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The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF

In The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing pdf I’m going to share some of the most important things I’ve learned about affiliate marketing over the last 10 years. Affiliate marketing is a business model which anyone can benefit from. Simply refer products and services online to customers! Sounds easy doesn’t it? While the concept of affiliate marketing is a straight forward one, there are several roadblocks to success which many affiliates will discover!

The easy part of affiliate marketing is joining an affiliate program and getting access to your unique identifying code or affiliate link. Once you have your link, you have the ability to make money by placing it online in front of buying customers.

When someone buys something through your unique code (affiliate link), your sale is tracked and you earn a commission. Sounds like nothing could be simpler. But the truth is many new affiliates will struggle to make a single sale online. Knowing why this is will best prepare you for a successful career as an affiliate marketer. That’s why in this article “The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF”, I’m going to focus on this topic: why affiliates struggle.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF

95% of affiliates fail! This statistic should wake you up to the fact that affiliate marketing isn’t as easy as some make out. But armed with this knowledge, and the knowledge in this article, you’ll be better prepared to become successful. If you also bring the right mindset to this fantastic business opportunity, your chances of success increase dramatically.

Why do so many affiliates fail? I believe this happens for a number of reasons:

Affiliate marketing has a very low bar to entry. This means anyone with a laptop and internet connection can “give it a try”.
Affiliate marketing is a very cheap business model which you can start for free. Again, anyone can do it without investment which is impossible in pretty much any other business model.
People have high expectations of what they can achieve without much effort. Yes high earnings are possible, but this takes more than most people are capable of.
People quit too easily because they expect an “easy ride” which affiliate marketing most definitely won’t give you!

Knowing all these things should prepare you better to become successful as an affiliate. With most affiliates, when they encounter a roadblock or problem, they see it as a reason to quit. Or at best they see it as a reason to doubt whether affiliate marketing really works. You should know that the 5% of affiliates who become successful don’t do this! They carry on through the problems and roadblocks, never allowing doubt to cloud their mind! They use roadblocks as learning opportunities, not as a sign of failure.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF : Shiny Object Syndrome

So, mindset is a hugely important part of affiliate marketing. Ignore it at your peril. But as well as mindset it’s important to get the right information and stay your course over the longer term. It’s very easy to get distracted when you’re new to affiliate marketing because there are so many people trying to persuade you one way or another with their “shiny objects”. Another training course seems much more enticing when you’re facing problems of some kind. Especially when the seller proclaims how easy their system is compared to the one you’re currently using!

The Busy Fool

Most paths of affiliate marketing will require a good deal of work before you can see the benefit. Unfortunately this means you need to stay focused on your marketing strategy for some time without seeing the benefits! Whether you run ads, create content or post on social media, it’s not typical that you will automatically start making sales on your first outing as a marketer.

Controlling your time and not getting distracted by shiny new courses or being a busy fool is paramount to your success. It’s easy to work at things which don’t produce a meaningful outcome too. This is known as being a busy fool and it’s another trap many affiliates fall into. A “busy fool” spends time on affiliate activities which although might be enjoyable, aren’t moving your business forward. As a business owner time is your most valuable resource and you mustn’t waste it. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business. If you don’t make sales, you don’t get paid!

Types Of Products

As a new affiliate I made many mistakes; one of which was promoting the wrong kinds of products. I chose Amazon and eBay simply because I knew they offered an affiliate program and I used the sites myself. The trouble was, I didn’t know how little they paid in terms of affiliate commission. You can make good money of course from any affiliate program. But with low commission based programs you need to shift a lot more product in order to become profitable. Amazon, for example pays as low as 1% commission on some of its products. So it’s well worth becoming aware of the different affiliate marketing business models and their relative levels of commission.

Physical products tend to pay the least to affiliates – typically from 5-10%. Digital products pay more and usually offer from 30-40% commissions. Then there are subscription products which pay recurring commissions to affiliates and of course high ticket affiliate products which pay much higher “one time” commissions.

Of course the best products to promote will depend on your marketing method, but the most profitable are those which pay you recurring commissions and higher rates of commission: subscription and high ticket products.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF: Methods Of Marketing

There’s various methods of marketing which affiliates use to get their products in front of a buying audience. Depending on your situation and marketing budget, or lack thereof, you might choose from a number of different strategies:

PPC – pay per click – paid marketing
Blogging
Video blogging
Social media methods (both paid and unpaid)

Marketing methods can be categorised into main groups: paid and unpaid. The paid marketing methods are the faster of the two and most scalable. Organic marketing methods such as blogging and SEO (search engine optimisation) are much, much slower methods. Plus they are less scalable. However, a free marketing method might suit you if you don’t have much free money for spending on marketing, but have a lot of time for content creation.

Creating Content

With content marketing, it can take weeks, months or even years to get traction and sell products on a regular basis. But with paid marketing, you can see results almost immediately. Most paid marketing campaigns don’t work however, so you’ll likely need to run several advertising campaigns to find just one which is profitable. This of course takes time (and money). But once you hit upon a successful campaign, you can leave it running (forever) and make money by running it. You can also turn up your marketing budget to make more sales. This is a bit like having a “tap” for money! Want more money? Turn the tap up – the “tap” being your marketing budget.

This can’t be done in the same way with content because you won’t see the same results as quickly nor is content as easily scalable. However, you can ultimately earn passively from content you have created previously if it does well.

An Analogy

I like the Chinese bamboo tree as an analogy to affiliate marketing. In my early days as an affiliate, I jumped around from one strategy to another without really getting any traction. I was frustrated and disillusioned over and over again. What I didn’t know then was that affiliate marketing is like a Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese bamboo tree takes a long gestation period of up to 5 years before you even see shoots above the surface of the soil. But if you water it and feed it, once it breaks the surface, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks!

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Affiliate marketing is like this and although it might not take 5 years to show promise (depending on your marketing method/products), it works in a similar fashion. Your first blog post for example won’t suddenly bring in thousands of sales. But after several months of blogging, you’ll start getting traffic to your website.

Your first advert might not make you any sales, but once you find one which does, you’ll have an income from it which can be grown and scaled up. The hard work with affiliate marketing is definitely the “unseen” work which goes on day after day when there’s nothing to show for your efforts. This is like the gestation period of the Chinese bamboo tree!

Stick at it and learn from your mistakes. “Fail forwards” and learn from your experiences. Little by little, you will grow and develop your business and eventually it will be like a freight train which doesn’t stop! One day you’ll be glad you never gave up! With affiliate marketing you can ultimately earn money without working, because of the work you’ve done previously. Your systems and automation will do the selling, once you’ve figured out how to be profitable.

Summary

While this handbook isn’t a definitive guide to affiliate marketing, there’s several points I’ve mentioned here which I believe will help you become successful if you decide to become an affiliate. Here’s the main points I’ve mentioned for a quick recap:

95% of affiliates fail and quit – to succeed you need to be better than them!
Lower value products pay less – learn about the different products you can promote – see affiliate marketing business models.
Choose a marketing strategy which suits you and your marketing budget – and stick to it
Get help – access these free videos to learn more about training and joining an online community.

Affiliate Marketing Handbook

Here’s my affiliate marketing handbook: what I wish I knew as a newbie affiliate marketer. As a brand new affiliate marketer, I was full of enthusiasm and hope. Little did I know the journey I had ahead of me. In this short article I’m going to share some of the things which would have shaved years off my affiliate journey. Although I think a bit of struggle is necessary to learn affiliate marketing, there’s definitely some hurdles you can avoid.

Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Getting Started

I first found out about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s. I was trying to sell my own ebook but struggled getting traffic to my website. So I put myself on a course with the intention of learning some traffic generation methods. Instead, I discovered affiliate marketing. I could sell someone else’s products and make ten times what I could sell my own ebook for! So I ditched the ebook idea and went full tilt ahead with affiliate marketing.

It was tough though and at first I started using the free blog sites such as Hubpages, Blogger.com and Squidoo, (now acquired by Hubpages). My first sale came from a review I wrote on Hubpages.com. I was over the moon at my first sale and knew I would make many more. Sadly though it didn’t happen like that at first. My account got shut down for spamming and I was starting again. I joined many courses and tried many tactics.

The next course I took taught paid marketing and just as things were about to work for me, my Adwords account got shut down. I seemed doomed to fail with affiliate marketing, I thought. This is where most people will quit forever, and I did quit several times. However, something kept nagging me to keep going. This I believe is the key for success as an affiliate marketer. Keep going and never quit. If you quit, failure is assured. If you never quit, success, or death is assured!

Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Shiny Object Syndrome

The thing which stood in the way of my success for a long time was shiny object syndrome. I believed affiliate marketing should be easy as I had bought into the idea that to make millions online would only be a matter of a few simple steps. This is false! It’s far more difficult than that, although in principle it should only take a few steps:

Find a scalable strategy for selling products continually,
Scale up by turning up the volume

Shiny object syndrome is the idea that anything else is always something better and than finding a new magic bullet to online success was the answer. I jumped from course to course looking for an “easier” way, which of course didn’t exist!

Don’t make this same mistake. Find a course and stick with it for at least 6 months. You can access one on this website.

Depending on your marketing strategy, affiliate marketing can take months or years to gain traction. It doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t believe the “quick fixes” the magic bullets and the push button claims. Technology has made affiliate marketing easier in some ways such as building websites and sales funnels, but it’s still a challenge to get traffic in large numbers; especially if you’re starting from scratch.

Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Don’t Quit Too Easily

95% of affiliates will quit so this means you’ll need to be in the 5% who stick with it for long enough to see some tangible results. When you break through this barrier you’ve proved to yourself that it works. This is a massive psychological achievement and you should celebrate the small wins. Small wins are actually big wins because once you have belief in your path, you will want to double down on your efforts. When you’re new, you doubt everything! If your mind is full of doubt about a particular strategy, how hard will you work at it?

When you know for a fact that a particular strategy is working for you, you’ll have much more belief in yourself and your ability to make it work.

Belief is therefore the biggest challenge for beginners in affiliate marketing. When you’re struggling, doubting and worrying, you’ll easily be swayed by a well meaning friend or relative who tells you “it’s a scam”!

To fuel belief in the beginning is super important because it’s what will carry you forward and keep you going. Without it, you’ve already quit!

Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Get A List

An email list is a requirement for affiliate marketing if you’re serious about making your living from it. Why make things harder than they already are by not getting an email autoresponder. You can get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing too. Use the image below.

An autoresponder is something it took me a long time to get because I didn’t understand how powerful building an email list of subscribers could be. Once you build a list of your own, you can control your traffic much better. You can communicate with your email list and build trust over time. This is very difficult to do from a website where most visitors will be gone in a few minutes.

I’ve had people on my email list make purchases even years after they joined!

Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Time Management

As an affiliate marketer you’ll need to get very good at managing your own time. There’s only a few hours in the day and if you’re working a job for most of it, you’ll need to prioritise your business outside of your work hours. This can be tough but you should commit to your affiliate business if you’re serious about making money from affiliate marketing. If you can only work an hour each day, you’ll need to be even more focused on the right kind of actions which can make the most difference to your business.

I wasted time when I started out doing affiliate marketing. I spent too much time on pointless activities which didn’t move my business forward. Affiliates only earn commissions when they sell something. It’s a performance based business model. So if you don’t get traction in your business you could earn nothing! So getting traction is key. That means focusing your time on money producing activities.

Don’t waste time being a “busy fool”. A busy fool fills their time with pointless activities, rather than the most important ones.

Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Marketing

Affiliate marketing doesn’t work unless you’re actively marketing. The clue is in the name. Having a nice website, won’t make you sales. Designing a logo won’t make you sales. What makes sales in affiliate marketing is getting good at marketing. Marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and potential customers. This can be done is several ways such as blogging, paid advertising (PPC – pay per click), video, social media, SEO, link building, email marketing and so on.

You need only one way of marketing that works to be successful as an affiliate. I jumped around from one strategy to another, looking for the “easy way”. Jumping from one strategy to another wastes time; time you don’t have! It can take months or even years for a strategy to start working. For blogging, for example, it will take much longer than if you’re running a paid marketing campaign using pay per click advertising.

Decide on your marketing strategy according to your budget and available time for your business. If you’re short on money, hustle, if you’re short on time, buy traffic.

Products

Not all affiliate products are alike and not all pay the same either. The products you choose to promote can mean the difference between success and failure as an affiliate. Physical products you might find from Amazon pay very little – between 1% and 10% in most cases.

Digital products pay much more – 30-40% commissions typically. There’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate programs you can choose too! With subscriptions you can earn a whole lot more than with a stand alone one off sale. Subscription products and software and membership products which pay out recurring commissions to affiliates.

A low value product on Amazon will pay only a small commission of say $2. But a high ticket product can pay out thousands of dollars in commission. You might think that more people will buy the low value product and therefore it will be easier to sell in bulk. However, you still need to get enough sales to make your affiliate business pay. Selling a few high value products is therefore much easier than selling the thousands of low value products you would need to make the same amount of money from.

Mindset

Your mindset is particularly important if you want to be successful as an affiliate marketer. See affiliate marketing mindset. Knowing that around 5% of affiliates go on to make a living from it, and 95% drop out goes to show that not everyone will make affiliate marketing work for them.

Affiliate marketing is a business and like any business you need customers to survive. Without making sales you won’t build a lucrative affiliate business. To do so takes more than most people can achieve. To keep going when others quit will require a particular approach to learning and implementing your skillset.

Being able to set goals, create a vision for your future and stick to a marketing plan over the long term is vital for success. How you deal with setbacks and adversity will require a strong desire to succeed. If you’re just “giving it a go” without a strong purpose and desire, you’re more likely to quit when things are tough. See also affiliate marketing psychology.

A “never say die” approach needless to say will have a much better outcome than a “I’ll give it a try” approach.

Get Help

This of course isn’t easy, particularly if you’re trying to do it all alone without any help. I started affiliate marketing and tried to do everything from watching videos. I struggled and struggled, for years! I eventually found an online community where I could connect with other like minded individuals on the same journey as I was. This is vital if you want to take affiliate marketing seriously and make a serious income from it.

Everything changed for me when I started taking it seriously and got help.

You can access a free video resource and learn more about the community I joined here.

Super Affiliate Handbook

I wish I would have had a super affiliate handbook back in the early 2000’s when I first heard the word “affiliate marketing”. Back then I was struggling trying to sell my own ebooks, with very little success. I put myself on a course and since then was hooked on the idea of making money online through selling other people’s products.

I ditched the ebook idea and started promoting a course I had bought by a guy called Peter Lexis. He’s not around anymore in the online space, or at least I don’t think he is. But I learned a few things from him and from the many other courses I took.

Super Affiliate Handbook

Despite working for several years, jumping from course to course, nothing seemed permanent from affiliate marketing. I made the odd sale here and there, but really, I didn’t know what I was doing! I needed a super affiliate handbook – or some guidance from the “super affiliates” who had made it online! Eventually after a lot of failures online and many attempts, I found an online business community which gave me the direction and support I desperately needed.

This was in 2014 and I was pretty broke at the time, so wasn’t able to invest much initially. But I was able to access a number of mentors and coaches and online trainings which anyone can access through this link.

Skip to 2020 and I’m still there! Still learning and growing my online business. But now I’m armed with much more knowledge and experience through having had the support of an online business community. I’m not a “super affiliate” myself, but I’m learning from several mentors who could be called super affiliates. Here’s what I’ve learned that super affiliates do differently.

Super Affiliate Handbook – Get Support

Affiliate marketing is tough. I struggled for years before making a consistent income from affiliate marketing. I did many things which were a waste of time and didn’t understand the different business models of affiliate marketing. One of the wisest things I did was getting support. I was able to join webinars and seminars which were run by 6 and 7 figure affiliates who had already failed more times than I had tried!

Getting support was the best money I spent online. It’s not a business that can be learned from a single course and a few videos. It’s a pursuit which can take several years to get good at.

Me and Jay Kubassek on a Momentum Day in London with The SFM

Use The Best Business Models

Another mistake I made was jumping straight in without getting the right knowledge up front. Again this comes down to getting the right information. The wrong information can cost you dearly as it did me! With the wrong information you can struggle for years, as I did.

I spent months and years building content and throwing it up in the hope Google would rank my websites; picking the wrong kinds of products too, (initially using Amazon and eBay), like many new affiliates do. Amazon pays between 3% and 11% commissions on its products which is a tiny percentage. With digital products you can earn 40% + on your sales; by using recurring commissions products, high ticket products and multi-tier commissions, you have a more profitable business model which can be more effectively scaled up quickly.

By using only physical products with low commission levels, you’re stuck with slow marketing strategies which can take years. You can’t afford to use paid marketing with many of these kinds of products because you simply won’t be able to profit while running paid adverts.

I made this mistake early on as an affiliate. I spent months and years creating content, pointing my affiliate links to companies who paid peanuts. My content disappeared into the stratosphere and never got seen!

Super Affiliate Handbook – Position At The Top

Super affiliates position themselves at the very top of a business system so that they can earn the most commission from their effort. Take a look at the business structure below which shows a product range and level of earning potential from commissions.

To position yourself as an affiliate to earn the best commission levels means investing in a business system like this one. The more you invest initially, the more you are capable of earning through sales you make.

Super affiliates realise that a greater earning potential means more can be spent on advertising while still being profitable.

With smaller valued products and services, you simply can’t spend as much because you won’t recoup your budget on sales, let alone make a profit. Super affiliates know this so they put themselves at the top of the commission structure.

Super Affiliate Handbook – Marketing

Once you have a business system (sales funnel) set up and running, you can send visitors (leads) into your sales funnel. There’s many ways to do this, but super affiliates think big! They know that with a digital product range and globally accessible audience, they can scale up and sell to many people all over the world.

With smaller value products you need to create content and work a lot harder to generate sales which aren’t worth as much. But with a six figure sales funnel, you can use paid marketing and scale up very quickly.

So, super affiliates start by testing and measuring their funnel with paid advertising. Initially they’ll start with a small budget which is easily affordable. As they run paid adverts from advertising platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Google Adwords, they’ll collect data. With enough data they can make informed decisions as to whether a campaign is working or not. With those which aren’t working, they cut. Those which are profitable are scaled up through increasing their daily budget.

Knowing Your Numbers

A good digital business system will produce $4 for every $2 spent on advertising. Once you have such as system, you can easily increase your budget, sending more targeted visitors into it. Providing you’ve done your homework and know your numbers, you can start increasing your daily budget.

Super affiliates don’t start out being super affiliates. They start small just where everyone else starts out. But over time once they are consistently making profit by spending money, they simply up their budget and spend more money to make more money!

Super affiliates can spend upwards of $20,000 a month driving targeted leads into their sales funnels. This amount sounds ludicrous, but of course a smaller budget will have been meticulously scrutinised over many weeks/months of sales and slowly increased.

Super affiliates don’t just throw money at their business without good justification. That’s just gambling. Instead they learn to “play” with small amounts first. When they know a consistent marketing strategy regularly produces a profitable outcome, they scale.

Tracking All Leads And Sales

Everything an affiliate does should be tracked. That way, when an affiliate makes a sale, they know where it came from. Pareto’s principle of 80/20, means that 80% of the outcomes come from only 20% of the causes.

Many of an affiliate marketers attempts will fail. Often 80% of advertising campaigns will fall flat! The super affiliates know this but keep going. They only need to find the 20% which work, and they have a winning lottery ticket! Once they discover the advertising campaign which produces a profit consistently, they can simply leave it running and scale up.

By tracking all their adverts, leads and sales, they get to learn where their sales come from. Over time and with consistent effort, they can learn from their data and determine which adverts are best to focus on and which are best to end.

Modelling Success

This “super affiliate handbook” wouldn’t be complete without mentioning modelling of success. Without the help and support of others who have already succeeded online through affiliate marketing, it’s so much more difficult to take the right steps and keep going when times get tough.

With other super affiliates to help and guide you, you only need to choose never to quit and eventually you’ll succeed! There’s so many facets to affiliate marketing that it’s very difficult to do alone.

Get the help of others who have already succeeded online. Join an online community and get started today. Click this link to learn more and access a free video series.

You can also join a free webinar with 7 figure online entrepreneur Stuart Ross by clicking on the image below.