affiliate marketing for dummies pdf Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

In my Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF ebook I share some of the main things I think you should know as a new affiliate starting out. I started learning about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s, and it’s no easy feat making an affiliate sale online.

There’s a variety of strategies you can employ as an affiliate in order to generate a single sale. Here’s a few of them:

Blogging
PPC – Pay per click
Email marketing
Video marketing – both paid and free (organic)
Social media

As a newbie, you’ll be keen to get started and start making those commissions. But I hope you will at least read through my Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF guide first (access here) because it will prepare you much better for the journey. I made many mistakes as a newbie affiliate and if you read this ebook, you’ll be much better prepared for success than I was!

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Traps To Avoid

There’s a few traps you’ll want to avoid and prepare yourself for as a new affiliate. Shiny Object Syndrome is the tendency to jump from one course to another looking for the easy win! Let me tell you there’s no easy win! I did this for years and no sooner had I started out on one particular training course than another “shiny object” caught my eye. The next course promised “faster and easier”, so I jumped ship and started again with a new strategy.

The Busy Fool

The problem with this approach is that you never get any traction with any given strategy. Becoming successful with affiliate marketing is a little like push starting a freight train! Once it’s going, you can add a little more effort until it’s at full speed! But getting it going from a standing start takes some will power, belief and motivation.

Being a “Busy Fool” is another trap to avoid! It feels nice starting your own business but you have to remain vigilant. Don’t get complacent with your time and start wasting it. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model so if you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid. Getting those sales early will give you the necessary momentum to continue on. Not getting them can mean you lose belief and encouragement, making the journey more difficult.

If you’re not used to being your own boss and managing your own time, it can be easy to dawdle and spend time on fruitless activities which you enjoy, rather than those which move your business forwards.

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Business Models & Products

When I started out as an affiliate newbie, I chose products from websites I used such as Amazon and eBay. Both platforms have affiliate programs – also known as “Partner programs” which let you join them and send people to the various products on the sites. But you should know that these platforms offer the lowest levels of commission, from 1% to 11% commission. So if you sell a $100 product from Amazon, for example, you’ll only make $1-$11 on that sale!

See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission for details of their rates.

If you’re selling low value physical products from these sites, be aware that you’ll need to sell in large volume to make a good income from your affiliate business. There are other types of products which can be much more lucrative and it’s worth considering the types of products you’d like to sell from the outset. Digital products typically pay much more in terms of commissions and can pay from 20% to even 100% commission on certain products.

Subscription affiliate products offer some of the best earnings because you can earn ongoing commissions for each and every sale. There’s also high ticket products too which offer the highest rates of commission available for affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Mindset & Motivation

Although pretty much anyone can become an affiliate, not everyone succeeds and builds a profitable business through affiliate marketing. This can be for a number of reasons but the sheer volume of people “having a go” at affiliate marketing is testimony to the fact that so many drop out.

I hope that you are not simply “giving it a go” because this attitude seldom works for affiliate marketing! It takes a lot more than dipping in your toe to make an affiliate business work and something like 95% of affiliates drop out and quit! See affiliate marketing failure rate.

the mindset of successful affiliate marketers

The right mindset and attitude is therefore a massive factor in whether you’ll become successful as an affiliate. This is therefore worth cultivating and particularly in the early stages there can be a lot of hurdles to overcome. If you’re well prepared mentally, and have a “never say die” kind of approach, so much the better. You’ll surely face adversity when approaching affiliate marketing and your resolve to overcome obstacles is part of the journey!

I even believe that it is adversity which makes you improve yourself personally and that affiliate marketing is both an inward and outward journey. Often the money at the end of the “trail” isn’t the most important part, but the personal growth is!

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Marketing Strategy

Whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need some kind of marketing strategy. There’s many different tactics and ways to promote affiliate products so you should choose carefully. Your choice will also depend on your circumstances and if you’re time rich you may want to focus on content creation and look towards generating organic traffic. This can be done through various strategies such as blogging, video blogging and using unpaid social media marketing tactics.

If you have less disposable time, you will probably want to get things automated as quickly as possible and scale up your business fast. If this is the case you should be looking towards using paid marketing. Paid marketing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Adwords for example are useful if you have less available time and want faster results.

Whatever method of marketing you choose it’s always worth building an email list. Email marketing is a powerful way to collect subscribers and deliver your marketing message through email messages. See also the power of email marketing. Access a free autoresponder here.

Best Business Model

Most affiliate products only pay you once. This is known as a “one time” commission. After that the customer has found the company providing the products. That company then acquires the customer and potentially earns from a lifetime of sales in the future from your referral! It’s a sweet deal for companies like Amazon who continue to lower their commissions and change terms to make affiliate’s lives more difficult! But it’s not such as great deal for affiliates who only receive tiny commissions on these kinds of referrals!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-rates-for-affiliate-program.html

Product Ranges

If you want to give yourself a head start as an affiliate, choose programs which offer multiple products within a range of products from which you can earn. Promoting a product range as an affiliate gives you much more potential to earn in the future from sales you have generated. Up-sells are useful to affiliates particularly when a built in sales team closes sales on the affiliate’s behalf. An up-sell is another product within a range which offers more value to a customer.

The three main types of affiliate commissions are:

OT – One time commission, you get paid only once
S – Subscription products
HT – high ticket products pay you larger than average commissions.

With a good product range such as the SFM Digital Business System, you can benefit from all of these kinds of commissions and a built in sales team, up-selling products on your behalf.

Timescale & Marketing Strategy

Depending on your marketing strategy you can build an online affiliate business over the course of months or years. Most affiliates will take at least a year to get traction in their affiliate business but it depends on the strategy you are using and your marketing budget; and of course product range.

With a high ticket sales funnel, you’ll earn a lot more from sales you generate and therefore you’ll be able to afford the more expensive advertising platforms. So according to your “buy in” level of a high value product range, you’ll be able to access the highest levels of commission.

Of course you don’t need to purchase affiliate products in order to sell them. But with a high ticket digital product range, the more you invest the larger your earning potential when it comes to re-selling.

If you take a cheaper approach to marketing, such as with blogging, expect it to take much longer. With a paid marketing strategy, a good marketing budget and high ticket sales funnel you can start generating traction much more quickly. Some affiliates do manage to replace their income inside of a year with this strategy; although these results aren’t typical. See also how long does affiliate marketing take.

With low value products and an organic marketing strategy, it can take years to gain traction. You’re far better off at least using subscription affiliate programs to speed up your journey!

Access Affiliate Marketing For Beginners!

If you’re serious about starting your own affiliate marketing journey, you can access Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF here! Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll get back to you.

You can also join a community of online entrepreneurs and start your affiliate journey by getting access to tools, training and support here.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies PDF

Here’s a short “affiliate marketing for dummies pdf” manual covering some of the main things you need to know before you starting out.

Download this guide in pdf format here.

When I started out as an affiliate, I thought I’d be super rich very quickly. I rushed into building websites and joining affiliate programs.

But an investment in my education could have saved me years of wasted effort. Back then, it wasn’t clear how to do affiliate marketing. There were lots of courses you could buy. But most of them were just a few videos to watch. There wasn’t an affiliate marketing mentorship program you could join. Or, at least I didn’t find any back in the early 2000’s when I started.

So, instead of joining a program which gave me access to successful affiliates, I jumped from course to course, learning one different strategy after the next. I got nowhere fast despite building hundreds of websites and joining many affiliate programs. I just didn’t know what I was doing. Eventually I found a mentorship program and things changed. Here’s what I learned.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies PDf – Get Help

Firstly, as already mentioned you should get help. Affiliate marketing is just too difficult to do alone. There’s many paths you can take and get lost down. You need a mentor to help guide you on the journey. Access a training resources through this link.

Secondly don’t expect it to be easy. High expectations of huge financial outcomes for little work are one of the main reasons people quit. Expect to work consistently at your affiliate business for several months or years before you see any results financially.

This will of course depend on your investment. If you can afford to purchase a large value sales funnel, and use paid marketing, you can build a profitable business much more quickly. If you take the slower route of blogging, for example, and getting traffic organically, it’s much slower.

The products you decide to promote as an affiliate will have a huge bearing on how well you can do financially.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies pdf – Types Of Products

There’s thousands of products and services you can choose from as an affiliate marketer. So it’s a good idea to know what products are the best ones to earn from. Amazon and eBay were the first partner networks I joined but pay very low levels of commission. Amazon, for example pays between 3% and 11% to its affiliates. Unfortunately I didn’t know any better and spent a long time promoting Amazon products from a blog for peanuts!

Digital products on the other hand pay much larger commissions. They tend to pay 40% and upwards for sales made by their affiliates. One of the first places I found digital products was Clickbank.com. Clickbank has hundreds of digital products which can suit almost any niche you can think of. See Clickbank Secrets Pdf.

Then there are products with offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs tend to be things like memberships or software products. With a recurring commission, you can sell an item once, and benefit from commissions for years, even decades.

High ticket products are another thing to consider as an affiliate. With a high ticket digital product you can make up to $8000 on a single sale. See what is high ticket affiliate marketing. Obviously that’s a whole lot better than selling a book from Amazon at 3% commission.

Multi-tier commissions are also worth a mention here too. With a multi-tier program, you can earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals. See best two tier affiliate programs.

Using a product range is another consideration worth bearing in mind for affiliates. With a product range, you refer the customer to the entry level product. At any time, if your initial referral purchases another product from the range, you make a commission – even years later.

Marketing Strategies and Ikigai

As you can see, there’s many different types of products you can promote as an affiliate. Another consideration is how you are going to promote these products. There’s two main strategies for promoting products online: paid and free. Paid strategies are much faster, but you’ll need a good product range, or return on your investment (ROI) to make it work.

You can’t easily use paid marketing with Amazon products for example because they pay such low commissions. You’ll need a higher value product/product range.

Organic strategies such as blogging, or v’logging (video blogging), will take much longer to generate the same results you can see very quickly using paid strategies. But with organic strategies you can build traffic over time and eventually benefit from free sales through your content.

Depending on your values, you can choose a suitable and appropriate marketing strategy which suits you. If you have a corporate job, and are time poor, blogging might not be the best option. You’ll want to use paid advertising. But if you’re only working part time and affiliate marketing is going to be another income source, organic marketing might be more suitable for you.

Ikigai is a Japanese saying meaning “reason for being”, or purpose. If you’re going to be a content creator, it’s a good idea to align with your ikigai. When you are aligned with your values and purpose, work seems easy and flows naturally. When you’re fighting against your values, everything seems like a hardship. Since organic marketing takes such a long time, it’s well worth choosing a topic and strategy which is aligned with your ikigai.

Affiliate Mistakes – Choosing A Blog Topic

Expect to make some mistakes as an affiliate marketer. Mistakes are made when you take action. Uncertain action is far better than certain inaction. One of the mistakes I made was to build a niche website around a topic I didn’t know or care about. It was out of alignment with my ikigai and I was just desperately trying to make money.

I built a mushroom harvesting site and blogged on it for several months. Every blog post had to be researched and it was incredibly difficult keeping going. Eventually I ranked the site at the top of Google for its main keywords. But it didn’t make any money and I eventually gave up on it. So if you’re going to write about something and become a blogger, make sure it’s something you care about and can continue for a good period of time.

Affiliate Mistakes – Throwing Money At Marketing

Impatience is the enemy of an affiliate marketer. I’ve made this mistake myself. I threw a lot of money at a marketing campaign because I got fed up of getting no sales! I got myself into financial trouble with a credit card and deep in debt running paid advertising on YouTube.

Affiliates who use paid advertising do so carefully at first. Only when they have a consistently profitable campaign do they increase their budget. Super affiliates often spend tens of thousands of dollars a day on their marketing campaigns. But they have done their research starting from $10 a day and slowly built up when they know they have a profitable campaign.

Beginner affiliates can get impatient and think throwing money at the problem is the solution! But Google, or any marketing platform will take your money regardless of whether you make any sales or not! So beware!

Affiliate Mistakes

There’s a lot to learn as an affiliate before you can even make your first sale. One of the main problems is getting stuck in learning mode. It can become a bit of an addiction watching videos and learning new skills. But learning doesn’t move your business forward. You also need to implement what you’ve learned as you go, otherwise you’ll find months have passed and you haven’t moved your online business forward.

I hope this affiliate marketing for dummies pdf has given you some insights into the affiliate marketing business. Hopefully it will better prepare you for your affiliate journey if you choose to accept this mission!

If so, you can start by clicking this link to access a free video series.

You can also download this guide in pdf format here.