Smart affiliate success means working smart not just hard. As a beginner affiliate I worked incredibly hard at all the wrong activities! It got me nowhere – besides to learn the error of my ways! I was excited and rushed in joining any course I could find.
One early course I took taught how to build and rank websites on Google. Sadly though for me, I failed over and over again to rank most of these websites. Google updates, and a lack of understanding were to blame. I rushed these sites and threw them up thinking the more I had the greater chances of success I had. But this strategy was poorly founded, and most of what I did amounted to nothing.
Another course I took taught me paid advertising. But it didn’t teach Google compliance and I was quickly shut down! I did make a few sales but again, my lack of understanding put me back months. To be a “smart” affiliate, you need to combine understanding and knowledge with enthusiasm and action. Action without the right strategy and knowledge won’t get you far, and likewise knowledge without action won’t get you anywhere either!
Smart Affiliate Success – My Journey
My affiliate journey has been a difficult one, as I expect for many who have even the smallest success with an online business. Making sales online is a great thing. It means you can repeat that success and turn it into a real income which can replace whatever else you’re doing for money. This is a huge incentive, particularly if you despise your job, boss or the commute to work, or, if you haven’t found satisfying work.
But working smart is ten times as effective with an affiliate business. One thing I learned which supercharged my success was to promote recurring income affiliate programs/products. This was something I didn’t understand when I first started learning affiliate marketing. I promoted low value physical products and earned a pittance when I eventually make a sale. It was years later when I discovered the ability to earn recurring commissions. What a waste of time!
Memberships and subscription products which carry recurring commissions are one of the best ways to work “smart” as an affiliate. Using high ticket affiliate products is another.
Smart Affiliate Success – Paid Marketing
One of my best successes was through using paid marketing to send people to a landing page and collecting email subscribers. This is one of the best ways to do affiliate marketing. If you’ve been blogging away for years and are still struggling to make money with affiliate marketing, I suggest a change is in order. I did this, (blogging) and was always deferring my success to “some time in the future” when Google, or whoever would reward me for all my hard work!
Alas they never did!
Looking back I abandoned this early success too quickly when Google banned my Adwords account. I did try and retrieve it, but didn’t get anywhere. Back then a ban meant for life! So I switched to free organic methods and spent a long time creating content which didn’t really work.
When I eventually returned to paid marketing years later, I had a much better sales funnel:
- Recurring income products
- High ticket products
- Using digital not physical products (Higher commissions)
- Using a product range, not just a single product
This kind of funnel means it’s so much easier to be profitable through using paid marketing. Combined with email marketing it gives you much more leverage.
Email Marketing Vs. Blogging
Email marketing is a huge part of my affiliate business today. But I was a struggling affiliate for years before even realising how important it was. Instead of building an email list, I struggled getting traffic for free because I didn’t dare to use any money in my advertising. Instead, I used to build niche websites and “hope” they would eventually get some traffic.
Hope is good for motivation but not for traffic, as I found out after a lot of work! Blogging is a slow marketing strategy which is great if it works but not so great if it doesn’t. I still blog today, but I also use paid marketing, which is much more effective, scalable and fast.
Email marketing is powerful too. It lets you build a relationship over weeks, months and even years with your subscribers. This simply doesn’t happen on a website. On a website, a visitor only has a small amount of time to make a purchase. Then, they are gone forever. But an email list is much better. It’s been proven that a customer needs many points of connection before making a buying decision, which is what email marketing is good for. A blog not so much.
The Busy Fool
You can work incredibly hard at affiliate marketing and still fail. I did for years! I worked hard at all the wrong activities, expecting some miracle to intervene and make all my websites suddenly visible to Google. But they were spammy websites in the beginning which offered very little value. I threw them up expecting miracles and was disappointed.
Later I realised that spending all day on the look of my website was a complete an utter waste of time! It got no traffic and made no money. So why was I spending so much time “polishing” it. A Yorkshire expression is “you can’t polish a turd”! But that’s exactly what I was doing!
By the time I heard the expression being a “busy fool” I had been doing it for a rather long time. Spending time on the things you enjoy doing, doesn’t always ring true with building a successful online business. In fact the opposite is more likely to be true. Spending time on money producing activities is more likely to produce the results you want from it. These activities are going to be the ones which you find distasteful, like looking at data and analysing. Shooting video perhaps and studying those boring topics like email open rates and tracking!
It took me a long time to actually shoot a video as I was massively uncomfortable with it. I much preferred writing and hiding behind my keyboard. This was fear of course which stood between me an affiliate marketing success for some time.
Scale
Affiliate marketing works best at a large scale with large numbers of people subscribing to your list and buying your products. If you rely on a marketing strategy which is organic, this is so much more difficult. It can be done but you are also up against a lot of competition. Blogging, for example is an organic marketing approach which can take months or years before you get the kind of traction you can attain in days with paid marketing.
Paid marketing can also be scaled up very quickly once you have a profitable campaign. A few months wisely spent would be to learn and understand a paid marketing strategy, even at a tiny amount per day. Once you have this understanding it can serve you for life. Alternatively, spend months blogging and achieve much less, or nothing!
Of course you need money to use paid marketing. But initially, you can start with a small daily budget while you are learning. Top affiliates eventually increase their budget to spend tens of thousands every month. But they do this knowing their marketing campaign is producing a profit consistently first. Smart affiliate success uses a high ticket affiliate product range (such as the SFM Digital Business system) and paid advertising to generate traction quickly.
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