One of the best pieces of advice I got as an affiliate marketer was to give first and receive later. When I first became an affiliate, I simply wanted to get those sales! Make the money! I didn’t really consider how this would happen. But affiliates succeed with an exchange of value:
Acquisition, conversion then value delivery are the main first principles of online selling.
As affiliates we send traffic to offers, but to build trust, acquire leads and convert them into customers, we must have some kind of value first. This didn’t occur to me as a beginner affiliate. I thought I could simply set up and advert, send traffic, and make money. While it can work like that, it’s what you give that attracts your customers, and builds trust.
If you’re running an advert, you attract customers by giving value and meaning. By creating content, or emailing your list, you give understanding and insight. If you do this enough, and to the right people, they will buy from you because they trust you, and because you’ve already given them the value they will exchange in monetary terms.
Give First, Receive Later – Example
Over the last few years I’ve been teaching martial arts and initially, I struggled with building up my school. I sought the help of an online “guru” who I found online. His name is Mike Massey. Now I didn’t have much money to go buying his stuff, and I didn’t know whether he could help me in any case.
So I signed up to his email list to learn more about what he was offering. His emails alone helped me enormously. He taught me to use online advertising, offer more courses and teach summers schools etc., how to retain longer term students and a whole bunch of other useful stuff!
I didn’t want to do some of the things he recommended, but after several weeks of reading his emails, I felt like he’d given me huge value – and completely for free!
Guess what? In his emails he sells his book and I bought it. I realised there and then that this was how to sell online. Nobody wants a pushy salesman shoving their wares at them. But once you’ve already given the value, the law of reciprocity kicks in. It’s a commonly known sales technique and one which works really well in the online space.
The online space is a buyers marketplace. But if you continue to deliver value and build trust, your subscribers and visitors will buy from you if your products are a good fit for them!
Give First, Receive Later – Example
Another example of the give first, receive later principle is Martin Lewis’s website moneysavingexpert.com. In it, he gives financial advice and links to companies and services through affiliate links. Money Saving Expert is a hugely popular and successful website which helps people with their finances by showing them the cheapest utility companies, credit cards, discounts and offers.
It advises on mortgages and other financial matters, such as getting out of debt. The point is that the site is built on the principle of helping people first, making money second. You might not even be aware that the site makes money from referrals (affiliate marketing).
Without having built the huge amount of helpful content on the website, Moneysavingexpert.com wouldn’t have gained the brand awareness and readership it has today.
Be A Producer Not A Consumer
We often don’t think in terms of producing or consuming, but if you look around you’ll see that most of us are in fact consumers nearly 100% of the time! We consume entertainment, blogs, videos, food and goods and services.
Most of our days are spent consuming something, whether it is food, goods, entertainment or a service. To shift this relationship and earn from affiliate marketing, you need to become a producer.
When people are consuming your information, your courses, ebooks and downloadable content, you have their attention! Use the content you produce to lead people to products which will help them, by giving them useful information which is of service. This can be done through blogging, through video or through your own ebooks, or email messages.
Be a producer, not just a consumer!
Delayed Gratification & Patience
As an affiliate marketer, it’s important to realise the importance of delayed gratification and patience! If you focus only on the getting, you might scare away your potential customers by being too keen! If you walk into a shop, and the salesman is too needy for the sale, it pushes customers away! The same is true in the online space.
But if you give through your content and email messages, you build trust over the longer term. Continue to do so, and your subscribers will know you are consistent and therefore reliable. But if you get frustrated and drop off, you can’t serve anyone over the longer term.
As a beginner affiliate I was definitely focused on the getting, rather than the giving. I was looking for the quick wins, the easy buck! But it didn’t work because I didn’t provide any value to anyone.
I recently had a sale drop in from a subscriber who had been on my email list for 5 years! Such is the power of email marketing and of course of patience and delayed gratification!
What is most important in affiliate marketing, is it techniques or mindset? When I was just starting out as an affiliate, all I wanted to know is ‘how’ to do it: how do I get sales online? As time has passed, I’ve come to understand how important mindset is for success with affiliate marketing. I tried many tactics to actually sell affiliate products, but many of them didn’t work, at least not straight away.
This is where your mindset comes into play. Without the right mindset, you’ll try a tactic, it will fail and you’ll assume (wrongly) that affiliate marketing doesn’t work. Many affiliates will throw the baby out with the bathwater here, and lump ‘affiliate marketing’ in with their tactic (which didn’t work) and their mindset (when they gave up). “It doesn’t work” they declare! In fact around 95% of affiliates will quit.
The ones who don’t quit, and look at their “failures” as an opportunity to start again with more wisdom, have the right mindset. So you can see that techniques aren’t the most important thing when it comes to affiliate marketing; mindset is.
Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset
Of course you need a technique in order to get your affiliate links in front of customers. But any given technique will bring about at least some challenges. With organic marketing, for example, your first blog post isn’t necessarily going to bring home the bacon.
Paid marketing too will definitely throw you some curveballs and most advertising campaigns won’t work on your first try. On a recent video one member of the community I’m a part of shot over 60 videos before he hit a winner! While some affiliates can get lucky and find a strategy that works quite quickly, most aren’t going to find this. I personally tried various strategies before I found one which worked for me.
Different strategies will suit different people too. If you’re working full time, you probably don’t have a lot of time for content creation, for example. So paid marketing is likely to be a better option for you. But whatever method you choose as a promotional tool for affiliate marketing, a “never say die” mentality is going to help you overcome the obstacles you’re likely to face on your journey.
Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset – Growth Mindset
Having a growth mindset means you can always learn some new skills and get better. With a limited mindset, you’re more likely to throw up your hands and quit. Affiliate marketing is a tough business and unless you make a sale, you don’t make any money. Initially there’s going to be some hurdles to overcome but over time your experience will help you choose the best course of action.
This is much more difficult when you’re new to affiliate marketing because you have no experience to draw from. As a result of this, your results can be slow and intermittent. You can spend a huge amount of time implementing a certain technique to no avail. This can be frustrating and disheartening when you’ve worked really hard but have no actual sales to show for it.
Don’t quit! Keep going, no matter how slowly. As you gain experience in affiliate marketing, you results can rapidly grow exponentially. Here’s why…
Why Results Grow With Experience
In the beginning you’ll likely be making lots of mistakes and learning the ropes as they say. But over time you’ll gain some understanding. Don’t stop learning because it is your own personal experience which is the most valuable thing with affiliate marketing. However much theory you learn, it’s never a match for personal experience; running ad campaigns, testing sales funnels, building content and so on.
The longer you can “stay in the game” the more experience you’ll accumulate. At some stage you’ll make a sale, or find a winning campaign. This becomes easier with time for two good reasons:
Firstly you’re experience shows you where your time is best spent – making you more efficient
Secondly, you accumulate data and traffic. With an email list for example, the longer you build it, the more people you have to sell to.
Therefore, results can compound later on in affiliate marketing if you stay the course.
Frustrated With Your “Tactic”
If you’re frustrated with your marketing “tactic”, perhaps you haven’t mastered it yet. What leads someone to master a tactic is a good mindset. Or, perhaps you expect too much from what you’re doing, expecting a lot from a little effort? A good mindset will carry you through the difficulties and help you overcome the obstacles.
If you aren’t aware of your limiting beliefs/ideas, any entitlement you’re carrying, or you expect an easy return on your efforts, you’re likely to keep running into problems and frustrations. Once you can shine the light of awareness on these issues (you may be carrying), you can change your behaviour and turn things around.
A Big “Why?” & Controlling Your State
In my early years as an affiliate marketer I experienced setback after setback. It’s a miracle I stuck with it as long as I did! The one thing which kept me going was an excitement and passion for what affiliate marketing can do for not just me but for anyone – it can set you free both financially and geographically. But for me, the biggest reason was so I could be independent of a job or a boss.
It’s important to remember your reasons for building an online business. When you hit a setback, which you definitely will, you’ll be much more resilient if you have a strong reason to continue. If you’re just doing it as a “side gig” and don’t really need/want it, you’re much more likely to quit.
Knowing your “why”, becoming aware of your limiting beliefs, and shining a light on any attitudes you carry which hold you back is part of a growth mindset. These “awarenesses” are just as important (if not more) than a strategy to drive sales in your affiliate marketing business. Controlling your inner state is also an important skill too.
When you lose your cool and want to throw your laptop through the window, this can lead to quitting as a beginner. Over time, if you stick with it, you’ll learn to know when to step away and maintain your most productive inner state for the growth of your business.
Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset
There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and not all of them are going to work for you. But stick with one for long enough and at some point you should see some sales (depending of course on what you do). Still, nothing is guaranteed in affiliate marketing. But if you quit, you’re guaranteed not to make any sales! How long you stick at something which isn’t working is going to depend on a number of things:
Your belief and confidence in your marketing strategy
The training you received and trust you have in your mentor/coach
Your mindset – how long you can endure “failure” without quitting
Your understanding of your marketing method, and how much you can learn from it through your efforts over time
When you focus only on a technique, it’s easy to blame your tactic when things don’t work out. But if you focus on personal growth and your technique, getting clearer on your tactic, more productive and limiting negative state of mind which will inevitably surface, you are much more likely to succeed with affiliate marketing.
Summary
I haven’t covered any marketing techniques within this article but I have written a lot about marketing strategies before. If you’re looking for a strategy, type your tactic into the search bar to find previous posts on different marketing tactics for affiliates. Or read my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
As a beginner, I was solely concerned with marketing tactics. I just wanted something that “worked” so I could make an income online. I didn’t understand the importance of having and nurturing the correct mindset for success online. So I just went through the motions with my tactics and had frustration after frustration. If this sounds familiar, check out my post on what to do when your affiliate business isn’t working.
The answer is to look after your mindset as well as focusing on a tactic. Set goals and intentions and do the inner work too. If you can be consistent with your actions in affiliate marketing you’ll have much greater success than if you dip in and out, give up and then return later. Long term consistency trumps short term intensity.
For more information and to get regular emails to help you with your affiliate marketing business, join my email list on this website. For training and support click here.
Is it really possible to escape the rat race with affiliate marketing? Many affiliates have achieved this already and are earning a full time living through the sale of other people’s products and services online. The switch to online spending from traditional high street stores, with an estimated $730 billion a year (and growing), is a huge opportunity.
With affiliate marketing, you become the “middle man” and promote products and services online. The benefit of doing so means you never have to hold, purchase or store these products yourself. Nor do you have to deal with any customers. Once you have learned the skill of selling online, you can apply it to any product and any country. Get started here.
Escaping The Rat Race With Affiliate Marketing – Why Affiliate Marketing?
So why choose affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is just one online business model which can be used as a vehicle to escape the rat race by building an income online. Others include drop shipping, direct selling, print on demand or even selling your own products online. Affiliate marketing is a good answer because most people don’t have their own products to sell, and it’s the simplest business model. Simply join an affiliate program and get an affiliate link which identifies you as the third party seller.
You then promote this link online. When you make a sale through your link, you receive a commission based on your referral.
Other similar business models can work well too, although there may be more involved. Drop shipping, for example is a similar business model. You send products directly to the customer from the wholesalers with drop shipping, having found them online using marketing skills. With most online business models the key skill is marketing – attracting an audience who is interested in your particular product. The fastest way to learn this skill is by choosing an affiliate product to sell and setting about selling it.
Once you’ve learned the skill of selling online, you can apply it to any business. It’s a skill well worth learning, whether you intend to earn from affiliate marketing, or any other business.
How Fast Can I Escape The Rat Race With Affiliate Marketing?
If your goal is to escape the rat race with affiliate marketing, you might want to know how long it will take. This is different for everyone and depends on a number of things such as the product you promote and the marketing method you choose to promote it with. In general though you can expect it to take several months before you’re up and running with affiliate marketing, making sales. For some, it will be less and for others it will be more.
The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is to use a high ticket sales funnel and paid marketing. This requires an investment upfront in terms of your business model and marketing method. Cheaper ways to sell online require less upfront cost by will likely take much longer to come to fruition.
High ticket products pay more because they offer more value. Training courses, for example, which offer software and personal coaching, will cost more than a small, low value physical product. There’s also high value physical products you can promote too.
How Much Can I Make With Affiliate Marketing?
With a regular job, your earnings are always capped because there’s only so many hours in the day. So even in a high paying job, you can only trade so many hours. But with affiliate marketing you can sell products online to earn money. This has huge benefits once you have learned how to do it. The Digital Payments market worldwide is projected to grow by 9.52% (2024-2028) resulting in a market volume of US $16.62 trillion in 2028.
Once you can sell online, you have learned a different way to make money which isn’t tied to trading your time for it. You can therefore make multiple transactions per day without having to be physically present through the use of automation. Websites, email marketing services and advertising campaigns can run automatically around the clock and you can sell products worldwide online.
The first step for an affiliate is to learn how to sell your first product online. Once you have done it once, you can do it over and over using the knowledge you have learned.
How Do I Get Started With Affiliate Marketing?
You can get started by joining a step by step program which gives you all the tools you need. Once you have set up your website, and sales funnel, by following the steps, you can learn a marketing method around your existing commitments.
You will learn the basics of selling online; the number one skill you’ll need to become a successful affiliate. Then, follow the step by step course to set up your online presence – website, sales funnel and email follow up. This is pre-populated so there’s very little technical experience needed in order to do this. Website setup can be done through following a simple setup procedure.
If you’re wondering how to build momentum with organic marketing, or even struggling to get started, this one’s for you! Once you are on a roll with your organic marketing campaign, you will see more traffic, leads and sales. But this can take some time. Before you get into 5th gear you need to drop the clutch, put it in first and slowly move forwards.
That can be daunting if you’re unsure about your topic, what to write, (or create videos about) or if you’re shy on camera or even doubt your own writing ability, for example. All these factors can and will stop you from even getting started. So that’s where to begin. I was super shy on camera shooting my first few videos but over time I got over it. Still, there’s work to be done too!
If you’re shy or lack confidence, keep in mind very few people will see your stuff when you are just starting out – (silver linings to no traffic!) If you lack confidence, that’s going to you hold back in promoting your content too. So on the plus side, you will naturally attract a larger audience when you gain confidence and that might be somewhere down the road.
For starters, lets look at your niche as what topic you decide to delve into is massively important.
How To Build Momentum With Organic Marketing – Choosing Your Niche
Your niche is the topic you decide you’re going to be creating content about. Creating content in a niche you are passionate about is always going to be much more enjoyable than one in which you have zero interest. Plus, you probably already follow others in your niche who can give you content ideas as time goes on.
It’s likely that your niche is related to the topic/s you’re already following online. Have a look at your YouTube channel and other social media platforms. What kind of leaders are you following? What are you interested in? If you align your niche with your passions and interests, you won’t ever run out of ideas and your own personal growth is tied in with your content production.
Choosing a niche you have no passion for is exhausting. I tried it once and lasted about 6 months before I completely burned out. Pick one you can keep working in for the long term, and in which you are investing in continual personal growth. You don’t have to know everything about your topic either, because you can always learn more. The key is to pick a topic you’re aligned with.
How To Build Momentum With Organic Marketing – Your “Why?”
Suppose you’re a Tony Robbins fan, for example. He’s big on personal growth and the psychology of success. You could watch a video of his on YouTube and take a single idea from it to create a video or article of your own. Here’s the first video I found of him and here’s an interesting question he asks “What is your motive for action?”
An intrinsic motivation is different to an external motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from within, while extrinsic motivation arises from external factors. When you are intrinsically motivated, you engage in an activity because you enjoy it and get personal satisfaction from doing it. When you are extrinsically motivated, you do something in order to gain an external reward.
The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination.
Don’t forget there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and more than 114 million active YouTube channels too. So whether you’re creating written or video content there’s huge competition for organic traffic. What’s NOT going make you stand out is if you copy someone else and/or are solely money motivated in your actions. To build momentum with organic marketing you’re going to need to enjoy the journey and have intrinsic motivation.
How To Build Momentum With Organic Marketing – Your First Piece Of Content
Your first piece of content is the start of this journey but remember that you are building momentum here! I find an inspiring idea will help me to get the wheels turning. Before you can create your first piece of content you need a website, or access to a video platform such as YouTube or TikTok.
If you haven’t done this before consider it a dry run. That takes the pressure out of it and lets you experiment. Consider your first YouTube video a practice in shooting a video and then uploading it. Or if you’re blogging the act of publishing your first piece of content is a major first step. You can even use free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com. Hubpages is where I first published an article and where I made my first affiliate sale too!
If you’re procrastinating here, try and take the pressure out of it for yourself. Checkout my post on overcoming procrastination in your affiliate marketing business. You may need to take a step or two back: clear your desk, outline your concerns or remove the importance around the issue somehow. Mental blockages can stop you moving forwards. This could be genuine concerns about a work colleague or boss seeing your video and it affecting your work somehow, for example. Or your belief that you’re not good enough, or will be criticised for your work. I’ve personally found that the inner critic (yourself) tends to be worse than anyone else who might openly criticise you.
You’ll need to deal with these issues before you can actually move forwards. By bringing them into your conscious awareness you can help to resolve them. A first step might be writing down all your inner conflicts. Then work through them one by one until you have resolved them.
Take the importance out of the initial step of creating a piece of content and give yourself a reward of some kind for having taken it.
How To Build Momentum With Organic Marketing – Congratulations!
Congratulations you’ve created your first piece of content and published it! Whether that’s a YouTube video or a blog post, well done. Don’t diminish the importance of taking a small step because momentum is created by taking small steps again and again. As the saying goes “a journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step”.
Building momentum with organic marketing is firstly about creating habits out of creating content. So you want to create a habit of doing this by creating content again and again. As you do so you’ll get better and better at it too and more confident and self assured in doing so! So don’t worry if you’re not happy with your content at first. The key is to get into motion and start taking small, positive actions in the right direction.
Now you have created some content you can share it on your social media accounts. That’s a great, free way to get your content out there. It’s useful to also create a habit out of content promotion. Without it, your content won’t get seen by anyone.
To get momentum through organic marketing, you’re going to want to make habits out of:
Creating (useful) content for your audience
Promoting that content
To build the habit, you only need to get started. As you progress, you will find your content will improve as you become more comfortable creating it (and sharing it).
Aligning Content With Your Product/s
It’s worth a mention here that your content should serve your audience in some way and be helpful to them. Otherwise, you’re not going to attract the audience you want with your content. Your content should also serve to attract an audience you can serve with your affiliate products (presuming you’re monetising your content with this strategy).
So before you rush off and create a tonne of content, be advised that not all traffic is targeted traffic. If you’re building an affiliate business with your content you want that content to attract the right audience. To do so you need to align your niche carefully with your content and your affiliate product. Otherwise you’ll be spending a lot of time and effort in attracting the wrong audience!
Content promotion is as important as content creation. If you spend all your time creating content, in the hope that “one day” it will be found, you’re not going to create the momentum you really need to build an affiliate business around it. So content promotion should be tended to as a matter of urgency once you publish your content.
I struggled with promotion partly because of shyness, lack of confidence and insecurity as well as my not understanding the importance of promotion. The same reasons which can hold you from getting started in the first place can stop you from attracting the audience you deserve. When you look at the lack of traffic you have, you may consider that organic traffic “simply doesn’t work”. But in fact it is your own cognitive bias working against you (through lack of self belief) and/or lack of action.
Hence this is why you must work on yourself as well as your affiliate business. If you’re full of doubt, your results will mirror that doubt. When you’re full of passion, self belief and inspiration, your results will mirror that too – but only if you take action!
Now you have the ball rolling, it’s important to keep it rolling. Don’t burn out though but instead commit to a daily/weekly habit schedule you can sustain over the longer term.
Momentum doesn’t happen with one action but with many actions repeated over time. So in the beginning it’s important to take small regular actions which can be repeated to build habits. Motivation doesn’t last, it only gets you going. Once you have overcome the inertia of not doing, you need to maintain the action steps which will build momentum over time.
“A rolling stone gathers no moss” and it takes much less effort to keep a stone rolling than to start it rolling!
A good daily/weekly habit pattern to begin with is to:
Create a piece of content (every day ideally, but whatever you can manage at first)
Publish and promote it – through your email list, on social media, etc.
Get this habit pattern down to the extent that it feels wrong NOT doing it. This usually takes a month or two of consistent action.
What To Expect
At first you’ll likely not notice much shift in your traffic. However, that’s because you haven’t yet built up momentum. Don’t be too eager to look for results at this early stage because it will likely send you into doubt and scepticism. You know what happens when you’re in the state of doubt? That’s right – nothing! You’ll doubt your course and STOP moving forwards. Then, nothing can happen.
I’ve been here many times, lacking motivation and lacking a habit which drives my business forwards. It’s not a great place to reside if you want growth! Focus instead on the small wins – your daily/weekly habit patterns and the hits you receive on your website as a result. Take these small wins as major achievements because they are – you’re learning to build organic traffic to your website.
What momentum looks like once you’ve built it!
If you persist, your traffic will continue to grow, albeit slowly. Keep examining your content generation, intentions and promotion methods as you move forwards, improving in every area. Once you’re a month or two in, you should have found a nice momentum.
I’ve had times where I lost the faith in my blogging habit, so I stopped. Then a sale would drop in and re-inspire me to take action again. I would kick myself for losing the faith and stopping, having lost what would have been even more momentum.
Keep your belief high by fuelling it with your passion on your topic. Follow other leaders in your field and use their content to inspire you for your own!
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?
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.
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Affiliate lead generation is the act of collecting leads, usually in the form of an email address. Some affiliates build their own list of leads and then deliver email messages to their subscribers promoting their affiliate products. Or, you can also send leads directly to an affiliate company if you’re working on a pay per lead basis.
In my personal experience as an affiliate I’ve built my own email list through offering some giveaway on my website or landing page. The benefit of using a landing page is that a landing page is a web page designed for the specific purpose of collecting emails. Whereas a website is different in that there’s more choices on a website.
On a website, visitors can have a look around and browse your posts. But on a landing page there’s only two choices: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to “tweak” the details on the page to optimise the rate at which visitors opt in. This allows them to drive down the cost to acquire a lead.
Affiliate Lead Generation – Why Generate Leads?
Affiliates use lead generation to build an email list of subscribers. By sending out useful email messages which deliver some kind of value, they can build trust with a subscriber. It can be a challenge to sell an affiliate product directly from a website. A website visitor only sticks around for a few minutes on average, often less. Plus they only have one opportunity to buy from you if they never return.
Click here to access my free Ebook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners”
Since most online shoppers will need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website online before they buy, it makes sense to connect with visitors more frequently through the use of email marketing.
Affiliates therefore have a greater opportunity to sell their products through email marketing than they would from a website alone. With email marketing, an affiliate can sell a product to a subscriber days, weeks or even years after they have joined an email list. This just isn’t possible from a website so a good way to optimise your affiliate sales is to capture emails from a website by offering a giveaway of some kind to deliver value to those who opt in.
The Lead Magnet – A Legitimate “Bribe”
The lead magnet is a legitimate bribe with which you can attain the details of your website visitors. A lead magnet should resonate with your customer avatar/target audience and also align with whatever product/s you are selling through your email list.
On this website I offer my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners as a giveaway when visitors join my email list. Access here. A lead magnet could be anything but many affiliates choose an ebook or a course which can be delivered automatically via email.
Affiliate Lead Generation – Communicating With Your Leads
Once you start attracting leads to join your email list you’ll want to give them some useful information which will be beneficial to them. If you’ve ever joined someone’s email list, and all they do is spam you with products to buy, it’s unlikely you’ll keep opening their emails for long!
But if you offer them some genuine value through your email messages, and if they are a good fit for you, they are likely to open your messages more regularly. They might even start to trust you!
Trust online is a powerful thing (especially online) because there are so many people wanting your hard earned cash, it’s worth building trust by genuinely trying to help your subscribers somehow.
If you build trust first, and sell later, people are much more likely to keep opening your email messages, trust you and buy from you if it’s appropriate to their needs.
There’s another powerful reason to build an email list of subscribers too. To get visitors to your website requires either a considerable amount of work (in building content) or a considerable sum of money in paid advertising. If you use content to acquire traffic, Google can shift the algorithm any time and you can easily lose your rankings overnight, meaning your traffic can quickly drop.
Or, if you run out of advertising budget and stop paying for traffic, your visitors will drop off almost immediately.
Building an email list gives you control over your traffic so you’re not as reliant on either Google for traffic or a paid advertising budget. Some affiliates will build their list to over 100,000 subscribers! A single email sent to their list can mean hundreds or even thousands of link clicks which could mean either traffic to your website post or a sale of an affiliate product.
Control over your traffic is huge for affiliates because without traffic you can’t make any affiliate sales.
Summary
Affiliate lead generation is a powerful tool. On a website most visitors leave within a short period of time. This gives an affiliate only a small window of opportunity to make the sale.
But if the affiliate collects leads from their website, it gives them more opportunity to sell through email messages. Once someone joins your email list, you can follow up via email over days, weeks, months and even years and decades. This gives you more opportunity to give value, built trust and sell your affiliate products.
Since most online consumers will require between 6-8 touch points before they make a purchase, it makes sense to use email marketing so you can achieve this.
“Baby steps” is a great term when it comes to building an income online with affiliate marketing. There’s a lot to learn and do and it can be quite overwhelming. Even now, after years of being an affiliate, I’m overwhelmed at times. Should I start a new website, or a YouTube channel? What niche should I choose? What products can I sell? The vast array of choices leaves many would-be affiliates completely dumb founded. Instead of doing something, they get overwhelmed and do nothing as a result.
This is when it comes down to making your choices simple. Take a “baby step” forwards. A “baby step” is something small and easily manageable. Thinking of the whole picture at once only results in overwhelm. You simply can’t do everything at once which it takes to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Even trying to do so is exhausting just to think about.
Why “Baby Steps” Is Important For Affiliate Marketing
Despite not looking at the bigger picture when you’re taking tiny steps, it can be useful to do so now and then. After all, you’re building an affiliate business for a reason. That reason will be different for everyone. For some it’s the geographical freedom it provides. For others it’s more time with their family or to quit a job which is draining all their time. Get really clear about your reason because it helps give you drive and motivation when things are tough.
Once you see the bigger picture and are full of motivation to make it a reality, it’s time to actually do something. It’s time for baby steps! Depending where you are in your affiliate journey, this might mean different things. For me, I’m starting with a blog post. But if you haven’t found a product to promote or set up an email list, that may be the step for you. (If you’re just getting started you can sign up on this website for the video series.)
Here’s a few examples of what baby steps might be appropriate:
One thing that successful affiliates are particularly good at is motivating themselves to do the work that is necessary. This can often mean seeing the bigger picture of the long term benefit of continuing to act when most will quit. For me, this was “seeing” (in my mind’s eye) a passive income continuing to come in even when I wasn’t doing the work.
So this motivation kept me blogging, for example, even when nothing seemed to be happening! Each day, I would continue to create a new blog post on my website, even if I didn’t feel like it.
The effect of NOT doing the work was also a motivation for me. If I quit, I would find myself back in lack and poverty, the circumstances I was trying to escape. This worked as another form of motivation to keep doing the work!
Summary
Filling your mind with everything you “must” do, to make an affiliate business “work” is exhausting and often results in burnout and overwhelm. It’s much better to focus on the long term outcome, (which fills you with huge motivation), and then focus on the one thing you can accomplish now, today, rather than the many things which are out of your control or which you don’t yet know!
Baby steps is what has helped me to keep going even when I was unsure of my direction. Making daily habits is also a good idea. Once you have established a habit, such as blogging, it feels wrong NOT to do it. With this kind of momentum you have a much greater chance of success with an affiliate business. See also my post on the power of micro habits and the book by Stephen Guise – Mini Habits.
What is the best online business in 2023? While there’s many online business models you can choose from, one of the best is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products and it can be done from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. But while affiliate marketing is a simple and effective business model which anyone can use, there’s a few downsides.
One of the main downsides is the massive competition online from other affiliates. So getting your start in affiliate marketing can take some time and effort. There’s a few choices you can make in affiliate marketing too, which makes it quite a versatile business. You can create content, such as this article, you can run advertising, build an email list, use social media and so on. So whatever your budget there’s usually an option which will suit you.
Affiliate marketing is pretty hands off too. You don’t have to deal with customers or products and you can simply refer customers online to existing products and services.
What Is The Best Online Business In 2023? Downsides To Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing you’re business is in sending qualified (website) traffic to products and services online. When you make a sale you are paid a commission based on the products you have recommended. If you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid! That’s a big downside but as with any business if you don’t attract customers you don’t have a business. With affiliate marketing the key is in building a steady stream of people to the products and services which you choose to promote.
There’s therefore two main choices which will have a huge bearing on your levels of success with affiliate marketing:
The products you choose to promote
How you promote them
Yes there’s huge competition online but there’s also a huge opportunity too if you set off in the right direction in an affiliate business. With the wrong products and marketing methods, it can be difficult to get any traction. But get the right trajectory and you can build a very successful affiliate business quite quickly.
What Is The Best Online Business In 2023?Your Marketing Methods: Paid Vs. Unpaid
Your marketing method is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an affiliate marketer. You can build content, create a YouTube channel, build a blog, build an email list and spend time on social media building an online business. But if you don’t have the right information, you could spend years doing this to no avail! One of the best ways to start generating sales quickly as an affiliate marketer is through using paid advertising. With paid advertising, you can turn on traffic to an affiliate offer almost instantly.
With blogging, as an alternative, it can take many months before you even start to see website traffic. So depending on your budget and circumstances, you can choose accordingly. However, you can still run an advertising campaign even with a low budget, just to learn how to do it. Paid advertising is much faster and more scalable. This means once you hit a winning advert, you can add more budget to reach more customers and make more profit – just by turning up your ad campaign budget.
Organic marketing, such as blogging can be a great strategy too. Although it’s slower initially, your content can eventually attract traffic passively, giving you sales and greater profit because you’re not paying for advertising.
What Is The Best Online Business In 2023?Products To Choose From
Affiliate marketing is a super versatile business and you can choose to sell almost anything you can find online! So long as a product or service has an affiliate program, you can join that program, promote that product and earn commissions based on your sales.
However, not all products give you the same opportunity. With products from Amazon, for example, the rates of commission are incredibly low. So although there’s a huge choice of products from Amazon to choose from, most of them only pay peanuts. Amazon typically pays between 1% and 10% commission on product referrals. This means you’ll need to sell a lot of products in order to make a reliable income.
Digital products offer greater levels of commission; typically between 30% and 40%.
High Ticket & Subscription Products
Both high ticket and subscription products offer the best opportunity for online business in 2023 for a few reasons. With a high ticket product you can earn substantially more from a single sale than with most affiliate products. High ticket products carry commissions of at least $500 per sale.
Subscription products too are great for affiliates because they pay recurring commissions. With a recurring commission from say, a business related software product, you can earn commissions all year round from a single sale.
OT – One Time, S – Subscription and HT – High Ticket affiliate products
Business products are particularly good for affiliates to promote because they are so necessary and essential for online businesses to operate. An example of a vital business related product is Aweber – an email autoresponder. Email autoresponders are used in businesses to capture email addresses and automatically send out email messages over a period of time. If you’re considering building an affiliate business from scratch you’ll definitely need one. Get free access by clicking on the image below.
Get Started
So if you’re looking to start a new venture in 2023, I highly recommend doing affiliate marketing. But while affiliate marketing is one of the easiest business models to use, it can be easy to get lost in the many choices along the way. What products to use, how to collect emails and how to generate website traffic and so on can all leave you in a state of overwhelm. The best thing you can do is get help and support in your product choice and marketing methods and strategy. Watch this video with one of my personal mentors Stuart who will explain a little more about this business model and a few others too.
