Category: Affiliate Marketing Mentor Blog

Are you wondering how to make money online internationally? One of the most popular ways of making money over the internet is through affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need your own products or service because you’ll use other people’s products.

By referring people to products and services on the internet, you can make money based on the things you sell. Affiliate marketers promote and sell products through a variety of strategies:

1. Creating content. Much like this article and leading website visitors to products and services they might find helpful.
2. Through email marketing. Building a list of email subscribers and promoting products to their subscribers.
3. Using paid marketing strategies to send people to products. (Directly or through an email marketing campaign).
4. Video marketing – YouTube’ers create and upload videos to YouTube to attract an audience and sell products/services
5. Social media platforms can also be used by affiliate marketers to build an audience and promote products.

How To Make Money Online Internationally – Affiliate Marketing

Are there other ways to make money online internationally? Yes there are of course. But affiliate marketing offers one of the most popular and best strategies for good reason. It works. The growth of digital shopping internationally far surpasses the traditional marketplace; which is declining as a result. Forecasts project e-commerce sales are expected to overtake in-store sales by 2024.

This offers affiliate marketers a growing opportunity to place themselves between a product and a customer. Anyone can now learn how to leverage the power of the internet to generate an income.

Because the internet is international, anyone can use their laptop to sell affiliate products from anywhere globally. It doesn’t matter where you live. Provided that you have a laptop and internet connection, you can become an affiliate marketer.

How To Make Money Online Internationally – Selling Products Online

Affiliate marketers sell all kinds of products in many different ways. Some affiliates sell products from Amazon. Others sell courses and software to help people build online businesses. Not all affiliate products are alike so choosing an affiliate product to sell is something to consider carefully.

For example, Amazon pays affiliates between 3-11% commissions on products they sell. Digital products, on the other hand pay much more; often between 40-60%. Then, there’s the commission structure to consider when becoming an affiliate too. With certain affiliate products you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales. These are products such as memberships and software products. See recurring income affiliate programs.

If you think affiliate marketing is oversaturated, you’d be wrong, simply because there’s so many avenues you can take as an affiliate.

Some of the best affiliate products offer multiple payout structures such as:

1. Recurring income – from memberships and software type products. (Often these kinds of products are used by business owners to help them run their businesses)
2. High commission affiliate products – (earn more per sale with high value digital trainings and mentorship programs). See high ticket affiliate marketing.
3. Multi-tier commissions – with multi tier commissions you can earn income from sales made by your referrals.
4. A built in sales team and range of digital products – Digital products typically pay much more to affiliates. Using one with a built in sales team means you can focus on front-end marketing rather than “selling”.

A product range and multiple earning strategies can give you a higher earning potential than a physical product which only pays you once. Amazon doesn’t offer affiliates the option to benefit from the lifetime value of a customer. The SFM Digital Business System, for example, does exactly that.

Making Money Through Automation

Automation is a big part of affiliate marketing. With countless products to choose from and multiple marketing strategies to use, there’s huge scope to make an online business an automated profit generating “machine”.

Selling other people’s products means you don’t have to personally handle products yourself. You also don’t need to even talk to customers. Affiliates can therefore concentrate their efforts on only the front end marketing strategies. They simply drive customers towards the relevant product/s for that particular customer.

With automated marketing strategies, an online business can grow well into six and seven figure incomes, given the right products and methods. Using paid marketing strategies, once you’re profitable using a sales funnel, you can increase your marketing budget and make more sales.

With content marketing strategies (e.g. this article), you’re leaving a digital “footprint” with each piece of content you create. This strategy takes longer to generate traction with than paid marketing. But over time and given the effort, you’ll start to see sales coming in. Your digital footprint should lead potential customers to the products they want and need. When you get this right, you’ll see automated sales coming in, from the work you’ve done previously.

Training & Support

Building an online business using the affiliate marketing model is not easy. It does take time and effort just like with a traditional business model. However, an online business model can run on autopilot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It uses no business premises and you don’t need any staff. As such, you can start an online business for much less than you would need to start a traditional business.

One of the best things you can invest in, with an online affiliate business is your knowledge. Like any skill, you get out what you put in. If you’re serious about investing in your future and getting the right tools, training and knowledge to learn affiliate marketing properly, access a free video series through this link.

Fancy learning CPA marketing from the experts? If you’re an affiliate marketer or have your own business, CPA marketing can help you grow your business exponentially. So what is CPA marketing? CPA stands for cost per action, or it can also mean cost per acquisition. With certain direct response marketing you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, or for a number of impressions shown to your audience.

This is very useful for marketers because they can control where their adverts show up. Ideally you only want your advert to show up for someone who is specifically targeted by you, according to your own specific criteria. This criteria will of course depend on your unique business, location and style of marketing.

For example, if you own a shoe shop in Greenwich, you might choose to only show your adverts to people who live in that specific town. People who live a long distance away, or even in another country are hardly likely to visit Greenwich just to buy shoes! So you’ll save money on your campaign by targeting those who are more likely to visit your shoe shop.

Learning CPA From The Experts

You might go another step too and target searches for “shoe shop” within your local area. You can do this through Google’s Adwords program or the formerly Bing ads (now Microsoft Advertising). CPA marketing goes beyond this too. Some CPA platforms can allow marketers to target their potential customers by:

1. Age
2. Sex
3. Location
4. Interests
5. Connections
6. Income
7. Online browsing activities
8. Online buying activities
9. and many other data points collected through online actions

Facebook, for example, gathers information on people through their likes, connections, interests, purchases, dislikes and posts. There’s huge amounts of data available through the platform dating back years. All this information can make advertisers jobs much easier. Used intelligently, this information can be harnessed through CPA marketing to find the perfect customers for your particular business or product.

Learning CPA From The Experts – Data Collection

Not only can online marketers control who sees their advertisements, but they can also collect their own data based on who clicks on their adverts and subsequently takes some action. An action could be signing up to an email list or making a purchase. When the marketer collects enough data on these kinds of actions over time, they are in a better position to determine what kinds of people are most likely to make a purchase, or opt-in to their email marketing list.

This is why tracking is such an important part of learning CPA. See also PPC affiliate marketing for beginners.

Many new businesses try CPA marketing on a platform such as Adwords, burn through some money and quit completely! They assume that their marketing efforts have failed. Or that perhaps the strategy doesn’t work. But this is a flawed view. They simply haven’t collected enough data yet or they made a mistake somewhere in their marketing campaign.

Starting Small & Collecting Data

When you start an advertising campaign using one of the many platforms, it’s advisable to start small if you don’t know what you’re doing. Doing so will ensure that your learning curve doesn’t involve massive losses and/or wasted impressions on your adverts to the wrong audience. It is likely to happen that you’ll make some mistakes.

If after a certain time your advertising isn’t generating any sales, you know to quit that particular campaign. This can be difficult in the first instance of learning CPA marketing; but think of it as a marathon rather than a sprint.

A good starting point is to use Google’s Adwords platform and create a specific keyword for your advert. The keyword you use will depend on your own particular business and service/product. Let’s use the previous example of owning a shoe shop in Greenwich.

Shoe Shop Example

Start out with Google’s free keyword planner tool and look for suitable keywords which relate to your shop and what you sell. Target only the country you are selling in, so as not to accidentally include other countries (and wasting money). If your business is global, you can of course ignore this and set location to all locations, removing any specific country.

“Shoe shop greenwich” is a suitable keyword for your store if this meets your criteria. It only gets 110 searches per month, but this is a suitable starting point. Next log in to your Adwords platform and build an advert which targets this specific keyword. Then, your advert should show up when someone targets your specified keyword.

Of course people in Greenwich probably won’t always type Greenwich along with their search. They will likely type in local shoe shop instead, or just “shoe shop”. Google, or their preferred search engine will give them local solutions automatically. But you can specify when creating your adverts to only show them within a certain radius of your shop. You can also create a radius targeting around your physical address, if you have one for your business.

Learning CPA marketing from the experts does take time and you need to experiment with a single platform until you become more familiar. Once you have run a few campaigns you can look at the data which should give you some insight into your perfect target market.

Look at the image below which shows some data on impressions of a campaign I’ve been running. As you can see, the higher age range shows a cheaper cost per lead. Hence, I’ve turned off the more expensive targeting and focused instead on the cheaper lead costs.

The more data you collect, the more you will see where your perfect customer “avatar” resides in terms of their demographics: age, location, marital status, etc.

The Customer Avatar – Your Perfect Customer

The customer avatar is the perfect customer who relates to your service or product the best. They are the people who will buy your products and become a lifetime fan! Defining your customer avatar can save you a huge amount of wasted effort when it comes to CPA because it will help you determine how to target your perfect audience in the best possible way.

Consider who your product/service serves the best. What are their problems, pains and frustrations which your product solves? As you get closer to understanding your perfect customer, you’ll be able to create your “customer avatar” and zone in on:

1. Their likes/dislikes
2. Where they live in the world
3. Whether they are married/single
4. Do they have a family/children?
5. How old is your typical customer?
6. Do they have a pet?
7. Do they own their own house?
8. What’s their income bracket?
9. And so on..

The more information you can gather on your customer avatar, the better able you will be to zone into them with your CPA marketing campaign.

Start Learning CPA Marketing & Build An Online Business

Whether you have your own business already, or want to build an online business from scratch, you can start learning marketing strategies through an online training and education platform and community.

You can start learning CPA marketing from the experts through an online business platform and training resource. Here’s me on a webinar masterminding with other marketers.

Learn how to market products and services through various online marketing strategies, including CPA, and join an online training and mentorship community.

Start learning CPA marketing from the experts. Access online digital training resource through this link.

You’ve probably encountered some affiliate marketing problems if you’ve been doing it for any length of time. When I started learning affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s, I encountered more than my fair share of them! I was originally trying to sell my own ebook and after struggling to make any sales. I realised that I wasn’t getting any traffic to my website. This, is a common problem for affiliates. No traffic = no sales!

So I put myself on one of those “earn money online” courses in an attempt to learn how to market my ebook. I quickly changed gear having found products which were far better than my ebook – and which would pay far more. This was just the beginning of my affiliate marketing problems!

Affiliate Marketing Problems

One of the first courses I took was by a guy called Peter Lexis. I promoted his online earning course after going though his training. You can read about some of the other courses I took over a period of a few years in my digital profit course review. It worked, and for the first time I thought I had “arrived” and was going to make it as an affiliate.

I ran an Adwords advert to a landing page where I used Peter’s video to promote his course. People signed up to an email list and entered into a series of emails which was about 10 emails long (1 per day).

I started making sales and was just about to increase my marketing budget when I got my Adwords account shut down! Back then it was pretty serious and I couldn’t get it back no matter how hard I tried. I was devastated; so I threw in the towel for a bit. But I knew that I had to keep going or I’d be stuck trading time for money forever!

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Next Stop, Organic Traffic

After a while of working crappy jobs again, and getting the odd contract in TV and film, I started again. This time, since my Adwords account was shut down I choose another route; organic marketing. I joined a course called The Keyword Academy. They taught how to rank websites and make money through Google’s Adsense program.

The idea was to pick a niche and use a spreadsheet to determine the value of each click of your adverts within the niche. Then, according to the advertising value you can potentially obtain, and the relative competition of competing websites, you would make a decision to build a niche website. The Keyword Academy is no longer operating so don’t bother looking! Needless to say I spent a long time working on websites and got nowhere!

I did see some tiny revenue from my sites. But overall this was a dead loss. Google’s algorithm changes had a big effect on sites like these and most of my sites didn’t rank at all, much less make any money. I did spend several months on this strategy though. However, it’s difficult to maintain a strategy if you don’t fully believe in it. Support wasn’t a strong suit of courses back then. So once again I dropped off and had some time out!

George Brown – Google Sniper

George Brown’s Google Sniper 1.0 was one of the courses I bought and it was around $50 or so for access. I did learn a useful strategy here it has to be said. I went on to create several websites which ranked in the top of the search results for their main keywords.

Plus, I made some websites for people who benefitted from a high ranking. But these were mainly city based companies where the keywords contained the city name and main business keyword. Still, it’s a useful strategy which has benefitted me to this day.

I even built the website for my Kung Fu school using this tactic. Fortunately there’s little competition for a Kung Fu school in Bradford so it helped me pick up many students over the years.

But, I had hoped to rank a site and make affiliate commissions from Google Sniper. And since there was so much competition from Google, this was nearly impossible, or so I found anyway. I did make an affiliate sale from one of the sites I built called tedsheds.net – selling shed plans using a Clickbank affiliate product. However, I had no success like George seemed to have from his screenshots!

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Support

Of of the main affiliate marketing problems is lack of support. What all these courses had in common was the level of support, or rather the lack of it. Despite attempting many strategies I was still pretty disappointed with my level of affiliate marketing success.

I had experience a lot of problems but had also made a lit of mistakes I wasn’t aware of in the beginning:

1. Lack of focus – jumping around from one strategy to another without any continuity
2. Being a busy fool – I would spend far too long on making websites look good rather than attracting traffic, for example. Or on the activities I enjoyed but weren’t profitable.
3. Shiny object syndrome – the next course always promised more than the last – so I was perpetually changing direction
4. Stuck in learning mode – I enjoyed watching videos and learning – but I was spending too little time on implementing the right strategies (lack of knowledge)
5. Lack of faith in what I was doing – because there was no support, I simply worked for months without getting any results and then lost faith in what I was doing.

See also 23 affiliate marketing mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes – Getting Help

I had been at the affiliate marketing “business” for some time by this point, and in 2014 found another online course. By this time I was pretty burned out and very sceptical. This was to work against me too (being sceptical)! But I bit the bullet and bought another course. I was desperate and my working life was completely miserable as was my personal life. So I had a big reason to make it work!

I saw a video of the guy below, Stuart Ross and he struck a chord with what I was struggling with.

I joined The SFM Mentors in 2014 knowing near nothing about them. It was just on instinct and desperation. Despite being very sceptical, I knew I had to do something. Life had been getting me down and nothing seemed to work. I was juggling a number of jobs and attempting to build a career as a stunt performer. But I didn’t get enough work to meet the bills, whatever I seemed to do.

I got an invite to a meet up locally in the UK and was rather surprised to find real people at the event! I also went to a meeting organised by the founders Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek where I was able to meet the founders of the company Stuart and Jay.

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Support

The SFM Mentors offered something which most of the courses I took didn’t – support. I was able to connect with other affiliates and actually meet up in person for the first time ever. Plus, Stuart and Jay regularly hold webinars with their members offering support and advice.

What was most useful were some of the groups I was able to join through Facebook. Here’s a picture of one of the mastermind sessions where we discuss a number of affiliate marketing problems and can ask mentors for help.

Affiliate Marketing – Business Model

One of the biggest affiliate marketing problems I faced was choosing the wrong business model. I would use eBay and Amazon products which only paid out tiny commissions. Amazon’s commissions range from 3-11% for their affiliates. With digital products you can expect to earn 40%+ commissions on any products you sell.

My marketing method too was mostly blogging and writing articles. This strategy is incredibly time consuming and laborious. Having my Adwords account shut down led me to think I only had organic marketing left. But in fact there’s a few other marketing options I could have chosen.

The SFM Digital Business System has a number of advantages over most affiliate programs:

1. High ticket affiliate products mean you can earn more per sale, scale up more easily and access paid marketing platforms which are out of reach with low value products.
2. Recurring commission affiliate products let you earn ongoing commissions from previous sales.
3. A range of up-sells mean you can benefit from later sales purchased by your existing customers.
4. A built in sales team helps close sales on your behalf – even months or years after your initial referral
5. Multi-tier commissions let you earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals.

Marketing Strategy

One of my biggest affiliate marketing problems was my marketing strategy. I wrote and wrote and wrote! But nothing happened, for years! That’s because my content wasn’t getting found. It was simply like throwing a business card into a well!

Blogging can work of course, but it’s definitely a slow strategy. Over time it compounds and the work you’ve done previously can add up to traffic, leads and sales. But you’ll usually only see slow progress unless you get a good link from a powerful influencer or site with a lot of traffic.

With a range of digital products though, there’s more advertising platforms available to you. Especially if you position yourself at the top tier of the business model and can benefit from high ticket commissions on the most expensive products.

Modelling Success – The End Of Your Affiliate Marketing Problems

Anyone can succeed at something given a proven roadmap and through taking the right steps and refusing to quit. Most people will quit affiliate marketing because they don’t get the results they want. See why affiliate marketing does not work. But in the early days, it’s all “feedback” and most feedback will be no sales. It just depends on how you take that feedback – as a challenge or a problem.

Only when you keep going through the difficulties will you see some results. Then, using pareto’s principle (the 80/20 rule), you can focus on what is working and drop the rest. At this stage you’re already well ahead, even with minimal results. When you have some positive feedback, you know what works. But until you get there it’s can be a hard uphill struggle.

To shortcut this process it’s a good idea to model success. To do this it’s worth investing in a mentor and a program which can help you learn and grow.

Access A Mentorship Program & Model Success

You can access a free video series to learn more about the SFM Mentors by clicking on the image below. You’ll meet one of my personal mentors Stuart Ross who will explain more about the digital business you can use to build an online income starting from scratch and with no prior experience.

In this affiliate marketing 101 pdf I’m going to share some of what (I consider to be) the most important aspects of affiliate marketing. Download this article on pdf format here.

Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and earn a commission based on the sales. There’s many ways for affiliates to do this. Some build websites, others spend money on advertising. Most affiliates have an email list and sell products through their list.

There’s many products which affiliates can choose from too. Some products are physical products, like you’d find on Amazon. Others are digital products which can be accessed from anywhere in the world from a laptop and given an internet connection. For the affiliate, choosing products and marketing strategies can seem simple. But that choice can result in success or failure. And your choices as an affiliate are pretty important and are built on your knowledge of the subject.

Affiliate Marketing 101 PDF – Building Foundations

Therefore knowledge is pretty important for the affiliate marketer. When I started out learning affiliate marketing I thought my enthusiasm would make up for my lack of knowledge! It didn’t sadly and I went through several years of struggling. I jumped from one course to another, never really getting anywhere. I was broke too which didn’t help and I avoided buying expensive courses and using paid marketing.

But the biggest thing going against the lonely affiliate is lack of knowledge – hands down. What you don’t know is always working against you, and as hard as you work, unless you’re following sound advice and a proven strategy, you can easily go down a rabbit hole and never get anywhere.

Think of your knowledge as an affiliate as your foundations. If you want to build a shed, or even a small cottage, you only need small foundations. But if you want to build a skyscraper, you wouldn’t use those same foundations. If you just want to place an affiliate banner on your website, and hope for the best, you might have a “shed”. But if you want to make a living from your affiliate business, you’ll need to put more work into building your foundations.

Affiliate Marketing 101 pdf – The Biggest Challenge

Anyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing which is why the failure and drop out rate is so high. The barriers to entry are much lower than a traditional “bricks and mortar” type of business. You only really need your laptop and an internet connection to get started. I would also suggest purchasing an email autoresponder and getting training too as the bottom line of what you really need.

Once you’ve set up your sales funnel and have your products ready to sell with your affiliate links in place, you need to learn marketing. This is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even with a “done for you sales funnel“, marketing will be your biggest problem.

There’s many programs and courses which will give you all the tools and products you need. But it’s then your job to actually make it all work. And this means getting good at the marketing side of things. Your marketing strategy will depend on what you can afford to do and the time you have to do it. It will also depend on your aspirations for your affiliate business. So let’s have a look at what business models will allow you to do what kind of marketing.

Affiliate Marketing 101 PDF – Products

You can choose from thousands of products on the internet as an affiliate marketer. Some pay you only 1% commission! Others can offer up to 101%! Choose wisely! Physical products tend to pay out less in commissions. With a physical product you have manufacturing costs, postage and handling costs to consider.

With digital products, such as a video course, you’ve only got the costs such as website hosting. Delivery can be done digitally (over the internet). Manufacturing costs are minimal once the product is created and so costs for selling digital products are pretty negligible in comparison. As such, product owners can pass more of the profit to affiliates to encourage them to advertise those products and make sales.

What this means to you, the affiliate is that digital products pay more, a lot more. Certain digital products also offer other benefits too:

1. Recurring income – membership products and software products offer ongoing commissions if you choose recurring commission affiliate programs.
2. High ticket products pay up to 40% on products valued up to $20k+
3. If you choose a product range you benefit from ongoing sales to your existing customers
4. A built in sales team can close sales on your behalf.
5. Multi-tier commissions allow you to earn from sales made by your referrals

With a good sales funnel like this you can use pretty much any marketing strategy – according to the products you place in your “digital store”. At the highest level you can benefit from high ticket sales and multi-tier commissions. See SFM Digital Business System.

If, on the other hand your product range doesn’t include high value digital items, your choice of marketing strategies might be more limited.

Marketing Strategies

To drive qualified leads into your sales funnel you’ll need a marketing strategy. Blogging, paid marketing, social media marketing and video marketing are all forms of marketing. As an affiliate you’ll need to choose a strategy according to your own specific products or product range.

With low value products, like you’d find on Amazon, which only pay out 1-11% commissions; you’ll need a cheaper strategy. With a high ticket sales funnel (see below) you can use the more expensive advertising platforms such as YouTube for your marketing strategy.

Your Mindset

There’s a lot of things to navigate while learning affiliate marketing. There’ll be a lot of opportunity to doubt what you’re doing and of course quit too! When your friends and relatives are doubting you, and you’re doubting yourself, it’s easier to quit than carry on!

Ideally get yourself a mentor and surround yourself with other affiliates by joining a community and getting help. Other affiliates can help hold you accountable and keep you going when things get though, which they undoubtably will (get tough that is!).

Set goals to keep yourself moving forwards and celebrate the small wins. Don’t focus on things which frustrate you. Learn strategies which keep you buoyant and forward focused. Mental coping strategies are important for affiliates because they work by themselves for a lot of the time. It’s useful to set up positive habits which you can stick to even when you’re having a bad day.

For more help and advice and to join an online community and access an all in one business system click this link.

To download this affiliate marketing 101 pdf document click here.