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.