You can download my free ebook affiliate marketing guide by clicking on the image below.
Affiliate marketing is a popular business model and can allow you to earn commissions by selling other people’s products over the internet.
After struggling with selling my own ebooks on a website, I decided to learn marketing and joined a course. This led me to affiliate marketing and I realised that selling my own ebooks wasn’t the best way to earn a living on the internet.
Free Ebook Affiliate Marketing
Although I like the autopilot ebook strategy, I learned that certain affiliate products would give me much more income from a sale than a single ebook sale ever could. One of the major keys to doing affiliate marketing well is to learn how to work smart, not just hard! In the early days I spent a lot of time on all the wrong actions. It got me nowhere!
In this article I’m going to share some of the main things which allowed me to turn affiliate marketing into a passive income. But in the early days I had a lot of problems. Here’s a quick run down of the main problems to avoid with affiliate marketing which I faced for years:
- Shiny Object Syndrome – Looking for the “magic bullet” of affiliate marketing sorcery – jumping from course to course. (I did this for years)
- Being a “Busy Fool” – Spending time on activities which aren’t important.
- Trying to be perfect on the first attempt – imperfect action is better than perfect inaction
- Procrastination – you’ll get frustrated and want to give up too. Just keep moving forward and taking small daily actions
Free Ebook Affiliate Marketing Guide
Besides having the right mindset and finding an affiliate mentor who can help you, it’s worth following the right path for you. Everyone comes to affiliate marketing from a different perspective. Someone in a corporate job, for example, will likely have considerably less time and more money than someone who is unemployed. As such they’ll experience affiliate marketing in totally different ways.
A corporate employee can spend money on marketing, they can invest in the best tools and training. While the person who is time rich by money poor will be less likely to be able to afford this.
Affiliate Marketing For The Time Poor
If you’re time poor and wanting to escape a career, you can build an online business very quickly if you’re prepared to invest. Invest in both affiliate products and marketing. With a large value affiliate product range, you can build an income through sales of:
With a good sales funnel like the one above, you can spend your time learning paid marketing strategies. When you have a profitable campaign you can increase your budget and scale up.
Affiliate Marketing For The Time Rich
If your circumstances are different you may not be able to afford to spend money on a sales funnel like this one. Even paying out for marketing might not be a viable option for you.
In this case, your best bet is to use products which offer recurring income but which you don’t need to purchase. Recurring commission affiliate products pay you over and over for each sale you make. They are a far better use of your time than low value physical products or single pay-out products which only reward you once.
Once you’ve chosen your product/s you’ll need to get people to them. Without paying for advertising you’ll need to create content. This can be done in various ways:
- Blogging – create written content on a website
- Video marketing – upload regular videos to YouTube and promote products from them
- Social media – use social media platforms to create a following
Content Creation For The Affiliate
Creating content takes much longer than using paid marketing. With paid marketing, and the right kinds of products, you can be running a profitable business inside 6 months. With content marketing it can take much longer, years even.
This article for example is a piece of content marketing. If someone purchases something from me after reading this article, I’ll earn a commission on the sale. But content like this doesn’t usually get seen by huge amounts of people. I have to create a lot of content for people to start seeing my affiliate products on a regular basis.
Paid marketing on the other hand is much faster. I can run a paid advert and get content in front of people immediately. Of course it takes money to test and measure paid marketing. But once I see a profitable advert, I can leave it running and increase the budget – putting it in front of more people.
With content marketing this is much more difficult. in order to reach the same amount of people you need to create lots of content. Each piece of content needs to be promoted in order to get seen. Just creating content without marketing or sharing it is like putting up a gas station in the desert! Nobody sees your content unless you make the effort to advertise it.
