affiliate mentoring Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Help With Affiliate Marketing: Mindset & Clarity

Most affiliates will fail for a number of reasons. It may be lack of education, vision, clarity or focus. But the main reason is that most affiliates will simply give up before they gain the necessary understanding of the business they are in. Giving up is easy! Sticking at something and learning why you’re failing is much harder!

Affiliate marketing is a very easy business to get involved with and there’s a huge number of people who become affiliate marketers. Joining an affiliate program is relatively simple and straight forward. You can learn affiliate marketing from anywhere, too; all you need is a laptop and internet connection. But making affiliate marketing profitable is another story altogether.

The main thing holding you back from the profitable affiliate business you desire is ignorance! With the right mindset, you can replace this with knowledge and awareness. Once you’ve done this, nothing will stop you from wanting to grow. A growth mindset will replace fear, procrastination, doubt and uncertainty. With the right mindset, you will still fail, but you will see those failings as “learnings” instead.

Help With Affiliate Marketing: My Story

When I began doing affiliate marketing I tried all sorts of strategies. But I was broke, so everything I did was on the cheap. I bought courses on the cheap, and did my “marketing” on the cheap. The problem with this approach is twofold. I was holding myself back because I had a poverty mindset but also I didn’t get the help and support I really needed to make my affiliate marketing business successful. Free marketing methods are also slow and difficult. I built various websites and attempted to get the to rank on Google, with much disappointment.

When I did finally made an affiliate sale, it was for peanuts because I was selling items from eBay and Amazon which paid tiny commissions. All of this was difficult and agonising!

After joining an online community (join here), I found other people who were building online businesses too, and coaches and mentors who helped me. I also learned to use subscription affiliate products and sell high ticket affiliate products. This was a total game changer for me and I was able to sell a high ticket product within a few months.

The high ticket items also meant I could run paid marketing and get traction much more quickly. With a high ticket sale, you can build a larger marketing budget and scale more quickly.

Focus, Clarity, Vision, Mission & Purpose

For a long time before this I lacked focus and clarity. I would jump from one course to another, looking always for a quick win, rather than building a solid foundation. A good foundation I learned, is having clarity around why you’re doing affiliate marketing at all. Without this understanding, you can easily become lost trying to make the sale, but without offering any value in the marketplace. A persons income relates directly to their value in the marketplace.

If you’re very “me” centric, you’ll only focus on what you want from affiliate marketing – the commissions. But if you can align your values with your business, and focus on what you can do to help others, you’ll find purpose in your work. With a greater purpose in your affiliate business, you’ll be much more likely to sustain your efforts over the longer term. You’ll know your “why” for building your business, you’ll have aligned your mission, vision and purpose for building it.

“With a big enough why you can overcome any how” – James Clear Atomic Habits.

If you’re just “flogging stuff on the internet”, it’s not hugely inspiring. But if you’re inspired to do your work, there’ll be a much greater drive, purpose and ambition behind it.

Affiliate mentoring is an important part of becoming a successful affiliate. Without it, you’re choosing to go it alone. Even the top affiliates have been mentored, so it’s important to park your ego and ask for help.

Before I found a mentor, I was the same. I was determined to go it alone and prove I could do it all by myself! But I spent years on bad strategies and tearing my hair out trying to make things work. Don’t make the same mistake – affiliate mentoring will save yourself a lot of problems.

Why You Need Affiliate Mentoring

Affiliate marketing is a pretty vast topic. There’s many ways to do it and if you’re not careful you can spend a lot of time on a strategy and still get nowhere. There’s many courses too which will take your money and still not give you the personal coaching you really need. I took many of them over several years. Read about them in my digital profit course review.

Once you hit a bump in the road, it’s far too easy to give up without someone to reach out to. An affiliate mentor is a “touchstone” to help keep you on track, motivated and buoyed up by the belief it is all possible. When you are on your own and things get tough, you can quit more easily. Your belief can drop and when your uncertainty takes over, it becomes much more difficult to maintain forward momentum.

affiliate mentoring — Stuart Ross mentoring during a live SFM seminar

With a mentor guiding you, your belief is much stronger. When you have a strong positive belief in what you’re doing, you can sustain your efforts for much longer. This is definitely needed with affiliate marketing, which can be a tough business.

Affiliate Marketing As A Beginner

As a beginner in affiliate marketing I spent a lot of time working on strategies which are now redundant. Back in the early 2000’s, I bought several online courses which taught affiliate strategies for building traffic. Some of them worked but mostly the results I got were disappointing.

This is the reality for many affiliates who start out with huge optimism. Over time, when they don’t see results from their efforts, they quit. But this is a mistake. They just need an affiliate mentor to help them breakthrough; and this can take some time depending on the strategies you implement.

Up to the point of the breakthrough, there’s a lot of time spent on learning and implementing strategies. If this time period is several months or even years before you see consistent results, many people will quit, thinking this is the “reality” of affiliate marketing and that it’s all a scam!

Affiliate Marketing Growth – An Analogy

I love this analogy for affiliate marketing and I even heard it from one of my mentors. The Chinese Bamboo tree needs a lot of nurturing, more than most plants. If you didn’t understand the tree’s needs, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was dead, and throw it away! This is similar to the path of the affiliate marketer and of those who quit too early.

In the first year of growing the Chinese Bamboo tree needs water and fertile soil. But we see nothing in terms of growth. The same is true in the second year, third and forth year of the plants development. In the fifth year the Chinese bamboo tree grows just 80 feet in 6 weeks! Of course the first few years of the trees development were vital to support the exponential growth of the fifth year.

The same is true of the path of the affiliate marketer. Setting up your foundations are vital to your growth. If you jump around from one strategy to the next, you’ll never see growth. If you’re impatient and throw a seed away before it takes route, you won’t see the magnificence of the bamboo tree!

Types Of Affiliate Mentoring

There’s various ways to get mentored in affiliate mentoring. You can access pre-recorded videos, download ebooks, purchase books online, join email lists and interact with 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring sessions online. If you’re lucky you can even meet mentors personally in live sessions and even befriend them!

The most common affiliate mentoring is through pre-made materials you can find online. However, there’s so much of this material available that it can be difficult to discern one “guru” from another. Who is telling the truth about affiliate marketing and which way is the “best” way to do it?

Conflicting advice on affiliate marketing can be a major problem when you’re getting started. No sooner have you joined one program when your inbox is filled with the next best thing – promising faster results for much less work! So you jump on to that course only to find the same problems! How can you navigate such a minefield of disinformation?! The answer is to get a mentor you trust, and stick with them, taking the action steps they advise!

Q & A Webinars

Some of the best mentoring I’ve received has been through question and answer webinars and seminars where I can ask questions directly to the host. Mastermind webinars too are really powerful and being part of a group of people is very powerful for your belief in what you are doing.

Without a community for support, you’re forever looking at videos and scraping the internet; trying to make sense of something all by yourself!

On a live mastermind webinar session with other online business owners.

Affiliate Mentoring 1 to 1

With Jay Kubassek in 2014 in London on a live event

In 2014 I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing mentoring. I met Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek during a live SFM meeting in London. Since then I’ve met many mentors (through the community) who have helped me build an online business through their support and encouragement.

If you’re going it alone in the affiliate journey, I highly recommend joining this community. Access a free video series to learn more about The SFM here.