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!

What Is Six Figure Mentors?

What is six figure mentors? The Six Figure Mentors is a company built by Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek which helps people learn the skills to build online businesses, even without any experience.

Stuart and Jay have created an online community of mentors who help others learn the digital skills to build either an online digital business, or use those skills to build other businesses.

What Is Six Figure Mentors? My Story

When I joined the Six Figure Mentors, I had my own business and I wanted some help with my marketing. I also was intrigued by the online business system which is offered through the SFM.

The Six Figure Mentors offers a range of digital business services, software and training, including one to one tuition and mentorship at the higher levels of membership.

At the basic level membership, you can earn commissions from promoting The SFM itself, or benefit from the online community and support network that Stuart and Jay have built. This can be useful for business owners and budding entrepreneurs. For me, it helped me understand and build my fledgling martial arts school with various online marketing techniques.

Since then, I’ve also been able to make a number of high ticket sales through promoting The SFM program itself, something which I was unable to do for a number of years attempting affiliate marketing with low value products.

What Is The Six Figure Mentors? The Community

Online training and support for entrepreneurs

Unlike the many other affiliate courses I had taken previously, The Six Figure Mentors are actually a real company and run real live seminars throughout the world.

I met Stuart and Jay on a training event in London and they’re real people!

Here’s a picture of me with Jay:

Who Are The Six Figure Mentors For?

The Six Figure Mentors are definitely not for those who want to ‘give it a go’! If you think you’re in this camp, this company is most definitely not for you. More than 90% of business owners fail and quit within the first year of their online business. Only something like 3% actually make it through and build a successful online business.

The Six Figure Mentors offer the software, training and support to make this a real opportunity for those who have no idea how to start an online business, but want to escape their current lives through earning online.

Even with no technical experience, or business experience, anyone can be successful online if they have the desire to succeed and the right mental attitude. Previously, building an online business has been out of the remit of most people. 20 years ago you needed more technical experience and know-how for it to be even a possibility.

Stuart and Jay have done a lot of the work for you in this respect. Take a look at the video below (click on image) to see how the software can make things much easier for building a website, for example.

Who’s A Member Of The SFM?

The SFM has thousands of members worldwide who are building successful online businesses.

From teachers and engineers to HGV drivers and office workers, The SFM offers the ability to work from anywhere in the world, and build a business using many different online marketing strategies.

One of the main things that attracted me to The SFM was the ability to work under my own steam and in my own way. An online business gives you the ability to work in many different ways, and operate your business from anywhere, while working around current commitments.

You can also build your business around existing employment too, which makes it an attractive proposition to those who are unhappy in their work or worried about retirement.

You can access a free video series by signing up on this website (below or by the side of this article). You’ll get a video each day directly to your inbox from Stuart and Jay! Feel free to email me back with any questions and I’ll get back to you.

SFM Mentors

Who are The SFM Mentors? The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) are an online digital training and education community. Their purpose is to help people transition into the digital economy by building a business from the internet, or learn digital skills which can be used to build an existing business.

SFM Mentors – Founders

The Six Figure Mentors was founded by Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek, two successful online entrepreneurs who have created a support network for people who wanted to escape their jobs and live more fulfilling lives.

Here’s Stuart Ross explaining some of the software used to set up an online website which can be used to generate an income from the internet. Click on the image to watch the video.

Here’s a picture of me with jay Kubassek at a London training event:

What The SFM Mentors Can Do For You?

The SFM Mentors have built an online training and education facility and community. They run events globally to help their members learn and develop their online businesses. If you are interested in starting an online business with The SFM, you can sign up to the free workshop series of videos on this website.

SFM Mentors - Transitioning from traditional employment to the digital age

From anywhere in the world, anyone can now learn how to use their laptop and internet connection to earn an ongoing income. This can eventually replace their full time job. This isn’t an easy thing to do; but the SFM Mentors offer the means to achieve this; if they are committed enough.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

The business model used within the SFM is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing in which anyone can sell someone else’s product over the internet; and earn a commission on the sale. This model, combined with online marketing strategies, can be used to build an ongoing and scalable income from anywhere.

Who Is The SFM For?

The SFM Marketing training offered within Stuart and Jay’s program can also be used to market any business. When I joined the SFM, I used the program’s training to market my martial arts school. So, you can use the training offered with an existing business, or you can use the products and services which are built into the SFM Digital Business System, and learn online marketing strategies to build an income even without an existing business.

The SFM is an ‘all in one’ business system and training and education tool. It offers a means to connect with many other people who are also building online business. The online community is incredibly valuable too, because you can network and connect with other like minded people through the community.

How Difficult Is It To Build An Online Business With The SFM?

It’s definitely not an easy thing to build an online business from scratch with no experience. You need a strong work ethic and it will take at least 12 months before you can experience any results. There’s a few things standing in the way for most people:

Hard work – This isn’t some magic ‘pill’ system. It’s a genuine business and so it takes time and effort to make it work
Mindset – most people have been programmed to follow the herd and this means usually work a 9 to 5 job. Although the time period is arbitrary, this also trains you to do a nominal amount of work and get paid for it. Affiliate marketing is different because it’s based on performance related pay.
Old habits – so you’ll need to learn new mindsets and habits to become an effective affiliate marketer. Time spent doesn’t automatically translate to income, like in a job. You need to focus on money producing activities.

What’s The Point In Doing Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing offers a means to an end. Most affiliate marketers choose this path because it leads to more choices. If you can make an affiliate business work, it means you can choose your own hours, work from anywhere, and write your own paycheque.

For many it means:

Escaping a job of boss which is no longer tolerable
Never having to do the 9 to 5 commute and sit in traffic hours on end each side of the day
Choose how to spend their time and work around existing priorities

Affiliate marketing can also be used as a side business which can be built up around existing work in order to provide an ‘escape route’ from a job, career, limited income or boss.

Over time, if you take the right action steps, you can use affiliate marketing to build a good stable income which can replace your current income. This means the same money or more, but no longer needing to have to go to work in a job.

Many of the systems and strategies used in affiliate marketing can be automated and scaled up too. This means once you start earning, you can repeat the same actions and automate sales globally. Over time, and with the right products, you can earn an ongoing income from sales you made previously: subscription affiliate programs.

SFM Marketing

SFM marketing can take many forms. The Six Figure Mentors (SFM) offers a training and education community and a digital business system. The SFM Digital Business System, gives you a number of digital products, a website from which to market your products, and a ‘plug and play’ sales funnel which can be set up with a few simple steps through the modules in the back office.

SFM Marketing Strategies

Once you’ve set up your marketing funnel (sign up on this site to get started), you’ll need to market it. This is often the biggest challenge for affiliate marketers. Having a sales funnel with a range of products in it is just the first step of starting your online business. Once you have achieved this, you’ll need to sent targeted visitors to your landing page.

Marketing can be done in many ways but the main two fall into the categories of:

Content Marketing
Paid Marketing

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a much slower strategy than paid marketing. If you choose a good strategy and work hard at it, you’ll start to see some progress as people sign into your email list. See autopilot marketing. How long this takes will depend on your strategy, how hard you work at it, and how long you work at it for. See how long does it take to make money from affiliate marketing. Some marketing strategies which are free include:

Blogging – creating content on a website, like this post for example. (See Niche Blogging For Profit)
Video marketing – creating and uploading videos regularly to YouTube
Social Media marketing – building a list of followers and offering value to your groups
Creating and hosting webinars or creating podcasts.
Any other form of content marketing which is used to engage an audience.

Paid Marketing

Using paid platforms for your SFM marketing strategy is arguably the best method. Paid marketing is the best because of two things:

It is fast – Start a marketing campaign and you can have instant traffic to your sales funnel
It is scalable – Once you ‘hit’ on a marketing strategy which works well, you can leave it running and scale it up; moving on to another campaign once doing so.

The downside of using paid marketing is of course that it costs money. If you haven’t got a lot of money to learn this strategy with, you need to be very careful. A paid marketing strategy will burn through cash pretty quickly if you don’t keep your eye on the ball. You can spend money and not get it right on your first few tried. Ideally, start with a small budget and test and measure – making sure you track everything you do. This lets you learn from your bad campaigns as much as you can from the good ones.

Over time, you’ll come to realise which marketing tactics produce the best results and which aren’t worth doing. Then, you can cut back on the ones which don’t perform, (or keep running) and scale up those which do. Expect to spend money while you’re learning this process.

If you’re using paid strategies for your SFM marketing, it’s best to at least be at Gold level in the SFM. Elite level will still give you a high ticket commission, but it will be much harder to recoup your expenditure with when using paid marketing. See Six Figure Mentors Compensation Plan.

SFM Marketing – Which Strategy To Choose?

If you’re a member of The SFM, it can be a difficult decision to make which marketing strategy to choose. There’s training and resources within the community for all kinds of marketing strategies:

You Tube
Instagram
Blogging – Digital Bloggers
Video Marketing
Facebook Marketing
And so on.

So which strategy should you choose for your SFM marketing campaign? Which digital products you place within your digital ‘store’, will give you some idea of which strategy to choose from.

For example, if you position at the top level (DEA Partner), you’ll be able to earn the most from the product range. At basic membership level, you won’t be able to access the high ticket commissions. Ideally choose paid marketing only if you can position yourself at DEA Gold or above. If you can’t do this, focus on content marketing and free strategies instead.

How Long Does It Take?

The length of time it takes to start seeing progress from a digital business system like the SFM’s, will depend on a number of things:

Your marketing strategy – and what you can afford.
Your success with your marketing
The level of commitment you put in
Your ability to learn from your mistakes

It’s impossible to say categorically how long anyone’s journey will take, since it’s different for everyone. With content marketing strategies, it will take considerably longer then with paid marketing. There’s no guarantees in business though whatever you do! The key is to keep going and learn from your mistakes. Think of failure as ‘feedback’ rather than failure and keep working on yourself, and the business.

See this article “Why affiliate marketing does not work” on this topic. Only around 3% of people will actually continue long enough and make an online business work for them and allow them to go full time with it. If you’re in the 3%, you’ll need to be stubborn, determined and very patient! A rare combination! Good luck! If you want to learn more, you can access the workshop series on this site. Sign up by entering your name and email in the sign up box.

SFM Digital Business System

The SFM digital business system offers an all in one online education and training community for anyone who wants to:

Build their own internet business from scratch – using variety of different strategies
Market an existing business using their training and education resources and community

What Is The SFM Digital Business System?

The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) offers a variety of online digital business software; and an online training and education portfolio. Their back-office offers a digital business set-up which allows a member to set up their own digital business ‘store’. This offers some of the SFM’s own products and services. This is one of the simplest strategies to build an income from the internet. Depending on the products you choose to put in your ‘e-store’, you can have:

A ready made affiliate website – with your affiliate i.d already installed. This is easily set up within a few minutes.
A sales funnel containing a range of digital products for you to earn commissions from.
A modular step-by-step set up process allowing you to set up automated systems and strategies for building an email list and sales funnel.
Through your funnel you can sell: digital products including subscription products, up-sells, benefit from a built in sales team, earn from multi-tier sales, sell high commission affiliate products.

You can also use the online community and a range of training and education tools to build a pre-existing business which you own. When I joined the SFM I was struggling with building a martial arts school. I used the online marketing strategies to build my school. See my website on this Martial Arts Marketing.

Training And Education – The SFM Digital Business System

The SFM Digital Business System offers a strategy which anyone can use to earn money from the internet by selling other people’s products (affiliate marketing). The system itself lets you create an online ‘digital store’ with a range of products and services within it. Depending on which products you purchase yourself, you can earn commissions based on the products you ‘place’ in your digital ‘shop’.

Products range from $29.95 for the SFM ‘App’, which is a ‘taster’ product which lets you access module 1 and a consultant. This lets you see if The SFM is a good fit for you. If you decide to join as a member, you’ll need to upgrade your membership. See more about membership fees here: Six Figure Mentors Cost.

High Ticket Commissions

Each product in the system offers a larger value in terms of access to the training and education community. You can also make larger commissions on the products themselves as an affiliate for the SFM. Ideally, join at least as an Elite member, if you go this route, since this gives you access to the high ticket affiliate commissions.

The top tier product is the SFM ‘partner program’ which gives you personal one-to-one access to top leaders in the community. You can also access a retreat run by the SFM founder members Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek; and the ability to earn the largest level commissions on top tier products. You can also earn multi-tier commissions which are commissions based on sales made by your team.

Products at this level are priced at $20,000+. They offer the ability to sell these products yourself and earn 40% commissions on a single sale. That’s $8000 on a single sale (*please check current prices). The personal tuition and mentorship available at this level is also very personal. You can connect with six figure earners personally and book regular appointments. There’s also a community of people to network and connect with who run regular webinars and training sessions.

Online Training Community

By far one of the best things about The SFM digital business system is its online community. The SFM has recently partnered also with Microsoft Lynda and DigitalMarketer to offer some of the best training and education resources available online:

Microsoft Lynda (Under the Linkedin umbrella of companies) recently partnered with SFM as a way to offer their own 6,500 training courses as part of the SFM curriculum.

DigitalMarketer (The world’s longest standing and most highly respected B2B and B2C marketing training company) also partnered with SFM and now offer their own training as part of the SFM curriculum.

The personal tuition and one to one support I have personally received from the community has been a huge help in my online business. Without this direct help, it can be incredibly frustrating and difficult to know whether you are taking the right actions and steps to move your online business forwards.

Building an online can be incredibly frustrating, especially at first. When you have access to people who are in the same boat, it’s a huge help in terms of mindset, technical hurdles and emotional support. Especially when they are much further ahead of you in terms of results.

Learn More

You can join this online community and learn more by accessing the free video workshops. These are available by signing up on this website. Enter your name and email on the opt-in form. You will receive a daily video from one of my personal affiliate marketing mentors Stuart Ross.

Affiliate Marketing Coach

Getting an affiliate marketing coach could be the best thing you can do for your online business. After getting a coach, I started taking a different view of affiliate marketing. Before I found a coach, things were pretty bleak. I tried many different strategies within affiliate marketing but couldn’t get any traction.

A coach gave me a different view of the actions and activities I should be focused on, to move my online business forwards. Everyone has different circumstances to work with, so the same answer isn’t appropriate for everyone though. Some affiliates will want to build slowly over time using only content marketing; other will want faster results with paid marketing.

According to your own personal situation, circumstances and ultimately your reasons for doing affiliate marketing, your ‘why?’, you will need to choose a path which is suitable for you.

Affiliate Marketing Coach – My ‘Why?’

An affiliate marketing coach can help you find your path and start making faster progress because they have already made the mistakes you are likely to make! There’s a huge learning curve in affiliate marketing. If you haven’t got a clear path, it’s easy to get distracted by the many ‘shiny objects’ and all the different strategies. Before you know it, you could be working for months and even years, without making any real progress.

See 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.

Knowing your ‘why?’ in affiliate marketing keeps you going when times are tough. If you don’t have a strong enough ‘why’, you could easily lose momentum and are more likely to give up. See Why I Do Affiliate Marketing And Why You Should Too!

Avoiding Affiliate Mistakes – Find An Affiliate Marketing Coach

A coach will hold you accountable and give you information which will help you. Here’s a few things which I’ve learned which have made a dramatic difference to my affiliate marketing business:

Your ‘state’ of mind effects your productivity. Unless you control it, it controls you. If you continually find yourself depressed, anxious and annoyed with the way things are going in your affiliate business, this can effect your productivity.
Subscription affiliate programs can give you a massive advantage – yes subscription affiliate programs offer ongoing commissions for previous sales. Choosing products to promote which offer a lifetime value to the customer is therefore worth the extra effort. The same sale (and effort) could make you $40 or $40 a month for life!
High ticket programs allow you to scale up, offset advertising costs and use more easily scalable marketing strategies. Small value items are harder to sell as a newbie because you have so much competition when using only content marketing strategies. High value items give you many advantages.

Affiliate Marketing Isn’t Easy!

Affiliate marketing sounds like it should be easy, but it really isn’t! You can spend time and money on affiliate marketing and still fail! Knowing what to expect from it is a useful thing. It takes time and effort and you should learn your trade if you’re going to do well. Affiliate marketing has some huge advantages over other business models too:

Offers a way to earn from the internet using a laptop and internet connection
Can be worked from anywhere globally
Work around other commitments and build your business around existing work
Uses scalable systems and strategies which can offer products globally
Uses automation and systems which can run, selling products 24 hours a day

Me with Jay Kubassek - affiliate marketing coach — With with co-founder 0f The SFM Jay Kubassek

So, in theory, affiliate marketing is an amazing business model which anyone can do. But there are some downsides too. It’s not always going to be easy:

It’s a performance based business which works both ways – unlimited earnings are possible but so is no earnings, and that’s more likely too for most people!
You need to fail a lot to learn what works and what doesn’t work
Content marketing is a slow strategy and although free, takes a lot of time and effort.
Paid marketing isn’t guaranteed either and although it’s fast, it doesn’t guarantee sales! You need to test and measure and learn from your failures before you can automate a profitable business.

But It’s Not All Doom and Gloom!

If your’e serious about earning money from the internet, you should get an affiliate marketing coach. Join an online community of entrepreneurs and marketers who have already failed more times than you’ve tried! You can’t fail to learn from them if you take part in regular interactive webinars. Sign up on this website for more information and to join.