ve picked out a suitable keyword, buy your domain name (with keyword in it) and build your site. I use WordPress to build my niche sites. Get an SEO plugin (I use Yoast SEO) and start creating content.

To find keyword ideas for your content go to your original “seed” keyword which you used to build your site. Type your keyword into the planner and you should see a bunch of other related keywords. Write content for each of these keywords in turn. Ideally, pick out those keywords which offer the least competition first. To find which these are, look at them on a normal Google search and under a phrase match for the same keywords (see image above and below).

The number you see below your search bar should give you some idea of the relative competition for these keywords. You’ll also be able to scroll down and see the kinds of websites and content which rank for these terms. As you do more of this, you’ll get a better feel for what works and what doesn’t. But it’s not an exact science and sometimes it’s just a little trial and error.

Ideally concentrate on writing great content. Try an outdo other content which is ranking highly. Google likes good content. If you spam your site full of affiliate links, don’t expect Google to look kindly on you. Ideally, leave your affiliate links off until you start generating some traction. Focus on providing value rather than selling your affiliate products.

Back linking To Your Content

Google uses a large number of data points to determine whether or not to rank a site. By choosing your keyword carefully before you start out, you’re giving yourself the best possible chance based on lower levels of competition. But this isn’t a fool proof strategy and you’ll still need to create some good content and build your site out.

If you concentrate on building good content, you’re also giving your site a better chance. Don’t rush content because it’s the next most important thing after your chosen topic/keywords. Use an SEO plugin to help you write content which is SEO friendly.

Build backlinks to your content from other satellite websites, article submission sites and through posting links on social media. You can also use Postplanner to automate submissions on social media. Nextscripts is another cool plugin which automatically shares your content throughout your social media sites when you post a new piece of content on your site.

It’s also worth using a social media share plugin, so people can easily share your content when they find it.

Keep Building

Depending on your chosen keyword, the relative competition and how hard and long you work at this strategy for, you can get some traffic developing within a few months. Don’t expect miracles though and expect to keep working for the longer term if you want to generate a healthy stream of traffic.

Work on link building and on content marketing every day for several months. Over time you should see some traffic. Turn traffic into leads with a good benefit driven lead magnet and then turn your leads into customers with a good email marketing strategy.

Think long term and keep going. That’s how to rank an affiliate website!

Alternatives To Amazon Affiliate Program

Alternatives to Amazon: affiliate program. There are many. Clickbank is an online digital product emporium. JVZoo offers multiple products you can sell as an affiliate and Click2Sell.com is another online affiliate platform which anyone can use. Amazon doesn’t offer the best commission rates either, as many affiliates are aware. They pay their affiliates between 3% and 11% commission. This is much less than many other programs which offer digital product commissions at 40% and above.

Of course Amazon’s program covers millions of products and Amazon is a household name. As such it’s got a lot of buyer confidence. It’s a good place to start for affiliates because it offers so much variety. I use Amazon’s affiliate program too, but I don’t earn much from it.

Digital products can be harder to sell for affiliates, even though they typically pay larger commissions. With Amazon, you know what you’re getting. But for the affiliate, Amazon’s not the best. Not really.

Alternatives To Amazon’s Affiliate Program

One of the main problems with Amazon’s affiliate program is the low value of the products and the low commission structure. With low payouts, it can be difficult to generate any traction with your affiliate links. You have to rely on cheap or free marketing strategies which generate traffic. The margin for profit is just far too low to use paid marketing unless you’re some kind of marketing genius!

So this limits you to building content and attempting to rank a website, or building video content and going for a ranking YouTube video. This can take a really long time too. So if you’re not happy to build content for months on end with no financial reward, you’re probably looking for another strategy besides Amazon.

Using paid marketing is the best strategy to generate traction online. You’ll need a high ticket sales funnel in order to make this a viable option. Without high commissions or high valued products, or both, it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and still be profitable. See highest paying affiliate programs list for programs to use with paid marketing.

Alternative To Amazon Affiliate Program – Recurring Commission

One of the best ways to build an affiliate marketing business online is through the use of recurring commission affiliate programs. With a recurring program you can benefit from ongoing commissions from previous sales you have made. Examples of recurring commissions programs are membership products, training and education tools and software products.

Even with a $10 recurring monthly commission, you can build a substantial income from only a few sales. With 50 sales that’s $500 a month. 100 sales would give you $1000 a month from work you’ve already done. Compare this to the Amazon affiliate model. With Amazon, you’re not rewarded for ongoing sales through your affiliate links. You only get paid once, and then Amazon gets to keep the customer, for life.

But if you choose a program which rewards you for members on a recurring commission basis, you can earn a lot more for a similar amount of effort. Recurring commission programs offer one of the best alternatives to Amazon affiliate program. Amazon simply can’t compete since physical products can’t offer recurring commissions!

The SFM Digital Business System

The SFM digital business system offers multiple alternatives to Amazon affiliate program. From a product range you can position yourself to earn commissions on a range of digital products and earn a variety of different commission levels.

At the basic membership level (Mentors All In), you can earn 101% commission on sales of the Mentors All In Package as a reseller. You can also earn commissions based on other sales within the product range. (See chart below)

You can earn commissions in a number of ways according to your level of investment in the program:

Subscription products – earn recurring commissions based on members you have referred ($20 per month for each basic member)
Multi-tier commissions are available at partner level and you’ll earn $10 monthly on member sales made by your referrals, plus 10% commissions on the high ticket items your members sell
A product range and built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.
High ticket items – high ticket products valued at $2500+ which also pay out 40% (according to your positioning).

At DEA (Digital Experts Academy) you can also earn the following commissions levels:

There’s also a number of trainings and products available to equip you with the skills needed to become an expert digital marketer along the way.

Why Digital Products Are Better

Digital products are far better than Amazon’s physical products for a number of reasons. Firstly, digital products offer far higher levels of commissions. Typically they will pay affiliates 40%+ on sales made compared to 3-11% through selling an Amazon product. Physical products carry more costs with them because they need to be manufactured and posted out. The manufacturer needs to make a profit as does the distributor (Amazon). So that leaves little left for the marketer/affiliate.

As already mentioned too, digital products can offer multiple payment strategies which physical products can’t. With certain recurring income affiliate programs, you still get paid months and years after making the original sale. Physical products simply can’t compete with this.

The best digital products to sell offer the greatest value. Mentorship programs and training and educational tools are often some of the priciest products on the internet. But they also offer the highest level of value. Wouldn’t you pay a high price to learn how to replace your income for the rest of your life? So would a lot of other people.

Learn more about how to build a profitable online business from anywhere. Access the free video series here.

Best Google Adsense Alternatives

If you’re struggling making money from Adsense, you may be looking for the best Google Adsense alternatives. When I started looking for way to earn online, I started out with Google’s Adsense program. The main problem I had was I just didn’t get enough traffic to make my efforts worthwhile.

Back in the early 2000’s I jumped from course to course learning various strategies to earn online. One of the courses I took was called The Keyword Academy which taught a Google Adsense strategy involving building content on a blog.

The strategy involved doing keyword research to find topics which were worth building content for. Some topics are hardly worth blogging for, since they don’t pay enough to make it worth your while. But other topics which pay more per click, are incredibly competitive.

Best Google Adsense Alternatives

So you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to earning revenue from Adsense! For example, clicks for “currency trading” are worth £11 in the UK on Adwords as per the Google’s keyword planner. As an Adsense user, you’ll get 51% or 68% revenue share of your advertising clicks. According to this article you’ll get 68% for content revenue share and 51% for search.

So, if you have a currency trading blog which is getting traffic (and that’s a challenge if you’re thinking of attempting it), you’ll earn £5.61 per click on search or £7.48 per click on content you own.

But that’s a site which is going to be really, really hard to get any traffic on because of the massive competition. With less competitive content, you’ll likely only earn cents/pennies on clicks, so again it’s often not worth the effort if you’re starting from scratch.

Just look at all the adverts for currency trading after a simple Google search for it too.

Not only is there massive competition for organic traffic (see the number at the top), but there’s also a huge number of advertisers bidding at the top of the page.

Best Google Adsense Alternatives – Less Competition

Going for less competition seems like a suitable alternative strategy. But when you do you’ll find your clicks are worth much less. Let’s choose a pretty low competition keyword such as “collage making”. A quick Google search shows that there’s no paid adverts running and much less competition than with the currency trading, which is to be expected.

So, with a long tail keyword, you could perhaps get some free traffic in this niche. But the problem then arises that you’ll only make a tiny amount for each advert click you receive. Even if you get your content ranking on Google, you’ll only make 68% of £0.77pence here in the UK. (See below). That’s £0.52 pence per click for content, £0.39 pence for search. So you’ll need a lot of traffic to make a living from such a site!

Best Google Adsense Alternatives – Affiliate Marketing

You’ve probably figured out that I’m not a massive fan of Google Adsense for generating income online. I did make some Adsense earnings after building hundreds of sites when I started out online several years ago. But I found another business model which seemed to work much better for me from the start. It’s called affiliate marketing and you’ve probably already heard of it.

An Adsense website can also be used for affiliate marketing too. Many Adsense users also use affiliate marketing for monetisation purposes. Affiliate marketing is better, in my opinion because you can earn a lot more and through using easier, better strategies.

Adsense is great if you’ve got a lot of traffic. But it majorly sucks if you don’t. And it’s really not working for the tiny income you’ll make from Adsense earnings; especially when Adsense can easily shut you down whenever it wants to as it did with a good friend of mine!

The other thing which affiliate marketing has over Adsense earnings is that there’s really only one way to earn from Adsense – through organic traffic. You obviously can’t pay for traffic because you won’t earn enough to cover your advertising. So you must earn traffic through building content and back links. This is incredibly difficult whether you’re using YouTube or Google to rank your content. You’ll need to be incredibly passionate about creating content over months and years to make any headway.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is A Better Alternative

Affiliate marketing offers a much better alternative to Adsense for a number of reasons. Firstly you can choose products and services which pay out much larger amounts that Adsense does. Ideally choose affiliate products which offer the following benefits:

Recurring commissions – why sell a product which only pays you once when there’s many which will give you the lifetime value of a customer?
High ticket commissions – With high value digital products you’ll make the most of your efforts with your online marketing strategies.
Multi-tier commissions – you can earn commissions based on sales made by other people you have referred to a company.
Lifetime value of a customer – affiliate companies like Amazon don’t offer you ongoing commissions from previously referred customers. But some companies do and also offer a product range. If your referral buys a product, even years after you’ve referred them, you get the credit.
A built in sales team – can help close sales on your behalf so you only need look after the front end marketing strategy you use.

See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Another reason this is a better alternative to Google Adsense is because you can also use a paid marketing strategy with a business model like this.

Scaling Of Affiliate Marketing Vs Scaling Adsense Model

With a business model like the one described above, it’s far easier to scale up your business to make more profit. Using a paid marketing strategy, you only need for your business to be profitable in order to start increasing your marketing budget and scaling up.

With the Adsense business model, of building more and more content, you can’t scale aggressively and you’re at the whim of Google’s organic results. However hard you work, your results will always be determined by whether Google ranks your content, and if they allow you to continue using their program!

Affiliate Marketing – Control

So with Adsense you’re kind of at the mercy of the big “G” in two ways:

They own the platform which pays you
They choose whether to rank you

You might even argue that Google’s interests may be contrary to yours, as an Adsense user.

You could say, their decisions determine whether, or how much you get paid too. And they can drop you whenever they what. With affiliate marketing though, you decide which products and services you want to market. You’re less obliged to a particular company or product with affiliate marketing.

Access Training & Resources

Anyone with a website can use affiliate marketing to monetise their blog. If you already have a lot of traffic, you should look for affiliate products and services which “marry” up with your content. Ideally look for products which would suit your website visitors. Build an email list from your website and promote your products and services through your list.

For more information about affiliate marketing, and for access to a digital product suite and an online training and education platform, click on the image below to access a free video series.