So what are the best mindsets for affiliate marketing. Obviously a mindset of poverty, lack and limitation is going to affect your affiliate efforts. So you need to be positive and mindful that you’re creating a positive nurturing environment for yourself, so that you can grow alongside your affiliate business.
A negative environment will seldom help you to grow your business. Conflict and pessimism should be avoided, but will no doubt arise at some point. So you need some strategies in place to help you when you’re not feeling at your best.
Having a positive expectation in your affiliate business will help you focus on the activities you need to do. Once a negative mindset takes hold, it can become very difficult maintaining the work needed to grow your business. So your mindset is fundamentally important to the growth of your affiliate business.
Best Mindset For Affiliate Marketing – A Growth Mindset
A growth mindset allows for all possibilities. You may not have all the answers now, but you know if anyone can build a profitable online business with affiliate marketing, you can too.
You’re definitely going to face some setbacks with an affiliate business. So you’re going to need to be equipped with certain strategies to remain focused and positive, when things get tough. You may have to learn these as you go, but a negative attitude seldom helps, so remaining positive about the future is paramount to your success.
A limited mindset thinks in terms of limitation. You define yourself by what you know now and identify yourself with a limited version of who you can be. A growth mindset means you’re able to change and become whatever you decide.
Best Mindsets For Affiliate Marketing – Types Of Products/Poverty Consciousness
As a beginner affiliate I promoted many low value products. Because I only bought low cost items online myself, I assumed that everyone was broke because I was broke, and my circle of influence (friends) were broke too! Here’s the perfect example of poverty consciousness.
This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because after promoting low value affiliate products online guess how my affiliate commissions looked? Yep, they sucked. Even when I started making sales online, which took a lot of effort, they were tiny commissions. My mentor taught me to sell high value products instead. With the internet, it’s easy to forget that you have the world at your fingertips. This means there’s multi-millionaires buying items worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So why promote a $10 book which offers a $0.10 commission? It makes no sense when you think about it logically. But that’s what I was doing! Sell high ticket affiliate products and you stand to make heaps more per sale.
Best Mindsets For Affiliate Marketing – Helping Vs. Getting
This was another huge shift for me as an affiliate. For a long time, I was focused on getting rather than giving. I thought I could “gear” the system and earn money simply by throwing up a few websites and “flogging” some products. My websites offered little in the way of value to anyone and I was just focused on the “getting”!
Most of my website failed miserably and they were soon kicked off Google (and the other search engines). In the bin with the other spammy, affiliate 3-5 page websites which offered zero value and only promoted someone else’s product.
I like to use the example of Martin Lewis’s website Money Saving Expert when it comes to giving value. His is an affiliate website, although most won’t know it because the main focus of the site is delivering value to consumers who want to save money on their bills, credit cards, mortgages and utilities etc.
When you give value, people respond. If you try and get, they don’t! Simple really but a mistake I made for a long time before I got some better advice from my mentor.
Aligning Yourself With The Right Products – Ikigai
Here’s another pattern of behaviour I had which didn’t serve me when it came to selling affiliate products online. I chose products I didn’t care about because I was only focused on the money. When I found products I genuinely found valuable and helpful, things began to change.
It’s about alignment and integrity. Once you’re aligned with a passion and purpose with your affiliate business, and genuinely care about what you’re doing, beyond the money, the magic starts to happen!
Aligning yourself with products you genuinely endorse because you personally have found them super valuable, means you are “selling” with integrity.
Attraction Marketing – Selling Without Selling
Attraction marketing was a concept which was alien to me for some time. It means attracting people to your products through providing value and service, rather than trying to sell. Again, Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert website is the perfect example. People visit the site looking to save money, get out of debt and find lower cost deals. They find all the above on his site and purchase various products from it (through the affiliate links).
There’s a transaction being made here but it’s one in good faith. A service is being provided to the consumer which is greater than the money taken! So people go out of their way to find Martin Lewis’s site – attraction marketing. Do you think that would be the case if his site didn’t offer any real value and only tried to sell you something? I doubt it.
The internet has changed the face of shopping. The pushy salesman doesn’t cut the mustard anymore (maybe they never really did). On the internet you can find a better deal. It’s a consumers market.
So trying the hard sell online doesn’t really work. Give value instead and keep giving value. When it comes time for someone to buy, and you’ve been giving value month after month to that person, they’ll likely choose you. You’ve already proved that you’re genuine, trustworthy and given them loads of value (more that the price they are paying)!
Producing Not Consuming
Here’s another important mindset shift you can make as an affiliate. Producing rather than consuming. Have you ever noticed that most people are consumers not producers? We consume the television programs, movies, food, information online, podcasts, videos and on an on. What are you producing? When you switch gears to spending most of your time consuming, to spending your time producing, you are becoming a giver rather than a receiver.
This little mindset switch seems obvious, but it’s amazing how often I fall back into old habits of consuming, rather than creating new content for my affiliate business like this post, for example. It’s a lifestyle habit for most people to only consume, without producing anything of value. As affiliates, you can connection your content to products and services from which you can earn an income. But only if you create enough content, or provide enough people with some kind of value first.
For more insights into mindset shifts you can make when building an online business, checkout this video.