Category: Affiliate Marketing Mentor Blog

Even the most lucrative affiliate programs won’t make you any money unless you sell the product. For beginner affiliates this can be especially hard. Struggling and not making sales is a common problem even with the best affiliate program you can find. But lets come back to the actual selling later. There’s a few strategies which the most lucrative affiliate programs share.

For starters look at the various commission structures which are paid to affiliates throughout the industry. Take a look at Amazon, for example. They pay only 1-11% commissions on their products. Most affiliates know this isn’t great. A low commission structure not only means a small payout, it also limits your marketing strategies.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – Digital

Digital products offer the most lucrative affiliate programs for a couple of reasons. They tend to pay out more than physical products – from 40%-100%. Digital products can do this because they’re not paying delivery or manufacturing costs. Once a product is made, it can be sold again and again. With physical products there’s more constraints: postage, handling, manufacturing etc.

But not all digital products are alike either. Some are “throwaway” courses which offer limited value. Clickbank is a favourite with many new affiliate marketers but Clickbank products often only lie in the $100 price range. Although this can be good with a high profit of 40%+, there’s other considerations with the most lucrative affiliate programs. Lifetime value of the product is one consideration.

If you’re only making a standard commission, that really doesn’t matter to you much. But if you can earn recurring commissions on subscriptions and membership products, it’s far more important.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – Recurring Commissions

Recurring commissions are a huge key to making affiliate marketing pay. With only a few recurring commissions you can make far more than even with the highest value products (more on this later). Clickbank does offer products with recurring income. You’re better off choosing these kinds of products too. Why would you spend lots of time and energy only to make a single commission? Especially when a similar effort can make you a recurring income.

The best recurring income products to choose are those which offer huge value. Ideally choose products you would use yourself too and which offer a lifetime value to their customers. Online business tools are a good idea because successful businesses require software products which help them operate. Here’s a few online business tools which offer recurring income:

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

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – High Ticket Products

High ticket products are obviously included in this list of most lucrative affiliate programs. A high ticket product is one with a large price tag – ideally over $500. With a $100 digital products you can earn $40 on a sale. But with a $1000 product you can earn $400 with the same level of commission. You might believe that it’s going to be much more difficult selling a high ticket products however. But remember that you have a global audience with digital products. The difference in work involved compared to profit will be minimal.

For the same profit, you would need to sell ten times that of the lower value product. It’s not ten times more difficult to sell a high ticket item online. Keeping in mind the earlier level of commissions comparing digital and physical products, it makes sense to also use digital products. However, there are physical products you can sell which are high ticket. Take a look at Hammacher Schlemmer. Some of their physical products value up to $190,000 and you can earn an 8% commission on that if you make the sale.

See also highest paying affiliate programs list.

Types Of Product & Market

But not everyone is in the market for a $190,000 flying hovercraft! I’d love one of them myself but sadly don’t have that kind of budget! The market for this kind of toy is smaller than for some other kinds of high ticket items. One of the biggest markets is for online business mentorship and training. There’s many more people who would pay to learn how to earn online and how to build a profitable business of their own.

If you consider the number of people hating their jobs and looking for an alternative, and compare this number with those looking for a flying hovercraft (or similar toy), there’s a huge difference. Online business mentorship is a growing industry too, which is why it can be one of the most lucrative niches online.

Multi-tier Sales

A multi-tier affiliate program offers to pay affiliates for the sales made by their referrals. This means as you bring people into a program, you can earn income based on their success. Multi-tier sales is another income stream you can benefit from once your online business is working well. See SFM Digital Business System.

The SFM Digital Business System has all of the benefits listed above: digital products, subscriptions products, high ticket products and also multi-tier sales. It offers one of the most lucrative business opportunities online. See SFM Mentors for more details.

Product Promotion & Marketing

Without a good promotion and marketing strategy, even the most lucrative affiliate program won’t make you any money. If cashflow is the “lifeblood” of an affiliate business, marketing is its “heartbeat”. Without a suitable marketing strategy, your business is doomed, even with the best most lucrative affiliate program there is!

How you decide to market your business will depend on your business system. With a low paying physical product from the likes of Amazon, for example, you’ll be severely limited to the marketing strategies you can employ. With a business system like that of The SFM Digital Business System, you’ll be able to use paid marketing more easily; especially if you invest in the top level products.

Take a look at the six figure (plus) funnel above. With a product range and high ticket items which payout up to 40% commission, you can use paid marketing strategies to drive leads into your funnel. When you can make an $8000 commission on a sale of a $20,000 product, you’re much more likely to be able to make a profit running paid advertising.

Compare this strategy to selling low value items from Amazon. A kitchen item worth $100/£100 would only make you around $8/£8.

Promotion Methods – Fast and Slow

To promote the product above from Amazon will be more difficult because you’ll struggle making a profit while running paid advertising. This means you’ll likely have to use other, cheaper or free strategies. This article, for example is a cheap marketing strategy. Blogging is also a slow process.

Paid marketing is much faster and much more scalable. So if you want an online business to be profitable quickly, expect to spent a lot of money initially. If, on the other hand you can’t afford the high value digital products, you may have to work a different strategy with your marketing.

Summary – Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

To sum up the most lucrative affiliate programs offer one or all of the following:

1. Digital products – which pay more commission (Usually 40% compared to 3-11% for physical products)
2. Recurring income products – such as memberships, software and subscriptions. Recurring commissions may be small but they add up and give you an income rather than just a single “one-off” commission.
3. High ticket items – don’t go for cheap items because you’ll need to sell in hug quantities. Instead pick high value items and your efforts will go further in terms of income
4. Multi-tier sales – a multi-tier sale gives you a commission based on your referrals’ success promoting products from a range.

See SFM Digital Business System which contains all of the above and choose your membership commission level according to the level you can invest at.

How you market your product range is key. Without a good marketing strategy, even a highly lucrative business system like this one will fail to earn any money at all! Access a free video series to learn more about The SFM business, access a training and education platform and join an online community.

Are you looking for Clickbank marketing secrets? When I first started out with affiliate marketing I used Clickbank. Clickbank can be a great source of digital products which fit your niche. And if you already have a following, it’s a great way to monetise your existing audience.

Still, Clickbank can be tough too; especially if you’re just starting out. There’s plenty of competition out there for organic content; so it can be difficult to get noticed. Here’s a few simple Clickbank marketing secrets which can work if you’re just starting out.

Clickbank Marketing Secrets – Clickbank Engine

Cbengine is a useful place to start when choosing your Clickbank products. It shows you the top Clickbank products according to any criteria you search for.

I find using recurring income affiliate programs works well when you start making sales. With recurring income products, your work keeps paying you even after the initial sale. It’s a smart way to do affiliate marketing. For what amounts to the same amount of work, you can earn a lot more over time with a recurring income product. So if you’re going to be working selling any product, why not choose those which reward you more?

Even with recurring income products from the likes of Clickbank though, you’ll have to focus on cheaper or free marketing strategies. Unless you have a high ticket program to offer, it’s going to be difficult getting traction with paid marketing strategies. See Clickbank autopilot for some cheap paid marketing strategies.

Clickbank Marketing Secrets – Long Tail Traffic

It’s tough finding free traffic from Google with most keywords nowadays. However, one strategy you can use is to find long tail keywords which offer less competition than the rest. You can also build niche websites around certain keywords and also build city specific websites which rank on the top!

With long tail keywords you can use Google’s keyword tool to build content targeted around your main search criteria. Look for those keywords which relate specifically to your product. Good ones to look for are review, pdf, loopholes, download, blueprint and other such obscure words which offer much less competition.

If you choose a specific product to promote, try typing in your product keywords into the keyword planner and see what comes up. Compare the results with a quick Google search to see how competitive your keywords are.

Let’s take Synergy Spanish – a Learn Spanish product on Clickbank. Look for suitable keywords which come up when you type in the main keywords into the Google keyword planner.

Then use these keywords to compare the relative competition you find on Google search with and without “quotes”.

Find the lowest competing keywords which are both targeted to your product and which offer the least competition. Practice writing content and building niche websites around these keywords.

This takes some practice and your content needs to be better than the competition. But it’s a strategy which can work if you keep at it for long enough.

Using YouTube & Clickbank

YouTube can be used in a similar way with Clickbank products too. When searching YouTube for your product name and keywords, you’ll find keyword suggestions come up in the search box. Create videos and title them with keywords based on these ones. Then you’ll already have people searching for your videos.

In YouTube you’ve also got a lot of space to fill in a description of your videos. Use this space as much as possible with your blog post content and link to your written content. It’s a good way to double up on your organic content to create both a video and a blog post at the same time.

Build A Niche Website

Building a niche website can work wonders with Clickbank products. Ideally, find a product you want to build a site around. Choose a topic which you have a passion for or interest in. That way you can keep creating content in that niche without needing it to be a huge drama! If you choose a topic you’re not interested in, it’s much more difficult to keep going.

You can build a niche website by choosing a domain name which relates to your main topic. It can also have some major seed keywords in it. This site, for example has a few important keywords in it which helps it rank for those specific keywords. You’ll still need to create some great content of course but a keyword focused domain can help you with the search engines to get some free traffic.

For more on niche websites see create niche websites and micro niche affiliate marketing.

In this affiliate marketing blueprint pdf, I’m going to share some of the many trials and tribulations I’ve had over several years as an affiliate marketer. Before I started learning affiliate marketing I had tried many jobs. I had even worked as a stunt performer in film and TV, landing jobs on Xmen First Class, Bad Education and many other TV and film roles.

But the work was sporadic and the constant insecurity of work and numerous jobs I filled in with led me to look for a better solution. Trading time for money in a job always has its limitations; even a dream job like being a stuntman!

I looked to the internet as a means to overcome my financial problems and work instability. First I looked to Forex marketing. My father has showed an interest and bought a course which he let me borrow. After 2 years studying Forex marketing I decided I simply didn’t have the funds needed to keep going. I decided I would return to it when I could afford a trading bank I wasn’t afraid to lose!

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF

I shifted to an eBay business where I could buy and sell items from eBay. You can read about the method I used here. It allowed me to start small and slowly purchase more valuable items to re-sell for profit. But over time I realised that this business model wasn’t going anywhere. Trapped on my computer most of the day, I was only making a small income.

There had to be a better way to earn an income online, I thought. I just didn’t know what it was then. So, I decided to create my own ebook since it was an ebook purchase which led me to the eBay business model. It seemed so simple to sell an ebook over the internet; no physical delivery was necessary. It was just an automated downloadable product. People could buy it online and access it immediately. I just needed to create the book and set up a website – so I thought!

6 months later and I had done a huge amount of work. I’d built a website and created an ebook. But what I didn’t know was how to get people to my website.

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF

So I put myself on a few marketing courses which promised to teach me how to earn money online. The idea to was use the knowledge to sell my own ebooks. However, I soon realised that there was a better way – affiliate marketing.

My own ebook was a short guide to tell people how to become a stuntman! This has a much smaller audience of course than those wanting to learn how to earn online. So I abandoned my “how to be a stuntman” ebook and started learning how to sell other people’s products online instead.

My first major win was with a course offered by a guy names Peter Lexis. I promoted his affiliate course and ran a paid marketing campaign through Google Adwords. Just at the point of starting to increase my marketing budget, I had my Adwords account shut down. I wasn’t to get it back for years.

This was a huge blow and just at the point of getting somewhere. But I carried on and focused for a while on content marketing – a free marketing strategy which I would continue to this day.

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF

Affiliate marketing is an amazing business which can work miracles in your life. But, it can also become a monstrous disaster which can create untold misery too! Ultimately it depends on you. The key to affiliate marketing, as with everything, is to look at the bumps in the road as learning experiences rather than failures.

Stephen McCranie: ‘The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.’

As with anything in life, your mindset will determine your outcome before you even begin. Had I known how difficult affiliate marketing would have been, I think I would have attempted it anyway – simply because an easy journey has nothing to teach you. A difficult journey can give you an insight into your self. And this is the beauty of the affiliate journey.

And of course there’s the money too! Most people come into affiliate marketing to make money.

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF – Mistakes I’ve Made

Mistakes can’t be avoided in affiliate marketing. You’re going to make mistakes. But there’s some mistakes you can swerve by getting help. Mistakes are healthy provided you learn from them. Most of affiliate marketing is getting things wrong and learning from them. Over time, you learn to focus on the actions which generate results.

Most affiliates give up too early because they try a few things, nothing happens and they give up. Don’t be that person. Be the one who learns from the “failures”. Don’t see them as failures. See them as feedback and you’re already ahead of many who will drop out.

Get help from an online community. It took me years to find this online community of coaches and mentors. Getting help and following a well structured procedure will save you years of frustration and struggle!

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF – Business Models

Affiliate marketing can be fraught with problems because there’s so many ways to do it. If you have no direction or help, you can easily spend years finding this out for yourself, as I did! Knowing the right business model is a major key. Without this knowledge, no amount of hard work will help. You have to work hard and smart to make affiliate marketing work for you. You can do this by choosing the right products and the right marketing methods.

Your marketing strategy will depend on your own particular circumstance of course. If you can afford to use paid marketing, do so. But start out carefully and use a good business model. What’s a good model?

Firstly let’s look at a bad business model. Amazon is a place many newbie affiliate marketers start out. Why not? There’s a tonne of product to choose from and lots of possibility to build a niche in almost any area right? But, Amazon only pays affiliates somewhere between 3% and 11% commissions. So if you spend months building a niche website, for example, and it actually works and gets traffic, you’ll still only be earning peanuts from it.

Digital products on the other hand pay much more in terms of commission. In fact most digital products pay affiliates 40%-even 100% commission in some cases. So, if you’re going to work hard, it’s worth working smart too. There’s also high ticket products you should consider too. High ticket items can make you commissions of $1000+ on a single sale.

Why High Ticket Products?

Why use high ticket products? Take a low value physical product for example. Let’s assume you’re selling an item from Amazon and you make a $10 commission based on a $100 price, or 10%. To make $10,000 worth of commissions you’ll need to sell 1000 items.

The equivalent high ticket digital product might be valued at $2500 and give you a 40% commission of $1000. To make $10,000 you’ll need to sell only 10 of these items. Now consider how you’re going to sell 1000 items from Amazon or 10 items of your high ticket digital product.

However you go about it, selling the higher value item makes much more sense. It may be more difficult to sell such an item, but will it be 100 times as difficult? Of course the answer is a resounding no!

High ticket products aren’t the only key which super affiliates use. They also use products which offer recurring commissions.

Recurring Commissions – A Key To Passive Income

High ticket commissions are all well and good. They can help you to achieve a larger income online and offset marketing costs so you can use paid marketing platforms. But recurring commissions are another major key which super affiliates use to make an income online. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer software products and memberships which pay affiliates again and again.

Like using high ticket products, recurring commission products give you an advantage which you don’t get from “one-off” sales. Even a small recurring commission is far better than a single sale over time. A recurring commission can give you a lifetime income. Even a high ticket commission is finite. A recurring commission can go on paying you over decades with the right products.

Multi-tier Affiliate Commissions

Multi-tier affiliate commissions are available on certain products. They are commissions you can earn from sales made by your referrals. Take a look at the SFM digital business system for more on this. The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) offer a product range with a built in sales team. Their digital business system offers:

1. Recurring commissions to affiliates – through a membership commission
2. High ticket product range – products ranging from $2500 to $20,000 which offer 40% commission (according to your positioning)
3. Multi-tier sales – earn from sales made by your referrals
4. A built in sales team – closing high ticket sales on your behalf.

Traffic – The Major Key To Success Online

Traffic is a major key to success online too. Without traffic you’ll never succeed online. There’s several ways you can get traffic to your affiliate products. With low value products it’s much more difficult because you’ll have less choice as to how you put products in front of people. This is another reason why the above business strategy is a much better option for affiliates.

Without a high ticket funnel, recurring income products or multi-tier sales, it’s more difficult to use paid marketing and still come out with a profit. With low value physical products, you’ll need to focus your efforts on cheap and free marketing methods. This takes much longer to do and is much less scalable than when using paid marketing strategies.

If you’re going down the organic marketing route through, you will need to put some serious time and effort in upfront, before you see any results. This can still be done of course, but is more difficult.

Organic Sales Online

Organic sales online are a wonderful thing when it finally happens. Those affiliate commissions rolling in overnight are simply wonderful. But there’s a lot that goes in before hand which goes unrewarded for a long time. There’s two questions you should ask yourself before creating content for your affiliate products:

1. Is this person a hungry buyer?
2. Can I get this content in front of those people?

When the answer is yes to both these questions it’s well worth pursuing. If you’re in doubt, save yourself the time and look for two “yes’s”! Ultimately this comes down to an important part of affiliate marketing – the customer avatar!

With content marketing you’ll likely create a lot of content which doesn’t work. Some will hit and some will miss. But as you learn and get better, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the content which gets sales. That content will work because it’s targeted a specific kind of person and got found.

Your Customer Avatar

The customer avatar is an important part of affiliate marketing. The better you get as an affiliate, the more you’ll focus in on your customer:

1. Who they are
2. What they want
3. Their individual problems and challenges
4. What they’re searching for online
5. The kinds of videos and blogs they read
6. How old they are
7. Are they a parent?
8. What interests them
9. What pains them?
10. And on an on..

The Email List

Whatever kind of marketing you’re doing, build an email list. With an email list you get people to subscribe and opt in to your list. You can then drip feed emails on a regular basis and keep in touch with your subscriber. This has two huge benefits over just having a website to sell affiliate products from:

1. You can extend the period of time over which a customer can buy from you – from 10 minutes on a website to months and even years through email marketing
2. You’ll be able to build trust with many subscribers by offering real value

One people know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to purchase a product from you.

Paid Marketing – The Fastest Route To Building An Income Online

Paid marketing is the fastest route to building a sustainable income online. But you’ll need a great business model like the one discussed earlier in this pdf/ebook. With a business model like The SFM digital business system, you’ll be in a much better position to learn paid marketing strategies with less risk.

Using paid marketing on low value products is very difficult. This is because there’s a learning phase when you’ll spend marketing budget and get nothing back. Over time, through testing and measuring your marketing, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work.

The benefit of using paid marketing during this period rather than content creation is that you can cut advertising which doesn’t work. Adverts which work, and make sales you can keep running. With content marketing this process is much slower. You create content and it can take months before you see any results from your efforts. With an advert you get the feedback straight away.

Recap & Resources

There’s a million different ways to do affiliate marketing. You can avoid getting lost down a rabbit hole if you get the right help and advice from the very start and find a mentor.

Choose affiliate products which offer at least one of the following:

1. High ticket digital products – which pay out at least 40% commissions
2. Recurring income affiliate products – membership or software products
3. Multi-tier sales – earn from sales made by your referrals.
4. A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf from a product range
5. Training and coaching including 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching

Ideally use a training resource which offers all of the above (Click banner below). Use paid marketing if your affiliate business model allows it. Test with a small budget to start and slowly build up your marketing budget.

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? A high ticket product is one with a much larger price tag than most others. Most affiliates, like myself, start out using low value products like those you’d find on Amazon. I started with Amazon and promoted items from their partner program. Anyone can join this program and promote products for a percentage of the sale value. But with most products from Amazon you’ll only earn 3%-11% commission.

With a product like a microwave oven worth $61.99, you’ll only earn 4.5% under the kitchen category. That’s $2.70 in commission. With a strategy like this you’ll have to sell a lot of items to make a full time living and replace an existing job. But with high ticket affiliate marketing, it’s a different story.

What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing?

A digital product which is worth over $1000 is an example of a high ticket affiliate product. There’s also physical products too which are worth a lot for affiliates. Look at Hammacher Schlemmer, an online store which sells high value physical products and pays its affiliates around 8% commission.

Although that doesn’t sound very much, on an expensive item like the golf cart hovercraft, you’ll earn $4640 for referring the sale. That’s a lot better than you’d get from referring a low value Amazon product, even at the same commission levels.

Digital product though, are the best bet for affiliates. With many digital products affiliate marketers can earn up to 40%+ commissions. Digital products also give you other earning opportunities too such as recurring commissions. With a recurring commission affiliate product, you can sell an item once and keep earning for the lifetime of the customer. Sell many items and you’ll start seeing an ongoing increase in your monthly earnings through recurring incomes.

What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing – The Six Figure Mentors

The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program is one of the best in terms of commission structure. The SFM offers multiple high ticket digital products from which you can earn 40% commissions. See SFM Digital Business System for details.

At the top end you can sell a $20,0000 product and earn a cool 40% or $8000! Their high ticket products are digital training courses and live events. They help people learn the strategies to earn online through affiliate marketing.

In order to qualify for the highest levels of commissions however, you’ll need to partner with the company. You can still use the multiple affiliate programs which the SFM offers. The entry level product (Mentors-All-in) gives you access to a 101% commission on the product itself. You can make $100 commission on a sale of a $99 product. This perhaps isn’t a high ticket sale as such, but it’s a very high level of commission for a low priced product.

After the Mentors-All-In product the SFM offers the Elite Influence package which gives more personal tuition and access to a number of trainings and live events. You can also earn $1000 commission on a $2500 product once you position yourself at this level. See Six Figure Mentors Elite for more information and Six Figure Mentors Cost.

Best High Ticket Products To Use

The SFM offers the best high ticket products to use for a number of reasons. It offers:

1. A number of high ticket products from which you can earn large commissions
2. Recurring commission products – subscription products give you ongoing income from each sale, rather than a single commission
3. Training and education through their digital mentors programs
4. A built in sales team – helping you by closing sales on your behalf and answering members questions
5. Multi-tier commissions – earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals.
6. A product range – each product offers more value than the last. This means you can refer a member once and benefit from later purchases they make – even if they are made years apart.

A high ticket product range gives you many opportunities to earn and allows you to use more expensive paid marketing platforms. With low value products, and physical products which only pay out 3-11% commissions, you’ll need to create sales through free (or very cheap) marketing strategies. There’s huge competition for free organic traffic and this can be a long term and time consuming strategy.

With paid marketing strategies and a high ticket sales funnel, you can recoup your advertising spend more easily (and make a profit) through the multiple earning strategies available through a high value product range.

What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing – Final Thoughts

With a low value product like a watch from Amazon, for example, you can earn 7% commission. Let’s say the watch is valued at $100. You make $7 for each sale. To make $1000 you’ll need to sell 143 watches. With a high valued product like SFM’s Elite Influence product, you can earn 40% commission on a $2500 sale. That’s $1000 per sale.

Many people assume that it’s much harder to sell a $2500 product online. But in order to make the same money, you’ll need to sell 143 watches at the lower value commission rate. Do you think it’s 143 times as difficult to sell the larger value item?

In fact, the same strategies can be used to sell high ticket items as with low value products. But you have an added advantage with high value affiliate products because you’re able to use paid marketing more effectively. With a $7 commission it’s very hard to run a paid advert and still make a profit. But with a $1000 commission it’s much more realistic.

To learn more about SFM and it’s product range, click on the image below to get started with Mentors-All-In package. You can upgrade your account any time through the back office once you gain access.

What do affiliate marketers do? If you’ve heard of affiliate marketing you’ll already know that it’s a way to earn an income by promoting other people’s products on the internet.

Affiliates recommend products and if they make a sale they earn a commission based on that sale. There’s many ways affiliate marketers can actually do this and not every affiliate uses the same strategies. Some will create niche websites, others will use paid marketing strategies. Some affiliates earn a part time income and others earn huge six and even seven figure incomes.

What Do Affiliate Marketers Do?

To make sales, and earn commissions affiliate marketers must put products in front of the the right people. Since people are buying products from the internet all the time, the job of affiliate is to become the person in between the customer and the product.

They can do this in many different way, the mains ones being:

1. Create written content – many affiliates create content by writing a blog or building website, just like this one. If someone purchases a product from my website, or signs up to my email list and purchases a product, I make a commission.
2. Create videos – a lot of affiliates don’t blog but create videos and upload them to YouTube. As their subscriber base and following grows they make more money from their recommendations over time.
3. Run paid marketing campaigns – many affiliates don’t want to spend heaps of time building content and opt for the paid marketing route instead. This can be a much faster way to build an online business.
4. Find suitable people for customers on Social Media platforms – another strategy affiliates might use is to connect with others through social media channels in order to build relationships and promote their products.
5. Affiliates build email lists – most successful affiliate marketers have an email list. They can send out useful content to their subscribers to help them with a topic which relates to their products.

What Do Affiliate Marketers Do?

As a beginner affiliate, you’ll be wearing your “student” cap for a while. This stage of the affiliate journey is spent researching affiliate programs and looking for training courses. You can sign up to the website and get a free video series to checkout my recommended mentors.

It’s well worth spending some time in this stage because the deeper your learning is, the better chance that you’ll take the right action steps later on. If you rush into affiliate marketing, as I did, you’ll find lots of problems.

Much like starting a new restaurant business, you wouldn’t buy the nearest building and just cook the food you already have in your kitchen. Your business would be doomed if you went about a new business this way. But many newbie affiliates do exactly this with affiliate marketing. They rush in and have problems because they don’t have the ground work in place.

So, it’s important for new affiliates to get the right training and educate themselves about affiliate marketing business models and strategies for marketing their products. This takes time and many drop out far to easily.

What Affiliate Marketers Do

Initially there’s some set up you’ll need to do in order to build a sales funnel. While some affiliates do everything by themselves, this is a much more difficult route. With the right program, you’ll get a fully stocked out sales funnel which contains products you can sell straight away. The SFM digital business system, you’ll be walked through the set up process in 7 step by step modules.

Once your sales funnel is set up and ready to go, you’ll need to turn your attention to the marketing side of things.

With the right business system, affiliate marketers can focus solely on marketing and allow an automated sales funnel to do the selling and promotion for them.

The Difficult Bit

In the first instance affiliates will set up a sales funnel, an autoresponder and a website and landing pages. This can be done through the SFM back office once you become a member.

Once this is all set up, and this can be done within a few days, you’ll need to learn marketing. Marketing your sales funnel involves targeting an audience and sending them to a landing page or website where they can sign up and enter your sales funnel.

This is the stage where many affiliates simply give up! But don’t! Marketing is the key to affiliate marketing. Without a marketing campaign affiliates will never make any sales or earn any money. So even with the best sales funnel in the world, it will just sit there collecting (digital) dust if you don’t send people into it.

Marketing can consist of many things. Any time someone clicks on a link of yours and goes into the sales funnel (by entering their email and name), you can consider it a form of marketing. Or they can also click on an affiliate link and directly purchase a product too.

Marketing at first can be very difficult because the affiliate will be learning what works and what doesn’t work. As a beginner this can be a frustrating time because most of what you do won’t work. Only after a lot of trial and effort can you determine which actions produce the best outcome. Once you get to this point, if you don’t give up before you reach it, you’re in a great position to focus on what works!

Why Affiliates Build Email Lists

From a website you can also directly link to many affiliate products from around the internet. However, the lifespan of a website visitor is much shorter than that of an email subscriber.

Once you get someone to subscribe to your email list, you can keep in touch with them for months or even years. On a website, someone only has a few minutes before they click away and are gone forever.

So with an email list, you have a lot more opportunity for building a relationship with your subscribers and making a sale. Some people will purchase from your email list even years after signing up to it.

Once Your Affiliate Business Shifts Gears

In the initial start up process affiliate marketing seems very difficult. There’s a lot to be done for little in return. But as you start making sales and seeing what works, you can focus on the actions which produce the largest results. This is the 80/20 principle or Pareto’s principle. It states that 80% of the outcome/consequences comes from only 20% of the causes.

Within affiliate marketing this is very important and once you determine which results produce the outcomes you want, you can place your attention there. As a beginner, you won’t know which actions give you the results you’re looking for, so it can seem like a difficult business.

But stick with it long enough and you can see some fantastic results for work you’ve done previously. Affiliate marketing can give you a passive income over time, which is pretty amazing when it happens.

What Do Affiliate Marketers Do – Keyword Research

Whether an affiliate marketer uses organic content to reach their audience or paid marketing, many affiliates will do keyword research. For this article, for example, I looked up this keyword “what do affiliate marketers do” to get an idea of how many people searched this exact phrase every month. As you can see in the image below, there’s only 30 searches per month for this keyword. But since my site is about affiliate marketing, I’ve been on the lookout for related keywords to write content about.

Once I’ve found a keyword which I like, I look on Google with a phrase search to see how likely I am to rank my article for this particular keyword.

The I do a open search too to see the number of results. This phrase comes in at just over 11 million which breaks my rule of less than 10million. However, I wanted to write on this topic for my email campaign to give some more information to my subscribers. So I thought I’d give it a go and see if I could rank! I might not make it onto Google but we shall see!

Affiliate Marketing Goals

It’s worth mentioning why affiliate marketers do all this too. Without that context this seems like an awful lot of work! Ultimately an affiliate business can give you complete time and financial freedom. But many affiliates work very hard to escape their jobs and be financially independent or self employed.

I like writing so blogging suits me and I enjoy the benefits of achieving a listing on Google, getting free leads and making sales from my content. Unless you enjoy the process of learning and implementing the skills though, affiliate marketing can be a lot of hard work. So it’s important to go into it with your eyes open.

Blogging isn’t the only way to do affiliate marketing and there’s much faster and easier ways if you have the money. When I became an affiliate, I was time rich and money poor, so I developed a habit for writing a blog.

What Else Do Affiliate Marketers Do – Tracking

Affiliate marketers track all their sales and leads. That way they can focus on the areas which are working for them once they get the data.

Initially though you’ll be doing a lot of things, testing and measuring what works and what doesn’t work. Once you start getting website traffic and leads (email subscribers), you’ll have some data to base your actions on. When you make sales you’ll want to track them back to an action you performed previously. Without doing so means you won’t know which tasks brought in the sale.

Tracking in the basic form simply means knowing where your sales came from. When you understand how you’ve made a sale, you’ll be able to repeat it again and again by focusing on the acton/s which brought it in.

Training & Webinars

If you’re lucky enough to find an online community of affiliates, you’ll be able to join trainings and webinars and mastermind with other business owners.

Ongoing training and development is key to any business venture. Your business can’t outgrow the level of thinking you bring to it. So if you’re stuck in your business in some way, changing your approach is key to breaking through to the next level. Limiting beliefs and underlying attitudes of limitation, lack or poverty can severely hamper your business growth.

So it’s useful to connect with other people who challenge your thinking and behaviour. If you’re going to build an affiliate business it’s well worth joining an online community who can help you do so.

Access an online business mentorship program here.