Are you struggling with your affiliate business? I was too, but in 2014 I joined an online community and got help and support. I learned how to get traffic, convert traffic into leads and sales and stay the course when things got tough. Having others around you on the same path is vital for your success with an online business. It gives you belief and holds you accountable. Without a strong support system, it’s easy to look to friends and relatives for support but unfortunately this can have a negative effect, as your circle are seldom online entrepreneurs and often they don’t see your vision.
Here’s a few of the things I learned which helped me overcome my affiliate struggles and get my business on track.
Struggling With Your Affiliate Business – Email Marketing
Before I got proper help, I was struggling to get traffic to my websites. This is one of the major problems for affiliate marketers. Unless you get traffic, and the right kind of traffic, in the right numbers, you’re never going to succeed with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Get enough people to your offers and you’ll sell something eventually.
Of course not all traffic is equal and you need to know who to attract to your products. Attract the wrong kind of traffic, and no amount of visitors will give you a sale. More about this later. The first “gem” I learned was the power of email marketing. I didn’t have an email list and this gives you a major disadvantage. Without an email list of subscribers, you’re relying on your website traffic converting into sales.
This can be difficult even if you attract the right kind of (buyer) visitor. Most online users will require a number of touch points before they make an online purchase. So if they only interact with your website once, most will leave without buying anything.
An email list puts you in greater control of your traffic and allows you to make a number of connections with potential customers and over a long period of time. On a website, most people leave within a few minutes which means you only have this time to sell to them, if you don’t get their email address.
Struggling With Your Affiliate Business – Products
Before I got help, the products I was selling paid only peanuts. I sold books from Amazon, for example, which only paid a few cents for each sale I made. Plus I wasn’t selling products in the volume I needed in order to replace my employment income.
But even with only sporadic sales, some products can allow you to replace your current income much more quickly. For example, if you promote products which pay out recurring income, a few sales quickly adds up to give you a rolling monthly income. With one-time commissions, you only get paid once per item, so you need to sell in larger volumes.
Subscription products, such as training courses and digital software are a good example of those which pay out recurring income. They are also good products to choose because they are vital for businesses. Email autoresponders, business training and other software which helps online businesses are good examples of products which people will subscribe to potentially for years.
High Ticket Items
Another example of a game changer for affiliate marketers is high ticket products. High ticket affiliate products pay out much larger commissions than standard products which affiliates often choose. When I started affiliate marketing, I assumed a lot about what people buy online, much of which was false. I would sell things which I personally bought online, and which I could afford.
My mentor taught me to look at what the wealthy buy online and focus on selling those kinds of items instead.
With a low valued item, say one valued at $100, you can only earn around 40% commission maximum (if it’s a digital product). Physical products pay much lower levels of commission (usually from 1%-10%). But with products valued at $10,000 and above, each sale brings a much larger rate of commission – whether your product is digital or physical.
Help And Support
Consider two affiliates each working towards replacing their employment income so they can become full time affiliate marketers. One of them surrounds themselves with mentors and coaches who have already achieved this, the other goes it alone and only has the support of their friends and family. Which one has the best chance of success? Of course it’s the one with the mentors and coaches.
I tried everything alone for a long time, thinking I would save money if I did it all by myself. The problem with this approach is that there’s many pitfalls with affiliate marketing and most aren’t prepared for them. So when things don’t work out, 95% of affiliate marketers will quit.
Finding other affiliates and mentors who can keep you on track and offer support and accountability is vital if you’re going to succeed online. It’s simply too difficult otherwise. No one succeeds in a vacuum doing everything alone.