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!

Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free

Driving traffic to your website for free is the goal of many bloggers and affiliates. If you can get free traffic, you can make sales without spending any money on advertising. That means any sales you make from affiliate marketing is 100% profit. Since most paid adverts don’t work and you’ll end up spending a lot of money (at least initially) just to break even, it makes sense to have an organic strategy.

Top marketers attest to spending thousands on their marketing budgets, only to double their spend. And that’s after they’ve found a profitable advert – which takes a lot of testing and measuring of their budget. So figuring out a profitable ad can be costly. So if you don’t have the funds (or the temperament) for this, organic traffic gives you an alternative and free option to build an affiliate business with.

The downside of organic traffic is that it takes time and there’s no guarantees. So if spending months on end blogging or creating videos isn’t your “bag”, it’s probably not for you. Plus, you can’t easily scale organic traffic as with paid advertising. Long term returns can be good though if you’re willing to put the effort in upfront with little or no short term gains.

Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free – Finding Your Niche

In a competitive niche you’re going to have to work for much longer too and despite a niche being highly sought after (and profitable), that also makes it very competitive. Consider that fact that you’ll need to work at your blog for several weeks, months or even years before it brings in a nice monthly income for you. In a top niche it’s likely to take longer than a relatively uncompetitive one. So it’s worth considering your niche before you start out. I spent a long time in the wrong niche, thinking since it was untapped and uncompetitive then it would be “easier”.

However, what I didn’t consider is blogging for 6 straight months about a topic I had no clue (or interest) about. This makes it considerably more difficult. The topic I found was garlic harvesting! Since I knew nothing about it, I had to research every article I would write. After 6 months that became incredibly tiring. I lost interest and my blog fell from the search engines. It was also difficult to monetise, which is another consideration.

So ideally choose a topic which you’re passionate about, find a high quality product which aligns with that passion and start your blog. Expect to create content for several months to establish yourself.

Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free – SEO

A good place to start is with some keyword research using Google’s free keyword planner tool. Strart by looking for long tail keywords with low SEO competition. You can find these by typing your main keyword into the planner tool. Scroll through the keyword suggestions until the monthly search volume drops to the lowest number (10 or lower). Here you should find some longer tail keywords which although offer less traffic, offer the new blogger a better opportunity at a ranking for their content. Going after the main keywords in your niche is unlikely to result in any of your content ranking on Google. There’s simply too much competition for a new site to rank for competitive keywords.

Google will usually “sandbox” new websites anyway until they have proved themselves with high quality content and regular new, fresh content. Some bloggers even recommend going after zero search volume keywords. The thinking here is that many new keywords are being searched for which haven’t yet shown up in the keyword planner. By going after these keywords you’ll benefit your SEO (Search engine optimisation) score with Google and give yourself more chance of ranking for relatively uncompetitive keywords in your niche.

SEO Tools

Once you have found a suitable keyword to target with your article, make sure you use an SEO tool such as Yoast SEO. This free WordPress plugin lets you optimise your articles for the search engines. It will let you know the optimisation score and keyword density for each post you write. This will involve getting your keyword in your titles, image alt tags and meta descriptions and so on.

There’s various other tools you can use too. I use social share icons to encourage my visitors to share my work on social media sites. You can also syndicate the publishing of your older posts automatically using a plugin called Revive Old Posts.

It’s a good idea to automate as much as possible because it will take up quite a lot of mental space just creating, publishing and sharing your content manually each time. So having some automation helping you is no bad thing! See also my post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free – Write Long, High Quality Posts

I would also suggest to write as long and as detailed and high quality posts as you can. Over time, there’s more and more bloggers added to the online mix. As your older posts gather dust, they get overtaken by other bloggers content, especially if they are of low quality. So make them stand out from the rest by writing long posts (ideally over 1000 words) and make them high quality so they stand the test of time.

Write to help your reader, not to “rank” or impress the search engines. Your plugin Yoast SEO will help you optimise for the “bots” so that’s taken care of. Google’s search engine algorithms constantly change and evolve. So over time SEO tools will change too. The Google “bots” can easily see how people interact with your content and they know whether it’s good or not by virtue of the way people interact with it. If you content isn’t worth reading, people will click away and the “bots” will see this. So write high quality posts for your audience’s benefit.

Will Google Rank You?

The internet houses a staggering 1.9 billion websites, including over 600 million blogs. So the chance of your content ranking top place on a Google search are pretty low; especially with a brand new blog with not much on it. You’re often competing with bloggers who have been around for decades. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of back links and decades worth of content. So don’t hold out for your 10 page website to suddenly bring in a tonne of traffic overnight! It just ain’t going to happen!

However, if you stick with it and continue to post regularly for several months, your authority will grow and you should see some changes. There are other search engines who will pick up your content and rank it too – Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, for example. But just don’t rely on Google (or any search engine) to do your bidding for you as you’ll be disappointed. Instead, take charge of your own blog promotion by:

Actively and aggressively promoting your content throughout your social media presence
Building an email list of subscribers and sending them your new posts as you write them
Placing share buttons on your blog to make it easy for readers to share your posts
Using social media planners and plugins to syndicate your content throughout social media platforms automatically
Building back links through guest posting and blog commenting on other websites/blogs in your niche
Using Q and A websites to link back to your posts (E.g. Quora.com) – See using Quora to drive traffic.

Aligning Your Content With Your Offer

Before rushing out in high hopes that your blogging is going to make you millions, it’s worth understanding how you’re monetising your blog first. Unless your blog posts are aligned with your products in some way, you’re not going to make any money from all this work!

I’ll say that again: unless your blog posts are aligned with your products in some way, you’re not going to make any money from all this work. So before starting out on this journey it’s worth getting this very clear: you must align your audience with your product. Failing to do this will result in a lot of work for nothing.

Now if you love your niche and it’s just a side hustle, perhaps you’re not too bothered. It is much more interesting and satisfying writing about something you’re dearly interested and enthusiastic about. In fact, it’s much more difficult sustaining the necessary effort involved if that’s not the case.

However, if you want your blogging to bear fruit at some point in a monetary sense, make sure your affiliate product is linked with all your content. So when you’re doing your keyword research, ask yourself this question:

“Does this search query bring a targeted visitor to my website who might want the product I promote”

If the answer is no, you might be wasting your valuable time on that particular piece of content. It’s worth checking out this post on the customer avatar to get clear on who you want to attract to your website.

Summary

Driving traffic to your website for free can be very rewarding if you stick with it. Plus, all your sales are 100% profit, unlike when you’re using paid advertising.

Before setting out with your article or content creation, do some research. Does your keyword have a good chance of getting found on the search engines? Is it aligned with your target audience? Don’t rely on the search engines in any case and make sure you aggressively market and promote your content personally, using manual posting and/or automated plugins or post planners. You might even want to test out some paid advertising too to give your traffic a boost.

Make sure you get a few plugins to help you both write and promote your content. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Progress though blogging can be painstakingly slow. So create a routine which helps you overcome procrastination and get moving, however slowly it might be at first. Define your niche – choose one you’ll love writing about for several months at the least if you want to make it work. Choose a high value product which is going to last and stand out among the others.

Keep going and never quit!

Good luck!

How To Use An Email List To Grow Your Affiliate Business

I always wondered how to use an email list to grow my affiliate business. I had joined several email marketing lists when I started affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s. Some of them would just send out a single line of text with a link in it. “Hey check this out it’s HOT” – or some shit like that!

I quickly learned that every singe email of theirs was to a product they wanted me to buy. No value in their emails, just spammy sales links wanting me to purchase something.

I of course tried this too when I started out, to no avail. So desperate was I to make that first affiliate sale that I tried pretty much everything. The problem with this approach is that there’s no trust there. Everyone is doing this so the discerning consumer quickly learns to unsubscribe and find their products (and information) elsewhere.

How To Use An Email List To Grow Your Affiliate Business – Patience

One mentor of mine taught that you should do the opposite to this spammy approach. Instead of trying to sell to your subscribers on every single email, connect with them instead. Ask them a question “How come you joined my email list?”

Some will of course ignore this email, but often I’ve had replies. This is really quite helpful because it allows you to connect with subscribers and find out what their particular problem is. Often too, subscribers will delve into their individual circumstance.

how to use an email list to grow your affiliate business

This is helpful when starting to understand your customer avatar. With a well defined customer avatar, you can more easily attract the kind of people you want to deal with (and those that will buy from you because your product can help them). You can also more easily relate to them when you understand your subscribers and this helps you craft more relatable and useful email messages.

You also want to help your subscribers with something through your emails. If you do this successfully, and your emails are designed to help instead of sell, you’ll build trust. It’s also a much more rewarding way of interacting that “Hey Joe, click here before this page is gone FOREVER!” or some other sales crap like it!

How To Use An Email List To Grow Your Affiliate Business – Slowly Slowly

Of course this takes time but your emails will work with or without you being there. Once set up your email messages are automated. You’ll want to ram those products down your audience’s throat in the beginning because you want to prove that affiliate marketing can actually work for you.

But because this is what a lot of marketers do in their emails, you’ll stand out by not doing it. Build trust instead and focus on long term service over short term sales. Recently I made a sale from someone who was on my list for 5 years!

Now I wouldn’t want to have to wait five years before a subscriber bought something typically. But it illustrates the point of relationship building. Not everyone is ready to buy when they sign up to your email list. But to keep them opening your messages, provide value and make them worth opening.

If all your messages just say “Click here quickly before this deal is GONE FOREVER”, how soon do you think your subscribers will stop opening them?

A good analogy is with a sales person in a shop. When you visit a shop to browse, and the sales assistane is hovering round you, desperate to sell something, it’s off-putting. You leave the shop if it becomes uncomfortable!

The same is true with email marketing messages which only show the sender as someone who wants to gain, rather than help. You will quickly unsubscribe from them.

Answer Questions Your Audience Already Has

Often your subscribers will have a heap of objections already in their minds:

I’m too old for this business
This is going to be too pricy
I’m not technical minded, will that be a problem
Is this guy trustworthy?
Is there a money back guarantee?
Will the product work for me?

Have a think of the ten most popular objections your audience might have about your product. Then craft an email (or emails) which handle/s those objections. Often your subscribers won’t want to break radio silence! They won’t necessarily want to show up with their objection as they might feel shy or silly. By handling the topic through your email messages, you get their attention because you’re talking about them and their fears and objections.

A money back guarantee for example is definitely worth mentioning if your product carries one. It lets someone know they can change their mind if they don’t like the product once they get it. As with my recommended course, if for any reason you’re not happy, email support and get your money back within 30 days.

Digital products in particular are sometimes difficult to understand. So a 30 day money back guarantee lets someone test it with no obligation.

Exacerbate The Pain

Of course it’s much easier to sit on the sidelines and never take any action when on someone’s email list, no matter how hard they try! That’s ok because it’s those who are pretty motivated to take action who actually do something and buy from you.

But there’s often some motivation for NOT taking action too, whether that is comfort or fear. People make the decision to buy something when their desire to buy is no longer inhibited by their counter desire/fear.

These could be things like:

I could buy the product any time, it’ll still be there tomorrow
I don’t really need it, or it’s not right for me
I’m afraid it won’t work for me
I don’t want to be conned out of my money/ maybe it’s a scam?
My job is not so bad, I’ll wait another year then buy it..

For time bound decision making there’s always tomorrow. That’s why many marketers with an email list will use countdown timers. When the timer reaches zero, the product is gone! Or the price goes up! That removes some objections and financial motivation kicks in.

For a business related product, such as an online business from scratch, for example, the motivation might be to escape their employer. Often I’ll mention my own personal motivation for escaping employment – the thought of another 10 years doing the same thing. That’s a strong motivation for someone who hates their job!

Often the thought of not taking action (therefore having to keep turning up to a job with no escape route) is enough to push someone over their resistance barrier. By juxtaposing what they could have, with what they have now (using your product), you can create a strong motivation through your messaging and help them overcome any resistance to taking action. There’s lots of great books on this topic such as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and Influence by Robert Caldini.

Summary

So there’s many ways in which you can become more effective with your email marketing campaigns. Stand out by being of actual service.

With so many marketers spamming their emails out with affiliate links, when someone is helpful, you’ll know it. Sign up to a few email lists of people in your business topic/niche and decide for yourself which ones are worth opening over the longer term. This will give you an idea about how to come across in your own emails.

I’m still on a couple of email lists of people who I personally find useful. They don’t spam out affiliate links and instead they provide real value through their emails – helping first, selling later. Start by building trust by delivering value. When you can do that consistently, people will trust you and then they are more likely to buy from you if you’re offering something which is useful to them and is a good fit.

Make sure you stand by the product/s you are selling and they are the best products in your niche.

Overcoming Procrastination In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

So what are the best ways of overcoming procrastination in your affiliate marketing business. You know what I’m talking about. With great intentions for our business, it can still be easy to fall into bad habits and accomplish nothing. It’s easy to get sucked into social media channels and waste your time!

You need a system and a routine to create some positive habits which you can do on a daily basis – no matter how small.

In fact, breaking your big tasks down into inconceivably little tasks is one of the best ways to overcome procrastination. When we look at the mountain in one go, it’s overbearing. It’s too much to take on board all in one go. You know the saying about how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Overcoming Procrastination In Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Baby Steps

With a monumental task of building an online business, it’s easy to procrastinate. You can’t possibly do it all in one day. But by breaking down the big steps into small, easily achievable goals, and making habits out of them, you can easily get back on track.

Tasks you might be considering with your business are:

Building a profitable ad campaign
Building a YouTube channel for organic traffic
Building traffic to your blog
Creating an email campaign for your list
Learning a new strategy for marketing

However, these tasks are already too big when you’re not in the mood. You need to create smaller tasks which you can do on a daily basis and make habits out of:

Set up a single low budget advert (just to learn the skill)
Shoot a tester video and upload to YouTube (to lay the habit foundations)
Write a blog post on your blog
Write a single email to add to your outgoing messages for your list
Watch a single video on marketing

By breaking down the big tasks into smaller tasks, you are making it easy for yourself to take positive action – no matter how small. A rolling stone gathers no moss – once you’re “rolling” it’s easier to maintain momentum

Overcoming Procrastination In Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Remove Emotion From The Action

Big tasks are often tanged with heavy emotion. For example, building a YouTube channel which gets lots of traffic might take a huge amount of time and effort. If you’re uncertain of your direction, the videos you want to shoot and so on, this further adds to the blockage.

Remove that blockage by taking a super-tiny step towards the outcome your ultimately want. So in this case, shoot a “tester” video and upload it to YouTube. By calling it a “tester” video you don’t have to give it any importance and so that takes some pressure off you. You don’t even have to set it to “public” either. This takes all the pressure of “performing” and putting yourself out there. You only need to take a tiny action and learn the basic steps in uploading a video to YouTube.

You can use this same principle with building traffic to your blog. When faced with a large task like this, it’s overwhelming. How will you do it? What will you write about? Will it even work after all the effort you have taken? These types of questions only fuel your doubt, indecision and uncertainty. So you procrastinate. But without action you can be certain of failure!

Remove the emotion by taking micro steps towards your larger goals – every day. So instead of “building traffic to your blog” create a daily baby step of “writing a blog post”. It doesn’t even have to be a great one, just 400 words and you’re done. Then you’ve created some momentum and released yourself from the blockage.

Create A Daily Plan

With a daily plan, you take action every day. Monday might be a blog post, and to write to your email list. Tuesday might be to check your ads, or shoot a video. Wednesday is posting on social media day, or Quora answers day – see affiliate marketing on Quora.

When you focus on the big picture that is your profitable online business running on all cylinders (some time in the future), you create problems. But when you break large tasks into small, easily manageable steps, you start to take action. That’s where the magic happens.

Without action you know you’re not going to have a business. So procrastination needs to be dealt with with micro steps which are easily achieved. Breaking down goals into smaller steps is a powerful tool in the entrepreneurs box! Use it to create a day filled with small easily achievable actions, no matter how insignificant they might seem.

Even if the step only has the effect of dissolving your procrastination, it’s been worthwhile.

Look At Your “Foundations”

Have a look at your environment. How does it make you feel? If you’re surrounded with a messy environment, with unfinished projects all around, it’s unlikely to help you with finding the right state of mind for top tier productivity. Set up your “stall” and clear your working space as a priority.

The same goes for your emotional state. If you’re a bag of conflicting emotions and unresolved conflicts, it’s highly likely that it’s affecting your ability to work and focus. How is your health? Are you exercising?

overcoming procrastination in your affiliate marketing business

Getting the proper sleep and looking after your health should be a priority if you’re attempting to build something such as an affiliate business. You can’t build a skyscraper with the foundations of a cottage. So make sure you’re eating properly taking exercise and looking after yourself first!

If you’re stressed about something, it’s likely going to affect your ability to build an affiliate business. For years I was stressed about money and it did me no favours when it came to building an online business. I was building from a foundation of a poverty mindset.

Summary

So if you find yourself struggling with your affiliate business, take the long term view of your business and break it down into steps you can do right now, today. Don’t fill your mind with all the aspects of what you need to do in the far flung future; what you don’t know, or understand and how large the task is ahead of you. That only fuels the frustration you have been creating! Focus instead of a tiny first step you can do right now, however small.

Keep doing that and set yourself a weekly schedule of these tasks, and you’ll soon find yourself moving forwards again. Once the procrastination has subsided, you’ll find other things you can focus on to move your business forwards too.

If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it on your social media platform! If you’re interested in starting an online business from scratch you can get more information here.

Get Leads For My Business

Whatever business you are in, getting leads for your business will be of primary importance. Without leads, you can’t make sales and generate any customers. Without any customers you don’t have a business, at least you won’t have one for long anyway!

Lead generation is therefore one of if not the most important thing to focus on to grow your business. There’s lots of ways to generate leads. You can grow a business through word of mouth, you can use organic marketing such as social media marketing and through using SEO (search engine optimisation).

However, organic marketing and word of mouth aren’t as controllable as paid advertising. With organic marketing, you must rely on the algorithm to rank your content. Or on people finding your links through your social media following. But what if the person you want isn’t on social media that day? Or if Google doesn’t rank your content? You could spend a huge amount of time plugging your business on social media and attempting to rank your website for nothing!

And word of mouth advertising, although free, is totally out of the bounds of your control. You can provide a high quality service to generate good will, and even operate a referral program (rewarding your customers for referrals) but beyond that word of mouth isn’t a strategy you can easily control.

Get Leads For My Business – A Scalable Strategy

A scalable strategy is what you really want to use for a business. To grow a business you need to be able to consistently pull in the types of customers who will buy. To do this quickly you can use paid advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, or Microsoft Ads, running either text ads or video ads (on YouTube for example). By running ads and sending highly qualified visitors to a landing page, you can quickly build an email list of subscribers to whom you can provide some kind of value through your emails.

Use an email a utoresponder to collect emails from a landing page and follow up with automated messages which provide information useful to your subscribers. Promote your product or service through these emails. With highly qualified leads (who want or need what you’re selling), you have a good chance of turning a lead into a sale. Particularly if you target your ads towards the right audience.

So for example, if you run a coffee shop in a certain city, and your typical customers are parents over the age of 35 with kids, that’s who you target in your advertising. You could target your specific area code and those people who fit the target demographic of your perfect customer. This is also known as the customer avatar. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf. Offer discount codes and offers to encourage your subscribers to visit your shop.

Get Leads For My Business – Test & Measure

Most businesses will try out paid advertising for a while and then quit, having spent too much money without getting a solid (or any) return. That’s because they haven’t run an advert which works for them immediately. But have some patience grasshopper! By testing and measuring different ads, and trying out different audiences, you will figure out who is most likely to buy and how to target them specifically so as not to waste ad budget.

Make sure you track everything and spend some time initially on the customer avatar worksheet pdf to “zone” in on who is most likely to buy before you even run an advert. This will save you a huge amount of advertising budget, getting clear about your target audience before you even spend any money.

Follow up with regular emails, informing your subscribers (who opt in to your offer from a landing page) of your offer. This is known as email marketing and it’s incredibly effective once you find the right audience and of course you effectively communicate the value of your offer.

Get Leads For My Business – Having A Congruent Marketing Message

A congruent marketing message is vital to use this kind of lead generating system. If, for example, you are targeting your adverts towards a specific search query, make sure to use that same language in your marketing copy (landing page etc.).

For example, I offer a course for beginners in affiliate marketing. So if I targeted a search query of “affiliate marketing for beginners” to show my advert for those specific queries, I will also use that same terminology in my landing page, and throughout my email follow up messages. If I used even a slightly different term, such as “online business” instead, it could throw off 30-40% of visitors who might bounce immediately from the landing page.

They are looking for “affiliate marketing for beginners” so if I suddenly started talking about “online business” many of my visitors might believe they have found the wrong information, and click away without having taken any action. This will cost me money in marketing budget without having collected any leads. So having a congruent message throughout your marketing copy is paramount for keeping your cost per lead at a minimum and ensuring a more efficient marketing campaign.

Split Testing Landing Pages

A landing page is a page specifically built to collect email subscribers. A landing page is much better at doing this efficiently because there’s much less confusion on a landing page than a generic website. On a website, there’s many pages to click through and browse. As such, most visitors become overwhelmed with information and leave without having taken any action from a website – often never to return. But a landing page is different. On a landing page there’s an offer of some kind – a freebie giveaway, such as an ebook or a free course. Plus, there’s only two options on a landing page – sign up or leave the page.

This means more people will “convert” into leads on a page specifically built to collect leads. Landing pages are also known as “squeeze” pages because they “squeeze” the subscribers information out of them!

By split testing different landing pages, you can learn which one/s will perform the best, giving you the lowest cost per lead from your marketing budget.

The Follow Up

Many marketers will follow up with their leads every day, but this will depend on your particular business and the offer you use to entice someone to enter their details. By keeping in regular contact with your leads through email automation, you can build a longer term relationship with them which helps build trust. Most online consumers will need several touch points with a service before they make a decision to buy – often between 6 and 8 interactions with a business before purchasing.

The mistake many marketers make is to try and make the sale immediately. The opportunity to build trust through providing some kind of value is then lost. By providing value through your email marketing messages , you can develop relationships on which business can be made.

This is why you can find many courses and ebooks online for free. These freebie “giveaways” are used as lead magnets to help build trust online in order to sell products later.

The process of generating leads online is a powerful one once you get it working. It’s a skill which when mastered will allow you to always be employable and even build a business from scratch without any products or a service of your own to sell. To learn more about starting a from scratch online business using lead generation checkout this free video.

Self Image, Paradigm And Circle Of Influence

Why is the self image, paradigm and circle of influence so important for affiliates? If you’re an affiliate, the chances are you don’t come from a background of entrepreneurialism. More likely you’ve come from an employee background and that usually means you’re surrounded by other employees rather than entrepreneurs. Have a look around at the five people you spend the most time with.

Jim Rohn “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”

They are your circle of influence – they influence you the most. So if you’re striving to build an affiliate business and they are not, they are more likely to be trying to talk you out of it than applauding your successes. Why is this? Simple, if you should attain a level of success which means you don’t need a job any more, it reflects badly on them. The elevation of your “status” isn’t great for them. In becoming financially independent (and no longer needing employment) also means their “social status” also devolves by comparison.

Even if your friends mean well, they are likely to carry beliefs and communicate in ways which aren’t going to help you. This is likely to be unconscious, but regardless, it can have the effect of demoralising you and scuppering your plans to become an entrepreneur.

What’s the answer? Be careful when sharing your “wins” with the wrong people. If they’re not cheering you on, they may be unconsciously hoping for you to fail. Play your cards close to your chest and find new people who have the same goals and aspirations.

Self Image, Paradigm And Circle Of Influence – Paradigm

Your paradigm is the belief system you carry with you and it has a huge influence on you too. If your belief system doesn’t support your entrepreneurial venture, you’re much more likely to fail.

Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right – Henry Ford

If you’re new to entrepreneurialism and just getting started with an online business, for example, you’re likely bringing some unhelpful ideas with you from your previous life. What can you do about this?

Checkout Bob Proctors book change your paradigm change your life pdf here for free. To change your ideas you first need to notice them! Pay attention to your words and thoughts when you talk about yourself and your beliefs around the subject of money, difficulties and work, for example.

Get help and learn how to shift your mindsets around money, wealth and work. Visit money mindset coach for more information on this and see also overcoming limiting beliefs about money.

Self Image, Paradigm and Circle Of Influence – Self Image

“Until you make the conscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate” – C Jung

Your self image is another “invisible” barrier to your success in any endeavour, and not just with an online business/affiliate marketing. But particularly when you try something new, such as building an online business, you’re going to be operating from your existing self image. If your self image is one of an “employee” or you hold some negative/limiting ideas of who you are in your mind, it’s going to act like a handbrake on your best intentions.

self image, circle of influence and paradigm

So how can you change your self image? Firstly become aware of it, as with your paradigms which might be holding you back. What do you say about yourself when talking to others or talking to yourself (inside your head). This is a clear indication of how you perceive yourself. What stories do you tell yourself when you approach a difficult task or an uncomfortable circumstance or situation?

Our stories (of ourselves or of our past) can often give you insight into your perception of your self. If these stories don’t help you, they can limit you. Bring awareness to your story of yourself which might be holding you in an old paradigm/belief system. Ask yourself whether your story is true. Can you reframe the sad (poor me) story in another light, for example?

Maxwell Maltz and Self Image

A good book on the topic is Maxwell Maltz’s book Psycho-cybernetics.

Maltz was a plastic surgeon who realised that many of his clients were still unhappy after their plastic surgery, even after corrective surgery. He started delving into their self image and got them to change the self image before they had their procedure. Once someone had changed their view of themselves, they often no longer required the corrective surgery on their outer features as a result.

Self image is massive if you’re undertaking a new venture such as an online business. If you still see yourself as an employee, or have a limited idea of what you can accomplish, it can completely halt your progress even if you are taking massive actions otherwise. You’ll sabotage your best efforts because the self image always follows you no matter how hard you try on the “outside”.

Summary

As an affiliate marketer myself I have struggled with feelings of unworthiness, limiting beliefs and poor self image. Undoubtedly these issues have held back my progress as I wrestled with my inner monologue which either supported or denied my ability to make a living online.

When you look to others for support and advice, it is your closest friends and family who you’re most likely to lean on (your circle of influence). Since most people aren’t business owners, and consider business risky or even dangerous, they aren’t going to be an inspiration to you! More likely they will talk you out of it, or encourage you to talk yourself out of it!

So if you’re struggling to make money as an affiliate I can highly recommend working on these important issues for your own personal growth and for that of your online business too.

Join an online community where self growth is part of the curriculum here.

Get coaching from me here and find a wealth of free books on mindset and motivation here.

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically

How to grow social media followers organically? Here’s a simple strategy using Facebook.

To grow any stream of organic traffic takes a little more time and effort that you would expect when using paid marketing. Paid marketing can give you traffic immediately and you can also scale up just by increasing your budget. With organic methods of traffic generation, you’ll need to put in some time and effort upfront. Over time though, that work can pay out in free traffic, even after you stop.

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically

Here’s my Facebook page and as you can see it’s clear immediately what’s on offer. Start with an offer which is clearly visible on your Facebook page – such as a free ebook or online course. In my link, I offer a free video series in the intro. You can check it out here.

When someone visits your page, it should be clear immediately what your offer is. That way, if someone is interested in it they can immediately take some action – ideally signing up to your offer (and joining your email list).

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically – Post Useful Content

Whatever your offer is, it should be congruent with the content you generate whether it’s on your blog or your YouTube channel or whatever! For example, I post on this blog to help out affiliates and share content on my social media platforms. Your content should align with your giveaway offer and of course attract the right audience for whatever it is you’re selling. See also target audience and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

The target audience is a good place to start if you’re just beginning. Knowing who it is you want to attract, and the purpose of attracting them is vital. If you’re an affiliate, and are selling an affiliate product, you obviously want to attract the kind of person who will be interested in buying it!

You don’t have to post your own content, although it’s preferable. You can use other people’s content which attracts your target audience. If people like your content, they are likely to follow you and interact with your posts. When this happens they are likely to browse your profile and see your offer.

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically – Use Groups

Groups are a great way to find other people on Facebook who are likely to have an interest in your offer and content. To find groups in your niche, simply type your main keyword/niche into the search bar at the top of Facebook once logged in. You’ll find a tab called groups:

In this example I’m using the keyword “affiliate marketing” because it related to my offer and niche. But you can use any keyword which is most suitable for your topic. Join groups which seem appropriate to your niche. Some groups will ask for your reason for joining and you’ll have to answer certain questions and agree to the rules.

In particular you must avoid spamming and overtly promoting your offers otherwise you’ll likely get kicked out the the group! Instead, interact, help and join the discussion. Spend some time each day in the groups you join and engage with others.

As people interact with you some will visit your profile and engage with you, even adding you as a friend and liking your content.

– Discipline

Like with any organic method of traffic generation, this takes some time and discipline. Make a habit out of spending time each day interacting with others and joining the discussion. Log your daily routine and spend a few weeks doing so building up a long term habit of it.

This small “mini” habit can seem relatively pointless at first. But over time your comments and interactions will bring people to your profile. Some of them will see your offer and sign up to it (if you have it set up). This is why it’s important to set up your offer and a giveaway of some kind so you can build an email list alongside with your social media followers.

If your profile isn’t set up to showcase your offer, your visitors won’t know the action to take when they find you.

High Demand Products To Sell Online

What are the best high demand products to sell online? While high demand products have a large audience, there’s also a lot of people promoting them too. This means there’s plenty of noise around those kinds of products so it can be tougher getting found online.

There’s two main strategies for promotion of products online: paid marketing and organic marketing. With organic marketing, such as blogging or creating a video channel, it can take a long time building your audience. So many new starters in the online space opt for paid marketing methods. Paid marketing is so much faster and more scalable than organic marketing, which can take months or years.

High Demand Products To Sell Online – Teaching & Mentoring Courses

One of the most popular products to sell online is training to help and support beginners learn how to earn online.

A recent Gallop poll showed that 85% of workers in the US are dissatisfied with their employment. This is a universal experience and it’s not just the States. Many people either want a second income from earning online, or to replace their income completely, and escape their employer.

high demand products to sell online — https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx#ite-506897

Of those people who don’t want to quit their jobs, there’s a huge amount being made redundant. Artificial intelligence is replacing jobs at a phenomenal rate. So whether you are actively seeking to leave your employment or having it forced on you, it leaves a big question. How will people be earning a living in the next 10 years time with such a large proportion of jobs disappearing?

highest demand products — https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65102150

High Demand Products To Sell Online – The Answer

One answer is to shift to the online space and learn how to earn a living from selling other people’s products and services online. This is known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates recommend products and services online for a share of the profit. Some of the highest demand products to sell are those which help people transition from traditional employment into the entrepreneurial space, through selling products and services online.

There’s many products which claim to help people earn online. However, actually doing so is something which requires a lot of motivation and effort. If someone could short-cut this journey they would be likely to pay a lot more so they could escape the 9 to 5 job permanently.

The answer is to sell the highest value products in the online learning space for digital earning. These are products which offer more personal one-on-one coaching and mentoring for affiliate marketing.

Selling A Multiple Product “Suite” From A Product Range

Selling multiple products within a product range solves another problem. The main problem for affiliate marketers when using paid marketing is to get a good return on their marketing investment. With most affiliate products, you can only earn once from each sale.

So each customer can only bring in a certain revenue, making advertising more costly. But with a product range which includes subscription products, mid and high ticket products, you can earn multiple times from each customer. This increases the average revenue per customer you are able to earn, making it easier to build a profitable business given the same marketing budget.

With high value products which are in high demand, this offers one of the best business models for anyone looking to build an income online. Mentorship products are also digital products. So they can be accessed online. They also pay much larger levels of commission than a similarly priced physical product would.

Summary

Some of the best high demand products to sell online are those which teach how to earn online. In particular, those which offer the most value are the best. The best kinds of products offer multiple products within a range. The benefit of this is that a customer can choose their level of support through the product range and according to their circumstances and level of commitment. This means more customers are able to purchase something from you, even if it is the lowest cost item within your product range.

With mid and high ticket offers in addition to your basic level product, you can sell higher value products to those who want them, without excluding people who don’t. A good multi-tier offer should be of high value and offer multiple earning methods including a product range and subscription products which pay recurring commissions.

See this video for more info.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing

What are the skills needed for affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. When you sell an affiliate product, you earn a commission. Don’t make sales though and you won’t earn any commissions. So the main skill needed to become successful with affiliate marketing is marketing. Unless you learn how to successfully market a product somehow, you won’t be successful.

Anyone can learn the skills of affiliate marketing though, but it does take some time and commitment. Good affiliates are problem solvers and they will often experience certain problems on the affiliate journey. These might be technical difficulties, such as setting up a website, or marketing difficulties such as getting customers in front of your products.

Top affiliates will often build large email lists of subscribers and market products to their email list. So they need to be good communicators in order to communicate according to the needs of their target audience.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing – Problem Solving

If you’re good a working on your own initiative, can find answers to your own problems and overcome them, this is a useful skill for affiliate marketing. Whether you are having a technical issue such as tracking sales on your website, or setting up your sales funnel or website, a good affiliate will be self sufficient and be able to search for solutions without needing constant supervision and help.

The main thing to remember with affiliate marketing is that it is a performance based business model. So good time management and activity management is vital. It can be easy to spend time on the wrong activities without moving your affiliate business forwards. Good affiliates can set their own schedule to move things forward off their own back.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing – Goal Setting

Goal setting is a useful skill but if you haven’t done any goal setting activities it is easy to learn. It’s easy to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of an affiliate business and get distracted by small menial tasks (which don’t necessarily move the needle on your income). So being able to set specific income and action goals over various timeframes and hold yourself accountable to get things done is a useful skill for an affiliate.

Goal setting helps you frame your affiliate business in a meaningful way and motivate yourself; another useful skill for an affiliate, self motivation. Affiliate marketing is a difficult business model if you’re new to it and many affiliates will quit before they give it much of a chance.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing – Marketing & Communication Skills

While affiliate marketing can allow you to sell products and services without the “hard sell”, and without dealing with customers directly, you still need to learn some skills to sell affiliate products. Marketing can take the form of blog posts, paid advertising, email messages, video or social media posts. You can become a content creator or run paid advertising to drive targeted visitors to your products and services.

A good marketer is good at communicating to their audience. This can be via email message, video advertising, blogging or some other means. Anyone can learn marketing skills from scratch and build a profitable affiliate business however.

Highly Motivated

Most top affiliates are highly motivated. This is pretty important because affiliate marketing does take some time and effort.

Most of the affiliates who succeed in their affiliate businesses therefore have a strong reason to overcome the difficulties and succeed. Often this is the desire to improve their financial situation, escape the 9 to 5, or spend more time with their family.

Summary

While anyone can learn affiliate marketing from scratch, there’s a huge drop out rate among affiliates. For the best chance of success, you need a strong desire to succeed and a big enough reason to keep going when others quit. Good goal setting, communication and marketing skills are also essential along with good problem solving skills.

A good entrepreneurial mindset is also a useful thing for affiliates to have.

If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate you can find training resource course here.

How To Sell Your Skills Online

Wondering how to sell your skills online? Whatever skills you have, there’s people who are willing to pay to learn them, or learn from you. There’s many ways to sell skills online too; here’s some of the strategies you can use:

Create a course, using sites such as teachable.com or udemy.com
Build a blog using your knowledge or a YouTube channel; sell affiliate products to your audience
Create an ebook/digital download/pdf product and sell it on a website
Work as a freelancer selling your skills – use Fiverr.com or Upwork.com for example to build a profile
Tutoring one on one – Teach classes in your local neighbourhood. Get found by using Google My Business to advertise your services
Promote yourself through Q and A websites – Quora.com offers a platform for experts to share information in their field of expertise.
Write a book – writing a physical book has a double fold benefit when selling your skills online. Not only can you sell your book but it helps you grow your authority and status when trying to sell online and grow your brand. You can even self publish with Amazon self publishing.

How To Sell Your Skills Online – Creating A Course

If you have a specific skill you can sell it by creating a course through one of the many online course creation platforms. Checkout teachable.com and udemy.com for course creation resources.

Course creators will often create and upload a number of videos to create a training resource of some kind. You can also add downloadable documents to this and written information. Once created and set up, you can attract an audience when using one of these sites. For example, people can find courses on Udemy.com with a simple search and there’s all kinds of courses you can buy:

Having your course on one of these sites can definitely help you with promotion.

If you’re not up for creating your own course, you can find a course you would like to promote and join an affiliate program.

How To Sell Your Skills Online – Existing Products & Your Knowledge

Another way to sell your skills is through building an online resource and selling someone else’s product from it. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you earn commissions from selling other people’s products online.

By finding a product which aligns with your skill (or knowledge), you can attract an audience by creating either a blog or a YouTube channel for example. Upload content based around your skills and knowledge to attract an audience.

To sell affiliate products from your blog/channel, you need to join an affiliate program and place your affiliate links within your content. Bloggers often use other people’s products to monetise their blogs with, the same goes for YouTuber’s.

Building an online resource based around your expert knowledge is a great way to sell either your own product, or someone else’s using the affiliate model.

Create An Ebook & Build An Email List

Creating an ebook is one of the simplest ways to sell your skills online by creating a “digital asset” based around your knowledge. You can either sell your ebook directly from a website or use it as a freebie giveaway to build an email list with.

Email lists are a great way to build an audience to sell your products/affiliate products to. If you create a course, offer an ebook on your website to build your email list. Then sell your course through your email marketing messages.

Grab my ebook here “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” and learn one of the best methods I’ve found to selling your knowledge online.

Freelancing – Upwork.com Fiverr.com

Have a look at both upwork.com and fiverr.com if you want to find people who are selling their skills online. You’ll find a heap of freelancers with a huge range of skills. To become a paid freelancer on either site you’ll need to create a profile and build up some reviews to attract jobs.

This can take some time and effort and there’s plenty of competition with some insanely low prices, so it can be tough even getting a paid gig. To make this work you’ll need to stick with it for a while and build up a reputation to get enough work.

Summary

There’s many ways to sell your skills online whether you want to go freelance, or create some kind of digital products to sell automatically.

Most of these strategies will take some time and effort to get the ball rolling. The beauty of online strategies though is that you can build up your online income in your own time around a job.

You can also do a few of these. Start by creating a digital product you can sell. Then automate the process. To learn more about selling products and services online checkout this online video course and download my ebook.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet

Wondering how to sell stuff on the internet? There’s plenty of strategies you can use to do this. You can sell stuff you own, from around your house. Use eBay to list an item or even Facebook Marketplace allows you to do this. Or if you want to sell in greater volume you can create a listing on eBay and sell multiple items through a single listing. If you have something of your own to sell, you can do it numerous ways; from your own website, on an auction website, through a social media platform and so on.

But what if you don’t have anything of your own to sell? Affiliate marketers sell other people’s products online using a variety of methods: blogging, paid marketing, social media marketing, video and content marketing and email marketing. The beauty of selling someone else’s product is that you don’t have to deal with anything physically yourself. Affiliate marketing and drop shipping for example are both business models which let you sell something you don’t own through a website or email list.

By using a unique affiliate link, affiliates sell other people’s products simply by recommending them online. The product delivery and customer services is taken care of by product owners. This leaves affiliate marketers to focus on the advertising of a product or service; without having to actually provide it themselves.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best methods used to sell stuff on the internet. By using an email autoresponder, affiliates can sell in bulk to thousands of people simultaneously, through email messages.

To use email marketing, you start by offering something of value to a potential customer, such as an ebook. This is known as a lead magnet. Checkout my lead magnet on this website which is my ebook “affiliate marketing for beginners“.

To access a digital “giveaway” the website visitor opts in to the email list. You can then follow up with a series of automated email messages. See also the power of email marketing.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet – Blogging

There’s an estimated 600 million blogs on the internet. So why are so many people blogging? The answer is that blogging is a great way to attract an audience whom you can sell to.

Bloggers write posts which get found online either through the search engines or from another website or social media platform. When you visit most blogs, you’ll see a popup with some freebie giveaway. That’s email marketing working it’s magic.
The blog is used to attract an audience and the email marketing system is used for selling of products and services.

You can blog on any topic online and sell affiliate products which are aligned with your target audience.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet – PPC: Pay Per Click

Pay per click marketing is often used to sell stuff online through a website or landing page, connecting a paid promotional advert with an email marketing service. Paid advertising can also be used to send a targeted audience directly to products online, too. But it’s often used in combination with email marketing because it gives the marketer a longer period of time to sell to their subscriber.

On a website, a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes and they are usually gone forever after that. But once on an email list, the marketer can follow up with email messages for weeks, months and even years. Pay per click marketing allows someone to test the water of an advertising campaign, without spending too much.

When an advert doesn’t produce a sale, the marketer will cancel that particular campaign. Once they find an ad that works, they will scale up, adding more marketing budget to that particular ad.

Selling Digital Products On The Internet

One of the best things to sell online is digital products. Digital products can be accessed online or downloaded instantly, making them incredibly low cost product to deliver. Whereas physical products incur manufacturing, handling and delivery costs, digital products don’t have that problem. Once a digital product is created, there’s very few costs attributed to their delivery – except advertising.

That’s why many digital products pay affiliates much larger commissions for their sale than is possible with physical products of a similar value. A typical physical affiliate product commission runs from 1% to 10%. Whereas a digital product will often pay between 30% and 40% commission.

Access a training resource to learn how to sell online here.