Affiliate Marketing

October 17, 2018July 30, 2019

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

I’ve often heard the question “how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing?”. It’s a difficult question to answer so I thought I’d put aside some time to answer in in a post. For me, it’s taken years! However, I’ve seen other people start earning within months. It really depends on a number of factors which I’ll break down here:

Motivation – Some people are just motivated more than others. This might be because you’re absolutely nauseated by your boss, fed up with having no money, or simply because you have no time to actually enjoy or appreciate your life anymore.
Life Situation – Your situation can be different to your motivation, so I’ve included this as a possible reason here. You either have no time or no money. Affiliate marketing can help out both, but they require different paths. If you’ve no time, you can spend budget and get things going faster than if you’ve no money, which might mean taking the longer route of content marketing.
Your resolve – This is different for everyone. Lets say 10 people are given a gym membership and told to build their best body in 5 months. They will all look different. Those with the strongest resolve won’t necessarily have the best looking figures either. It depends where you’re starting from. But it’s your resolve which will determine whether you stick the course at all!
Mental Blockages – Any conflicting beliefs and attitudes around money and the business model you choose in your affiliate marketing journey can hold you back from success.
The Path You Take/Products – This is probably one of the most important reasons why an internet business can take years or months. I started looking online for an income many years ago. I took several wrong turns though and never had any money. This set me back. You can do it quicker than me! The product/s you choose to promote has a great deal to do with your success.
What marketing Strategy Will You Opt For? – Your marketing strategy will determine to a large extent the time it takes to build your online business too. Paid advertising can be expensive, but it’s much faster than creating content. Content creating is a cheap method of building traffic, but it takes ages to get any tangible results.

how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing

Motivation – What Creates Success Online?

You can think of affiliate marketing like joining a gym. Just because you buy a gym membership, you shouldn’t expect to get great results. Some people will only go to the gym once a month. Others will not go at all! The people who get the most out of a gym, work hard and regularly for a long enough period of time to see the results they want. They eat right too and cut out distractions and habits which would get in the way of their progress. Not everyone has the motivation and discipline to keep doing this through life’s ups and downs. Many will quit before they even start seeing results at all. Affiliate marketing is the same – don’t expect your ‘gym membership’ to do the work for you!

My motivation for starting out online came from a need for both direction and income. I was struggling with low paid jobs and attempting to build a stunt career! I’d had a few professional stunt performing jobs for TV and film but the career was a patchy one to say the least! I needed something to subsidise my passion for the stunt career. The internet was my ‘way out’ of menial low paid work and was something I could do in-between jobs. My motivation was patchy at best and I was ‘split’ by a number of other hobby jobs including a passion for Kung Fu and for stunts! Perhaps this is the reason it took me such a long time to actually make it work.

Cordelia, a member of the community I belong to online has gone from having a full time nursing career and 3 kids to being a full time online entrepreneur in around 6 months. She was absolutely focused on getting the result she needed to get out of a career which left her with no time for her children.

Dan is another member of the community who is now a huge earner online. He left his job to pursue an online business full time. It took him around a year to transition to full time online after burning through a budget he had left from a high paid job which left him no time to pursue the things he wanted in life.

Life Situation – What Limitations Are Holding You Where You Are?

Your life situation can in some ways determine which strategies you will use as an affiliate marketer. I started out will no job and a very sporadic income. Some affiliates start out with a high paid job but no time to really enjoy their life or spend how they choose. Both situations call for a different strategy within affiliate marketing. I used my time to learn all the free strategies to build my affiliate marketing business up from scratch. Initially, I tried various systems and strategies and made a lot of mistakes on the journey.

I focused on free strategies which took a long time and much of which didn’t work at all. It took me several years to find both a strategy of affiliate marketing which worked, and a strategy of traffic generation that worked. I’ve saved you the time of failing as much as I did by recommending the best courses and mentors I have found on my journey!

Your life situation may determine how you go about marking an affiliate business, or on which path you decide to go down. I recommend using a high commission affiliate program for a number of reasons:

You can earn larger amounts more quickly than with low cost affiliate items
Earn from multiple strategies
Get ongoing commissions from subscription based products
You can use paid marketing strategies and recoup costs more quickly and easily

Not everyone is in the position to afford the best training and education online. I chose a cheaper route and for years struggled with low value courses which didn’t help me. You can read about some of them here.

Your Resolve – How Bad Do You Want To Be Free?

A lot of people start down a path and give up too early. Affiliate marketing is no magic bullet and you won’t get the results you’re after without a stubborn determination and stead-fast mind to succeed. You’ll have many set backs on the journey too. I struggled for years with affiliate marketing trying all sorts of courses and strategies. If I had given up, I wouldn’t know the ability to work for myself, create an income from home and be free of the fears and anxieties which dogged me for years. But it came at a cost. I worked for a long time to understand affiliate marketing and eventually I found a business model which worked.

Only something like 3% of affiliate marketers who start down the path actually continue and turn it into a real income. For those who do stick it out, there are great rewards. You can use automation and a global audience to sell digital products. You can work from anywhere and scale up your business to earn a fantastic income. But first you’ll need to overcome a lot of barriers and potential set backs.

This comes back to your reasoning too. If your life is currently alright, just how it is, you might not be prepared to go through what you need to do, in order to make if better. Many who are desperate to escape their current circumstances are far more prepared to take giant steps out of their comfort zone in order to get the result of time and geographical freedom.

Just decide never to quit and you’re half way there. You’ll have good days and bad days, but if you never quit, you’re already there in many ways. It’s not an easy journey and it’s not paid like a job is every month, regardless of how hard you work. Affiliate marketing is performance based. But before you can perform well as an affiliate marketer, you need to learn what to do. Only after a lot of failing, can you know how to excel. Once you do though, you can continue to grow your business using automation and the ability to scale. See also on resolve why affiliate marketing does not work.

Mental Blockages

It’s also worth talking about any mental reservations you might have towards really creating some financial freedom in your life. What comes up when you imagine living a life of financial freedom? I tried this exercise as I was having difficulties moving my online business forwards at one point. I imagined having more tax worries, greater demands on my life and more stress! Funny how the mind can work! How do you think this affected my ability to make my affiliate business work for me? Many of the blockages to moving your business forwards and creating more income are mental in nature. Unless you uncover them within your self, you’ll sabotage your conscious efforts with unconscious beliefs and negative programming you’ve picked up from your past.

What beliefs do you have about making money easily from the internet when many people work really hard for it? Do you have any of the following beliefs about money:

You must work hard for money
I must suffer to make money
Money is the route of all evil
It’s greedy to want more than you need
I’m satisfied with what I have already
Wealthy people are lazy

We can also prevent ourselves from living a more pleasant and bountiful life for other reasons:

What duty must you do in order to feel ‘right’
What are you trying to be right about in life?

It’s worth thinking about your inner world of beliefs and attitudes because they can hold you back and cause you to take much longer in generating money from your affiliate business.

The Path You Take – How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

The path you take can be a major benefit or a major obstacle to your online success. I took several routes to learn affiliate marketing, many of which were complete red herrings. After completing several online courses and trying out many strategies including:

Keyword researching
Niche website building
Google Adsense
Ranking websites on Google
And many more…

I finally got lucky and found a fantastic online business community which had a great business model. The business model included:

high ticket items
Up-sells for which you can earn commissions
A built in sales team
Multi-tier sales
Subscription products

In short, the business model does a lot of the selling for you and you can earn ongoing commissions by referring a customer once. Most affiliate models only pay you once for the referral. They then get the customer who may go on to purchase again for a lifetime, but you, as the affiliate, don’t get any further commissions. With this business model, you get the benefit of potentially lifetime commissions from a single referral.

Obviously you need to make sales first though, but you can also access an online community who will help you do so. This is a massive benefit and a huge help, especially if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. It’s much harder to get things moving with an online business if you don’t have the support of a community and a step by step procedure for getting things done.

Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy will be a large determining factor in the speed of your online business success, or lack of it. I started out using only content marketing strategies and it’s one of the reasons it took me so long. Content marketing is a slow process of building and promoting content and attempting to get it seen by as many people as possible. There’s many ways to do this and many attempts I made to get my content ‘out there’ really just plain didn’t work! Probably less than 10% of the content I created got some traction. If you throw enough ‘mud at the wall’, some of it will stick though.

I created ebooks too as well as doing a lot of blogging. Here’s a couple of the books I created:

You don’t need to do this of course. People have far faster results that I have had simply by following a simple route using paid marketing strategies. Paid marketing, although costly, is far quicker at generating traffic than content marketing. Most of the top earners have figured out paid strategies and leverage it with high ticket affiliate programs. Unless you have a program which offers the benefit of high ticket, up-sells and monthly membership (subscription) commissions, you are more limited in what you can spend on advertising. Low value affiliate products can limit you to cheap advertising platforms and content creation tactics. This means you progress will be slow, and that’s only if you put the work in consistently for long enough to produce a result. Many give up before they see any results at all.

Training And Education – An Ongoing Process

As another factor in determining how long it takes to make money with affiliate marketing, I’m including your training and development. Unless you surround yourself with forward thinking entrepreneurs and continue to develop your business, and yourself, it’s easy to fall back into old habits which don’t move you or your online business forwards. In particular, well meaning friends and relatives can hold you back from achieving the result you would like.

Connecting with other entrepreneurs has been a vital part of my marketing and mindset development. If you don’t get results quickly in your business, which is very likely, it’s easy to dismiss it as something that doesn’t work. Until you get to this point where you see results, it’s possible that you will quit. If you have a community to go to with your problems and concerns, your chances of success are far greater.

You need to keep going for the long term and overcome the various difficulties which you will definitely find on your journey. An internet business isn’t something which is built in a day. It takes time and you need to keep going even when your belief is very low. Connecting with others on the same journey is hugely important for your growth. An internet business can make your life easier in the long run because of the automation involved. Keep putting it together peace by peace and eventually it will work for you! Keep taking small steps and never stop!

If you’re ready to take the first step, join an online business community and start building your online business today! Access a FREE video series, and an online community I found a few years ago which helped me on this journey.

September 4, 2018September 4, 2018

Best High Ticket Affiliate Programs

What are the best high ticket affiliate programs? High ticket affiliate program s are programs with larger than average priced digital products within them. This has a number of advantages off the bat. Digital products can be sold over the internet, without any need for postage and storage costs. This means affiliate program owners can offer larger commissions to affiliates. It also means you can have a completely location free business.

High ticket affiliate programs offer products which range from $500 all the way up to $20,000 – $30,000+. To be able to qualify for top commissions on these products, you’ll need to purchase the product yourself. Top products typically give you not only the higher levels of commission, but also offer better and more personal trainings with the top internet marketers directly.

Best High Ticket Affiliate Programs

But don’t worry if this sounds like too much of a price to pay. The best high ticket affiliate programs also offer a multi-tier system which means you can still access higher valued digital products, without having to commit to the very top level. The Elite level, for example of The SFM program offers the ability to sell a high ticket product for a lower level of financial commitment. See Six Figure Mentors Elite.

The further you go up the product range, the larger the cost and the larger the commissions – depending on your placement in the business structure. To get the top level of commissions, you need to position yourself as a founder member. See Entrepreneurs Looking For Partners for pricing and commission structure.

How Does It All Work?

best high ticket affiliate programs

So what if you know nothing about working an online business? How do the best high ticket affiliate programs help? The best high ticket affiliate programs offer an all in one resource which should be the last thing you’ll need to purchase on the internet. A good business system should offer:

All in one training, software and products
An online community you can go to for assistance
Support from community and online ticket system
Multi-tier sales – earn from your team of referrals
A plug and play business system which is simple to set up
Modular step by step breakdown of how to set up your business
Ongoing training and support to build your business

One of the best things about this business system is the online community which offers support and help 24 hours a day.

Problems With Internet Businesses

When I first started looking to start an online business I tried many systems and strategies. One of the main problems is lack of direction, even if you have the best high ticket affiliate programs at your disposal. Imagine you haven’t even got your driving licence and someone gives you a Ferrari! This is the same as having one of the best high ticket affiliate programs, yet not knowing how to make it work for you!

There’s so many avenues of activity in the online world, that it’s easy to go off route and spend your time being a ‘busy fool’. Activity is not the same as productivity with an online business. A community of help and support is vital for success in an online business endeavour. Our online community includes multiple Facebook groups which you can join and access personal Q and A training. This allows you to watch ‘over the shoulder’ of successful entrepreneurs and take the same action steps they are taking to achieve a successful result. Here’s a picture of me with one of the co-founders of the SFM business community I belong to.

Stuart and Jay actually turn up for their students, something which never happened in all the previous programs I had struggled with.

Here’s a picture of the founders:

Best High Ticket Affiliate Programs – Sales Funnel

The best high ticket affiliate programs should also have a ready made sales funnel. Access to the SFM business system gives you access to such a sales funnel – if you join as a member. See Six Figure Mentors Cost. Access to higher valued commissions means upgrading to at least Elite membership level. This gives you the ability to earn high ticket affiliate commissions. Without doing so will limit your ability to earn. However, you can still learn from the business training and education and online community. You can also still earn commissions but they will be much lower. See Six Figure Mentors Compensation Plan.

What Next?

So let’s say you’ve set up your sales funnel and you have positioned yourself within the business system to allow you to earn high ticket affiliate commissions. What’s next? Having a sales funnel means you have set up a business system which can allow you to earn commissions from online sales. This is a great achievement but you’re not quite ready to quit your job! Don’t get ahead of yourself! Before you can earn any commissions, you’ll need to send targeted website traffic into your sales funnel.

A sales funnel starts with a website or landing page. You’ll be able to access these too within the online business platform and customise them to suit. As people land on your landing page (or website), they can opt in to your sales funnel by entering their email on to the page to access information. Once they do this, they have entered into the sales funnel.

Understanding Your Funnel

Your ready made sales funnel will come with a standard follow up series of emails which you can customise with your own personalised message, if you choose. As your visitors go through your sales funnel, they can purchase products. The best high ticket affiliate programs will give you a range of products to sell through your sales funnel. The SFM has a range of products which start with an ‘entry level’ price and offer more value with each increment in pricing. Your sales funnel offers:

Up-sells – every product within the range can earn you a commission – even months or years after your initial sale (depending on your positioning)
Built in sales team – A sales (and support) team is built in to your funnel offering advice and help and closing sales on your behalf. You don’t have to personally sell anything, simply refer people into your sales funnel!
Multi-tier sales program – If you invest at the higher levels of the program, you’ll be able to benefit from multi-tier sales – earn commissions from sales made by your team/referrals. This can have a massive impact on your business as you continue to earn from other people’s sales and efforts.
Subscription commissions – Subscriptions make a huge difference to an online business. Sell a single subscription and you’ll earn a residual commission continually. This is much better than selling a single item for only a single ‘one time’ commission.
High Ticket commissions – Of course high ticket products make a massive difference in an online business. You can scale up more quickly and offset paid advertising strategies far faster than with smaller valued products. High ticket affiliate programs also allow certain paid strategies which would be out of reach with lower value products.

Knowing your sales funnel will give you confidence in your marketing. Without this belief, you can easily sabotage yourself in the process of building your business.

Marketing Your Funnel

If you’re not already a successful online marketer, you’ll need some training in this area. Fortunately you’ll be able to access a great deal of training and resources which will help you to successfully market your sales funnel.

You can do this in a number of ways with paid or free strategies. If you choose to go down the free marketing route, you’ll need to create content for your website either in the form of video marketing or blogging. Many marketers also run webinars and offer video trainings which can be uploaded to YouTube to gain an audience. If you choose the free route it will take much longer to gain traction in your business. Expect to maintain a habit of content creation for a long enough time to start seeing some results.

Here’s a book I created which explains some strategies for ranking your articles on Google. It has helped me get some of my content found:

Paid Marketing can work much faster. You still need to expect to spend money in the learning process. But this is never wasted if you learn from everything you do. Some of your adverts simply won’t work. Put this down to experience though and learn from it. If you track every one of your adverts, you’ll soon be in a position to determine which adverts work and which don’t. Then you can cut back on the poor performing adverts and scale up on the better ones.

Checkout my ebook on paid strategies here:

Why The SFM?

Disclaimer: Earnings can never be guaranteed and your results will depend on how well you can follow instructions and develop yourself as a business owner. (I am an affiliate of the SFM and will earn a commission if you purchase a product through my affiliate links in this article).

The SFM is definitely one of the best high ticket affiliate programs available for anyone to start. It offers an all-in-one business system and training resource for anyone who wants to create a lifestyle of more choice and freedom.

The sales funnel offers a range of high ticket products which can enable anyone to benefit from the ability to earn a scalable income from using leverage and digital technology. It is a means to stop trading time for money, and use the internet to sell digital products for a commission. It does take work though and you will need to continue your personal development in order to succeed.

The Best Training Resources

There’s certainly a lot of training available on the internet and much of it can be accessed for free. However, finding the right training and resources is something different. There’s a lot of free stuff out there but it can take you an age to filter through it and find the best resources.

Microsoft Lynda (Under the LInkedIn umbrella of companies) recently partnered with SFM as a way to offer their own 6,500 training courses as part of the SFM curriculum.

DigitalMarketer (The world’s longest standing and most highly respected B2B and B2C marketing training company) also partnered with SFM and now offer their own training as part of the SFM curriculum.

The SFM community is one of the best resources in their business system. By joining the SFM business, you can access many of the various groups whose sole purpose is to help students build their businesses online. There are regular Q and A webinars, online seminars and global events to join and learn from. Access here.

August 17, 2018August 16, 2018

Best Website Builder For Affiliate Marketing

What is the best website builder for affiliate marketing? Well it depends on your needs and your particular circumstances. Many website building software companies will claim theirs is ‘the best’, but really it depends on your needs as a customer. The best software might also be far out of your price range. Take a look at the video below by clicking the image. In it, you’ll see how you can have a ready made website up and running in a few minutes.

Best Website Builder For Affiliate Marketing

So you can see that the website building software is very easy to use. But this isn’t just a website. If you only want a website, this probably isn’t the best website builder for you. This is also a business system which includes:

A built in sales funnel (access your own email marketing tool and start building a list of subscribers)
A product ‘suite’ – A ‘suite’ is a range of products which you can earn affiliate commissions from.
A built in sales team closing sales on your behalf.
A range of high ticket products within your product ‘suite’.
Full training and support backed by an online business community

So why is it important to have all of this anyway? Why is this the best website builder for affiliate marketing?

best website builder for affiliate marketing

Depending on what you want for your affiliate business, the SFM business system has a number of products to accommodate. Ultimately, if you want to grow and develop an online business which leverages digital products there a lot of advantages in having high commission affiliate programs.

Advantages Of High Commission Affiliate Programs

One of the main advantages of high ticket programs is that it allows you to start generating larger commissions more quickly. Whereas, with low value items, you’ll need to sell a lot more products in order to make the same amounts.

High ticket products can also give you greater flexibility when it comes to advertising too, both in terms of how much you can spend, before you break the bank and in terms of advertising platforms and techniques which are available to you. Facebook and YouTube, for example, are very sophisticated advertising platforms. They’re also rather expensive to use. You simply can’t afford to use these platforms for low value items. Spending $500 in advertising is much more easily recouped with a high ticket program.

If you only sell low value items, it’s going to be very difficult to use these platforms at all, let alone break even. Knowing you have a product suite which offers products valued at $500 – $35,000 in them, (and you can earn 35-40% commissions on those products) gives you a huge advantage and much more confidence in spending on advertising.

Best Website Builder For Affiliate Marketing – Speed

Are your building a website with the intention of blogging? Blogging is a much slower method of building an online presence. Paid advertising is a much faster one. Paid advertising can grow an online business very quickly, particularly with the right business model.

This is the best website builder for affiliate marketing if you’re looking for a long term sustainable business model. Whether you want to build your business quickly with paid traffic or more slowly with content marketing, the right business model can make all the difference to your business.

Subscription products – give you a monthly income from previous sales. This means you earn continuously from each previous sale (providing the member continues their membership).
Up-sells – As already mentioned, a range of products allows you to earn later on from previous sales you have already made. Some members might upgrade their membership long after the initial sale – make sure you get the credit with the best affiliate program.
Built In Sales Team – A built in sales team means you don’t have to close sales of larger high ticket products. A sales system like this works for you even after you have referred a customer, giving you commissions even after your initial referral.
Multi-Tier Sales – A multi tier sales system means you can earn commissions based on the sales your team makes. (Eligibility depends on where you place yourself in the business tier system).

Why This Isn’t The Best Website Builder For Affiliate Marketing

When I started out in the affiliate marketing field I did everything as cheaply as possible. I didn’t have any money to spend on something which I knew nothing about. I didn’t know the value of things, because I didn’t have much knowledge in the area.

Over time I realised the value of certain software and strategies which I initially failed to appreciate early on. For me, it would have been a waste of money back then because I would have expected to be able to “buy a profitable business” and not have to do anything to earn from it. If you are in this camp, this definitely isn’t for you.

However, if you’re serious about rolling up your sleeves and actually learning some new skills and working hard on your business, this might be the right starting package for you.

One of the best things about this business system is its online community. When I was working on my own, I was working hard at many of the wrong activities. As I joined this company, I realised where the most successful people were putting their efforts. By modelling the success of other successful people, you can achieve far better results than by going it alone.

Access an online business system which gives you the benefit of:

A website building software
Landing page software and ready made templates to use
A modular step by step set-up procedure
Training and education on marketing and set up
A business community on hand to help you
A built in sales team
High ticket products to earn from (access according to how you position yourself in the business system)

Access the full 7 day video series here to learn more

August 16, 2018

Can I Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

When I started affiliate marketing, I never bothered to ask “can I make money with affiliate marketing?”. I just knew I could! It was absolute certainty, and my actions over the following years were based on passion, stubbornness, desperation and ignorance! After a while of failing, I stopped and asked myself that same question “Can I make money with affiliate marketing?”.

Can I Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

can I make money with affiliate marketing

Before I found affiliate marketing I was desperate to succeed with some self employed endeavour. I knew I didn’t want a job or a boss. I was juggling some self employment, some employment and attempting to earn money from the internet, back in 1995 when eBay was born!

Back then I had a dial up connection to the internet which was frustrating at times. I remember attempting to outbid someone on an eBay auction at the last minute. The dial up connection would cut off at the vital moment and I would lose the item! This was before I discovered a little eBay money saving tip which I share in my article how to start a profitable ebay business.

Leverage & Automation

can I make money with affiliate marketing

After a while of buying and selling on eBay I realised there must be a better way of doing things. I bought an eBook which offered an eBay business system and realised the selling of the eBook was the key! It had automation and anyone could buy from anywhere globally. All the seller had to do was create the thing, and then list it – in theory anyway!

I spent quite a while attempting to replicate the idea of selling my own ebooks, but after a lot of struggle, the idea led me to affiliate marketing.

Basically affiliate marketing is the process of selling someone else’s product which can be delivered or downloaded automatically or by someone else. You don’t have to take care of any customers, deliver or handle any products or personally sell anything. You’re effectively a third party referrer who gets paid only when you successfully sell something.

But affiliate marketing sounded perfect to me. It meant I could work whenever I wanted and around other work and commitments. All I needed was a laptop and internet connection. I dreamt of working from my yacht in the Bahamas!

During all of the training and learning process I went through, I never thought to ask “can I make money with affiliate marketing?”. Nor did I look into how much money I wanted to make, or how I would do it. I was just enthused by the idea of affiliate marketing and I really didn’t know what it would take.

Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

There are people who make a whole heap of money with affiliate marketing. It’s the only source of income for many. But for the ones who ‘make it’ there’s many who don’t, and there’s many who struggle. Anyone can make money with affiliate marketing but it does take work. It’s definitely not a magic formula for success and riches. So the answer to “Can I make money with affiliate marketing” does depend largely on you.

can I make money with affiliate marketing

What affiliate marketing has to its advantage is the digital economy and the ability to leverage the internet. Anyone can learn the skills to leverage the internet and sell other people’s products. They can then scale up their sales to reach an ever growing customer base. How they go about this, their levels of determination, their financial situation and their belief and desire, all have a bearing on the level of success they can achieve.

How someone goes about building an internet business is really down to their knowledge. Without the right knowledge, they can go down a number of rabbit holes and get nowhere. Without self belief, and belief in what they are doing, anyone can get stuck on the journey too, and give up before they have found success.

Why Most Fail

Most will fail because they are not prepared to function as entrepreneurs. Many employees come into affiliate marketing and give up long before they would see any results. That’s for a number of reasons. Perhaps it’s because they have been trained to expect reward on a monthly cycle? With affiliate marketing, you are paid on a performance related basis. It can be years before you start seeing the benefits of your efforts. Most aren’t willing to wait that long.

can I make money with affiliate marketing

There’s other reasons people give up too early but mostly it’s their belief which gives up first. Once the will to succeed is lost, there’s nothing left to work for. If you can’t see any tangible results for your work, it takes a lot of energy to overcome doubts, fears and cynicism.

There’s a lot of work involved too. Consider learning affiliate marketing like getting a degree or going back to school. Only, with affiliate marketing the end result is financial freedom.

Stumbling Blocks To Affiliate Success

There’s also many stumbling blocks in the way of success with affiliate marketing. See my article 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. There’s a number of strategies which you can spend a huge amount of time on and see nothing in terms of results. It can take months before you’ve realised that your strategy is flawed. You then need to start again.

can I make money with affiliate marketing

The people claiming to ‘help’ you can also of course be flawed in their teachings and in their intent. Are they really the ‘experts’ or do they really want to help you? Having this thought in the back of your head does nothing for your belief. Without trust, building an online business is so much more difficult. You have to contend with your own scepticism which sabotages your efforts, belief and action steps.

It’s also very difficult to determine what a realistic affiliate marketing income is, and how soon you can achieve it. With a good business model and by using paid marketing strategies, some people have managed to replace their income within 6 months. But that’s more rare than most. That’s if someone fully trusts a particular strategy, and goes ‘all in’.

Others can spend years barking up the wrong tree and wasting time on the wrong activities. But providing you learn from your mistakes and failures, and given that you’ll never quit, you can eventually succeed at affiliate marketing. To get there fast you need the right business model and a community of mentors. Going it alone is pretty much a receipe for disaster, even if you think you know what you’re doing.

Can I Make A Living With Affiliate Marketing?

When I started affiliate marketing, I wasn’t looking for making millions and driving Ferrari’s like many of the ‘guru’s’ suggest you should. I only wanted to be able to make a ‘living’ from it. This, in part, was a reason I failed so many times – (I’ll come back to this later). I was looking for a simple strategy to allow me to earn a ‘modest’ income. So I worked away at many of the tactics which were free to do.

One of these was blogging. Blogging is a cheap method of building website traffic which you can hopefully convert into sales. You can also use Google’s Adsense program to earn money from clicks on your adverts. However, you’ll need to build a good amount of traffic if you decide to go this route. This means creating a lot of content and successfully promoting it. Over time the goal of this strategy is to rank your articles and content on Google and earn some free, long term traffic.

But unfortunately it doesn’t always work this way. ‘Free’ traffic doesn’t always work and is incredibly time consuming. It can take years to get the kind of traffic you need to convert visitors into buyers. Your content needs to be good and well suited to your potential customers. It’s a minefield attempting to build an online business from a blog alone. Especially if you’re in a competitive niche. You need to become a master at promoting your content and your content needs to be good enough for people to notice and share it.

So, can I make a living or not?

My original intent of “I just wanted to make a living”, or even a part time income transpired into not very outstanding results. Really, my original intent was to be doing something I enjoyed and that turned out to be article writing, or blogging. Unfortunately, that’s also a very slow method of building up an online business. Even if your content gets ranks on Google, it is unlikely to get ranked for the most competitive and lucrative keywords because of the enormous competition.

So that means if your content does rank on Google, it will be for low hanging “fruit”, or the long tail keyword combinations which only get a few visitors per month. Still though, this is free traffic. If just one of your monthly visitors opts into your sales funnel, that could potentially turn into a sale every month! but equally it might not, and you’ve spent a long time creating and promoting your content for nothing!

With paid advertising on the other hand, you have far more control of the traffic. Only after a long time and lot of disappointment did I venture into using paid traffic. If I hadn’t found a mentor, I probably would still be solely focused on content creation.

Paid Traffic Vs. Content Creation

With paid traffic you can run a campaign and see very quickly whether it works or not. Within a few days you’ll know whether your campaign is creating any leads. Depending on your particular business model, you’ll know within a month whether your lead has converted into a sale. Once you have this data, you can make decisions on which campaigns are worth running and which you should discontinue.

With content, on the other hand, you could be spending several hours creating an article, publish it and market it, and still get no results. It can take months before your content appears in the search results on Google. Also, it might never appear. The time you spend doing all this could have been wasted, for all you know. If time is less valuable to you than money, this is a possible route to go down. However, if your time is more valuable and you have an income which you can use for marketing, the paid route is far quicker and more effective if you learn how.

Pay To Earn?

Part of this learning will be costing you money. You need to run adverts to understand which ones work and which ones don’t work. You also need a very effective sales funnel in order to recoup your costs. (See ready made sales funnel). This is perhaps another sticking point which stops potential affiliates from continuing down the path of an online entrepreneur. Spending money doesn’t make sense when you want to earn money for most. But for an entrepreneur, it does make sense. Once you are in position of spending $10 and making $20, you’ve learned a valuable strategy of scaling an income and automating a business. But this might take a lot more than $10 to learn.

This was a steep learning curve for me. When I started looking towards affiliate marketing, I had no money and so tried to do everything on the cheap. Once I was in a better position I was able to pay for better training and resources which allowed me to move forwards faster. Here’s another problem which I think many would-be affiliate marketers face.

Many see affiliate marketing as a cheap way to earn an income from their laptops. However, unless you treat it as a serious business, you won’t put the time, effort and investment into it. If you attempt to do things on the cheap, it will be much harder and take much longer! Hence why many quit.

Can I Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Belief

Can I make money with affiliate marketing?

Whether you believe you can do something or not, you’re right – Henry Ford.

Belief is a self fulfilling prophecy. Affiliate marketing is a business like any other and requires work like any other. The difference with affiliate marketing is that anyone can attempt it and at a variety of different levels, with a variety of different strategies.

You can ‘dip your toe in’ with affiliate marketing and find the water too hot or too cold. You can equally put your heart and soul into affiliate marketing and fail! It’s whether you give up or not that ultimately determines your eventual success, or lack of it, and the path you take and learn from.

Whatever belief you carry about affiliate marketing (and yourself) can either taint your journey or help you to succeed. Your beliefs are based on knowledge and in some cases ignorance. Building your knowledge about something is a good place to start then.

Ask yourself “Can I make money with affiliate marketing?” now, and in a year’s time after you start learning.

August 1, 2018

Supplemental income Ideas

I’ve always been a fan of supplemental income ideas. Once you’ve given your soul to ‘The Man’, you’re trapped. It’s especially true once you build your life around a job or career. A part of your mind is duty bound to accept that it’s your ‘lot’ in life. What if the business fails? What if your job is automated? How about redundancy?

Supplemental income ideas can give you a ‘buffer’ so you’re not so dependant on your current income. Ideally, your supplemental income ideas will be capable of surpassing your current salary. This is the key. If your supplemental income is always supplementary, you’re still stuck in your job, even with this income. On the other hand, if it has the ability to surpass your current income, you’ll be much more likely to pursue it for long enough to make this happen. Here’s a few supplementary income ideas which I’ve found on the journey to find the ‘one’ which is scalable and automated.

Skip to the end if you want the short version summary!

Supplemental Income Ideas – 1

One of the first supplementary income ideas I found was through the auction site eBay. I started out just buying and selling items from my house and moved on to car boot sales and antique sales. I eventually found a clever little eBay hack which lets you find bargain items on the site itself. You can then either sell them on Facebook for free using the marketplace or local selling pages, or re-list them back on eBay to get a better price.

The strategy I found uses a clever Misspell tool which you can access here. Use it to find items which are misspelled on eBay. Because they are misspelled, they don’t get the views they should and, as such can often sell for much lower than they are worth. You can read the full strategy for this supplementary income idea in my article how to start a profitable ebay business.

Supplemental Income Ideas – 2

Here’s another clever little ‘hack’ if you’ve got a skill and want to monetise it. By using Google’s Places for Business listings, you can create a business listing completely free. If you pick up a few jobs there’s a nice little earner here. I used this strategy to get some work as a handyman in my local town.Wherever you are based, you can create a business listing and get yourself ranking on the top of Google for your particular business.

This could be a painter and decorators, handyman, music teacher, language teacher or anything else you might be good at. You can build up a free listing and you don’t even need a website to do this. Just head to Google Places for business and create a listing. This is a great supplementary income ideas and if you’ve got a skill of some kind, it’s very cheap and easy to get started. Also checkout my ebook below which explains creating a business listing in more detail.

Supplemental Income Ideas – 3

Car boot sales offer the opportunity to sell your old items but also to run the sales yourself. If you’ve got a tonne of stuff sitting around the house why not find a local car boot sale or sale and take it along? Running your own car boot sale can also be a lucrative supplementary income idea and you can run it on the weekends. You need to find a local field or place big enough to get a good turnout. Run an advert in the local paper and put up some banner adverts advertising locally.

Charge people to bring their cars and for entry. A good turn out can net you a nice little profit, if you get good weather. You can also scout about for bargains to re-list on eBay as per “supplementary income ideas – 1”.

Supplemental Income Ideas – 4

An online business presents an opportunity to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. Most people simply aren’t aware of the vast opportunity of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone benefit from referring people to products and services around the internet. Digital products in particular can earn you 40% of their cost as an affiliate.

Because the internet has a global audience, this has the most potential of all the ideas listed here of surpassing your current income, whatever it is. An internet business can be largely automated too. By building systems and strategies which can run 24 hours a day on complete autopilot, you can send website traffic to offers and services to earn a commission. Regardless of your age and technical experience, you can do this. It does take some time to learn though.

You can access an online video series which will show more about it completely free here.

Supplemental Income Ideas – 5

Depending on your circumstance and location, you may be able to sign up as a TV extra. When I worked as a TV extra, I met a lot of people who had their own businesses. This was because they were able to take time out at short notice, something you’ll most likely need to be able to do.

supplementary income ideas

TV extras, or background artists. appear in the background on television to give the scene a more realistic appearance. You get to visit places and do things within your locality which you wouldn’t normally do, and earn money at the same time! Just do a search online for Extras agencies near you. You may have to apply to join an agency and wait a while before any suitable work appears. Work tends to be sporadic and unreliable. Depending where you are though, you may be able to sign with multiple agencies, although some agencies ask for exclusivity.

Here’s a quick summary of the ideas I’ve shared in this article.

Supplemental Income Ideas – Summary

Ebay – Buying and Selling using the misspell tool – See my article how to start a profitable ebay business.
Start your own small business selling yourself! Whether you can paint, play an instrument, speak a language or fix someone’s fence, there might be an opportunity to get work locally by using Google Places for business – get a free business listing. Learn how in my ebook.
Car boot sales present 2 opportunities both for running them yourself and for buying and selling in them. Start your own car boot business. Book a field, advertising and charge for entry.
Start your own online business. This simple and effective business system can be used by anyone to build a scalable and profitable online business even with no experience.
Become a TV extra! TV extras agencies offer local work on television and film production. Find an agency near you with a quick online search.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article on supplementary income ideas. If you’ve got any more please comment below to include them for any readers!

My best supplementary income idea is an online business. Access a free 7 day video series and learn more about how to use a simple business model, even with no previous experience.

June 18, 2018

Autopilot Money Maker

There’s lots of websites claiming to give you an “autopilot money maker”. The truth is that it takes much more than buying a simple “set it and forget it” website to make money on the internet. There’s so many hyped up claims on the internet that it’s easy to discount a “truth bomb”!

autopilot money maker

Why struggle when you can have it easy? Because the easy way is a lie and, actually, it takes a lot more than most people are prepared to commit. But, let’s not get too gloomy about the idea of an autopilot money maker. The idea itself is what kept me going long enough to start seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. From there, it’s just a matter of never giving up!

Autopilot Money Maker

So how do you get an autopilot money maker? How to do you build a website or system which continues to make sales for you and put money in your pocket, without continuing to work? The answer lies in what you’ve done previously. Many online marketers have set up systems and strategies which only require them to work on one thing – marketing. When they ‘crack’ the marketing, they can make sales in their sleep. But before you work on marketing, you need something to market, right? And if you don’t want to be caught up in the business workings, you can use other people’s products.

autopilot money maker

Using other people’s products means you only need to work at the front end of the business model. The entire ‘back-end’ is an already functioning business which requires no input from you. All you need to do is send customers to the “showroom”. This entire process can be automated. But, and this is a big “but”, so to speak, this takes time and effort to learn and implement. But hey, it’s worth it right because ultimately we’re talking about total financial freedom here. No more job ever, no more commute ever, no more annoying bosses, ever. Isn’t that something worth working for?

Autopilot Money Maker – How To Get Started?

You can see the ‘nuts and bolts’ and what’s involved in this whole process in my article autopilot money making system. The basic idea for your autopilot money maker is that of selling other people’s products on the internet. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you can link to various products and services on the internet and make commissions based on the sales you have referred.

Amazon, for example, is the largest affiliate program on the internet. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and link to their products. If you sell something from your link, you earn a commission. Since the internet works 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, you’ll be able to earn from work you have done previously. By setting up automated systems, you can earn in a number of different ways.

Organic Traffic

For example, this article may or may not start ranking on the organic search engines for the keyword “autopilot money maker”. If someone signs up to my email list and purchases a product from me, I earn a commission based on the sale. This is one strategy for getting targeted website traffic to your website. From there you can recommend various products and services which you think your visitors might appreciate. If you can generate organic traffic to your website, and effectively send customers to the right products, you can earn commissions on autopilot, based on the content you generate.

You can also create videos and upload them to YouTube – known as ‘v’logging’. V’logging and blogging are two strategies for generating free organic traffic with the intention of sending that traffic to affiliate products which may be suitable for visitors.

Paid Traffic – Autopilot Money Maker

Paid traffic is a much faster way of generating traffic to your affiliate products. With paid traffic, you can ‘turn on’ traffic by opening a campaign. Paid traffic can also be scaled up in a way that organic traffic cannot. Organic traffic takes time to build up. Paid traffic costs money but can be scaled up very quickly by increasing your advertising budget. So, once you find a profitable campaign, you can simply turn up your advertising budget. With organic traffic, you can’t do this. Successful organic content can’t necessarily be replicated as easily.

Of course paid traffic costs money and initially you are likely to spend money you don’t get back too. That’s because it takes a bit of time to understand what works and what doesn’t with organic traffic. However, consider this a worthwhile investment of your time and money. Once you have learned how to create successful paid campaigns, you’re in a much better position to scale up an affiliate marketing campaign and leverage the internet to increase your earning power.

Business Models And Ways Of Marketing

Ideally you should have a product suite if you’re going to use paid advertising. A product suite gives you a much easier way to learn paid strategies, than by using only single products. A single product can pay out a commission of up to 40%, if you choose a digital product.

However, if you choose a product suite which offers:

High ticket products,
multi-tier sales,
built in sales team,
subscription products,
up-sells,

your return on investment is going to be much higher than with single sale products. Access a business system which offers everything you need here.

So What Makes This System An Autopilot Money Maker?

autopilot money maker

The autopilot of this business system is made up of a few elements. You are of course selling a product on the internet. What product you choose is up to you. You can sell anything on the internet using the skills you can learn in this education platform. The system I am promoting here uses a number of strategies to optimise your earning potential:

Automated sales systems – Sales Funnels, email auto-responders
Various marketing strategies which can be automated and scaled
Affiliate Products – your product ‘suite’ – sales of which are automated
Multi-tier sales – commissions based on the sales made by your referrals
Subscription products – commissions made on an ongoing basis from your previous sales

So as you can see, the ‘autopilot’ of the business system lets you automate all of the systems which run. You still need to build the systems of course and get it running. This takes time and effort but a lot of the work has already been done for you. The sales system itself is already set up. Your main job is to learn how to market the sales funnel and how to scale this up over time. Once it’s running, you effectively have an autopilot money maker – providing you’re making more money than you’re spending.

autopilot money maker

The Next Step Of A Marketer

As online marketers build their business systems and start marketing it, they discover what needs to be done to make their business system more efficient. Decreasing the expenditure paid out for advertising is the main focus for many once they get to this point. One of the marketers in the groups of which I’m a member pays out $20,000 a month just in advertising. However, you don’t start at this point.

autopilot money maker

This just means he’s been successful enough already with his marketing to increase his budget based on his understanding of the business and previous sales. When starting out with a marketing budget most people only use a budget they are willing to lose. This may be only $40-100 a month for many people starting out with this kind of business. As they see results and ‘tweek’ their marketing campaigns, they get better at it. Once they are making a profit consistently with their marketing they can increase their budget, knowing that they will also increase their profit as a result.

Can Anyone Build An Autopilot Money Maker?

Anyone can now learn the skills to enable them to build a fully functional online business from scratch. The building of this system can be done quite quickly and easily. However, there’s much to learn in the developing of the actual business and of yourself. This may require you to learn some new skills and develop beyond your current thinking.

Many “would-be” online marketers give up because they don’t get the success they expect straight away. For those who stick it out, there are large rewards. Having a business which can be largely automated means you can build your business around your lifestyle. Most businesses require you to build your lifestyle around your business.

This, and the financial freedom which an online business can bring, are both good reasons not to quit! Most businesses aren’t geared for the kind of scalability which an internet business offers. Locally based businesses, for example, are limited by their geographical location. There’s a limited amount of potential customers within a certain area. Plus, a locally based business requires you to keep turning up, trading your time for money. An online business can be worked at whenever and wherever you choose.

Access a free 7 day video series and see if an online business is right for you.

June 7, 2018

Why Your Internet Business Is Failing

There might be a few reasons why your internet business is failing. Here’s a few of the reasons why I failed in the past. Successful online business owners aren’t afraid of failure. In fact, they see failure as ‘feedback’ rather than failure. If you continue to fail for long enough, you’ll eventually learn what not to do and therefore learn to use strategies which work. Ultimately, it’s easier to quit and blame whatever strategy you are using. It’s much harder to keep going and accept that you simply didn’t use the right strategy, or use it in the right way. Keep learning and never quit, you can’t fail if you stick to that mentality!

Why Your Internet Business Is Failing

why your internet business is failing

So what’s the main reason why your internet business is failing? One of the main reasons I failed so many times was that I simply didn’t know what I was doing. I was all enthusiasm and no knowledge. The idea in my mind was that I could make money very quickly online. I soon learned that this wasn’t the case. In my mind, I thought I could make money by just throwing up a website and letting it find customers for me. My ignorance soon caught up with me though. I learned through many failures online what didn’t work. Putting up a website is no guarantee of success. Think of your website as a tiny little store in outer space and you’ll come somewhere close to how many people will actually visit it, without you working at it.

1. Expectation

Are your expectations too high? Are you expecting an online business to be easy? I expected people to come running to my websites because there were there. It took a long time for me to realise that the key to making any kind of success online is by getting people to your products through your website, if you have one. If your expectations are too high for your online business, and you’re looking for quick success, you will likely be disappointed.

Any business takes time to build up. Don’t expect to make it big in only a few months. Would you expect that from a normal business. Of course people so have huge successes online in less than a year. However, they massively commit to their business in more ways than one. Could your expectation be too high for what you have put in? Could this be why your internet business is failing? What have you beed spending most time on in your business? Are you growing personally and professionally?

2. Lack Of Specific Knowledge

why your internet business is failing

I started out with a lot of enthusiasm and no knowledge. Seeing how little I knew took a lot of the shine off the idea and by the time I realised how much work was ahead, I was already pretty committed. Had I known how difficult it would be, I might never have started! Getting the right knowledge upfront is key.

I jumped around from one system to another, never really getting the continuity of training and expertise I needed. It was always the next “shiny object “which promised more riches in less time. I bought into the idea because of my lack of knowledge. It took a long time for me to realise that it was a long term business, like any other.

3. Shiny Object Syndrome

Because the internet is so accessible, it’s also very easy to become overwhelmed with information. There’s always something better than what you’ve already got. Someone is always there to promise the unobtainable. If you’re struggling with one direction, there’s always someone promising you an easier path. This is known as ‘shiny object syndrome’. Sticking to a path and finding a community and good mentors is key to avoiding this pitfall.

4. Commitment

why your internet business is failing

How committed are you to your internet business? This may be a reason why your internet business is failing. I thought I was committed for a long time, but it turned out I was only committing my time and I was only prepared to do certain things. I wasn’t prepared to commit any money because that was my problem. It became like a self fulfilling prophecy. I had no money to give, so I couldn’t step from my comfort zone and pay for more training, software or products which would help me. So I stuck to working for hours at a time blogging.

Much of my time was spent learning various strategies. But the real problem was I couldn’t get any traction with my online business because I didn’t want to step out of my comfort zone and spend money to get things moving. The fastest way to get an online business working is to invest both time and money. Paid advertising strategies can very quickly change your circumstances with the right business model. Free content marketing strategies take much longer. You need to commit both time and money if you want to escape your job within less than 2 years.

Why Your Internet Business Is Failing – Own Your Business

If you’re not taking ‘ownership’ of your business, you’re expecting it to simply work without your input. While this is part of an internet business, the ability to automate it, you still need to asses every part of it and look for improvements. The main part of your business is you.

If you’re limiting yourself by going it alone, not seeking out help and not committing to your own personal growth, how can you grow your business? Seeking out successful entrepreneurs who can help you is a massive factor. I kept doing the wrong activities for years and it wasn’t until I changed my actions did things begin to change. This was after finding a community and getting involved in the regular online meetings.

Develop The Owner Not Just The Business

Not developing the owner is probably one of the major causes for why people fail with their online businesses. After all, pretty much anyone can start up online without any previous experience. Most people are not entrepreneurial. This can mean they bring their own mindset to their online business with them. I made this mistake too. I worked a job and expected that if I worked really hard for long enough, results would come.

But being an owner is different to a job. Affiliate marketing or drop shipping or any online business is performance related. If you don’t get things done, you don’t get paid! Working on the wrong activities can mean you never get paid, if you never make any sales. You need to take an overview of the business as a whole and focus on the best money producing activities, not just those activities you are good at, or enjoy. You also need to learn the things you’re not good at.

Self development is key to success with an online business. Both in terms of your online business education and your motivations

Who Are Your Friends?

why your internet business is failing

Another key reason why so many fail with their online businesses is that their friends and family don’t support them. If your 10 closest friends are opposed to your internet business, the changes are pretty good that they will subtly (or even not very subtly) attempt to undermine your efforts.

An internet business can be very lonely without some support. Again, this is why a community is good to find. Remember too, that your income can be determined by taking an average of the income of your closest 10 friends. “Birds of a feather flock together”.

Your Self Image – Why Your Internet Business Is Failing

If your self image doesn’t allow the concept of success to be a part of your life, you’ll self sabotage and default back to your comfort zone. This is a very important realisation to make. Unless you can get all parts of you mind ‘on board’ with your highest purpose and achievements, you’ll hold an inner blockage which you can’t get past. If you’ve ever felt like there is an ‘inner wall’ which blocks your success, it’ll be very likely to be your self image.

Your self image tells you ‘who you are’. If your continually reminding yourself that you’re not up to it, or that you can’t do something, it’ll be very difficult to move past this to create a successful online business. You need to find out this inner saboteur and take steps to remove its influence to your subconscious mind. Read Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-cybernetics and get Stuart Lichtman’s book “How to get lots of money for anything fast“.

Why Your Internet Business Is Failing – Your Unconscious Saboteur

There’s a good reason your internet business might be failing because of your unconscious behaviour patterns. While consciously you want your business to succeed, you may be sending your subconscious mind conflicting signals which maintain the current status quo, or, which block you from achieving the success you desire.

If despite your best efforts you feel as though you can’t succeed, it’s probably down to your unconscious inner blocks to success. Removing these is possible by first noticing your thoughts, words and actions. What contrary thoughts do you have about success or money? How do you talk yourself down, against your best intentions? See how to train your subconscious mind for success.

Frustrated And Want It Now?

Another reason your internet business is failing is simply down to you being too impatient. Perhaps you’ve had some success already, but it’s not at the level which you want. Remind yourself of the 80/20 rule – Pareto’s principle. This basically states that most of your success comes from only 20% of the activities which you have done. By concentrating on the 20% of actions which give you your best results, you can make more progress than working twice as hard and twice as long, on the wrong kinds of actions.

So, if you’re frustrated and want more success, it’s entirely possible that you are focusing on the wrong actions in your business. If your actions are “slow burners”, like article writing, v’logging or organic traffic generation, you will have to accept that success will come much slower than if you can use paid advertising. Paid advertising takes time too, but you can scale it up very quickly once you’ve learned it. You can’t do this with organic content generation.

Working At The Wrong Strategy

It’s entirely possible that you have wasted your time on the wrong business model too. I did this several times over. I built websites which were supposed to rank on Google and make money from both affiliate marketing and Google Adsense. The problem was always traffic but I was also using an outdated strategy.

I learned from a course which was outdated. It taught how to rank websites on Google. The problem was, it didn’t work. Or, at least it didn’t work for me. Google is constantly changing and despite the strategy working several years previously, after I had bought a ‘how to’ course, it was no longer a viable strategy.

Why You Fail – Working on The Wrong Activities

why your internet business is failing

A common cause of failure with an internet business is through working on the wrong activities. You can also get ‘stuck’ in learning mode too and spend endless hours watching “how to” videos without actually applying that knowledge. If you’ve been working really hard, but haven’t seen any results for 6 months, it’s likely you’re working in the wrong direction. Of course you should get an idea of your timeline according to your strategy.

If you’re building a niche website which you hope to rank on Google, you’re going to have to do a lot of work before you see anything happen. On the other hand, with paid marketing strategies, you can start to see sales come in much more quickly. This will also depend on the training you get and your ability to take an overview of what you are doing. I made the mistake of expecting results far too early in the grand scheme of things.

Entitlement – The Hidden “Cancer” Of Your Internet Business

I’ve definitely made this mistake too. Being ‘entitled’ means you think that just because you’ve paid for a course, or have taken a certain action, that you must get a certain result. This thing about an online business is that absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

why your internet business is failing — Mindset is everything

Although a healthy expectation gives you motivation and is necessary, too much of an expectation can become entitlement. This is the idea that success should just come to you because of something you are or something you have done already. This can bring a huge amount of disappointment with it. Keep taking a step back from your internet business and ask yourself “how am I getting in my own way?” “What can I do to move things faster?”

If you’re bringing an entitlement attitude towards your internet business, you may be doing less than you can to bring about success in the long run. If you expect results to come, without doing the right actions, you’re going to be in for an unpleasant awakening.

Until you have the results you want, consider yourself to be the main reason why, instead of placing the responsibility on someone else or on a strategy or system. Until you take 100% responsibility for your life, there’ll always be an element of blaming someone else. This means you’ll shirk taking charge, because you can diffuse the blame!

Why Your Internet Business Is Failing – Your Why?

There’s many reasons which could explain why your internet business is failing. One of them is your “why?” Unless you have a strong enough reason to make your business a success, you can easily give up before you have given it a chance. I’ve heard a lot of reasons why people simply just give up. “Not enough time” was a recent one. This is quite ironic, since something an internet business can give you is time.

why your internet business is failing

But if you don’t have enough of a reason to put time in, you won’t get any of the benefits out of having a profitable internet business. If you don’t believe it will work over the long term, it will be hard to maintain the actions required to make it a success.

Unless you absolutely despise your job, have huge financial problems, or are in a situation you can’t abide by anymore, you may not have a good enough “Why?” to motivate you to take the right actions for long enough to replace your current job and provide a growing income for the future.

What’s Your Motivation?

Is your “why?”, (your reason for starting an internet business), good enough to motivate you towards success? If life is “ok” and you don’t have a strong enough compulsion towards creating more time and financial freedom, or, you don’t believe it’s possible for you, you’ll create excuses in your mind before you even get any traction.

Could this be why your internet business is failing? If any of these ideas have hit a nerve, it’s likely that it relates to you and your business. If you want to build an online business and learn from mentors within a community, access a 7 day video series here to learn more and get started.

Thanks for reading my article “why your internet business is failing”. I hope you’ve enjoyed it? If you have anything to add or would like to leave a comment please do. Also, I’d be grateful if you shared my post! Many thanks!

June 3, 2018June 3, 2018

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer

For a long time, I desperately wanted to know how to be a successful affiliate marketer. After all, so many affiliates seemed to be having success. Why not me? I studied various methods of affiliate marketing and all kinds of methods for making money on the internet; from affiliate marketing, to Google Adsense and I even created some of my own products.

Success seemed to elude me for so long though, partly because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I wondered why affiliate marketing does not work, and almost gave up many times. I eventually found a affiliate marketing mentor and things began to change. Slowly but surely things turned around. It took a lot of failing for me, but success can be reached far more quickly. You don’t need to fail as many times as I did!

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – A Scalable Model

Before I was even thinking about how to be a successful affiliate marketer, I started out buying and selling from eBay. I soon realised that I needed to be able to use the global reach of the internet to sell digital products. This was a key moment for me. I had been working away at a business model which, although had tapped into the global nature of the internet, didn’t capitalise on one of the internet’s best features – scalability.

Here’s the strategy I used to sell on eBay. In short it relied on finding bargain items using a misspell search tool, and then re-selling it back on eBay with the correct spelling, more keywords and better listing. It worked almost every time and I made a profit on many items before I looked for something else. I had bought an ebook to teach me this method, and although it worked, the ebook idea seemed better to me.

The items I was selling relied on me buying items and re-listing them. This in itself took quite a lot of time. The ebook could be resold again and again without doing all of this. The automation of the sale was what led me to affiliate marketing. There was nothing to post out either which made the whole process much easier. Anyway, I digress! This post is about how to be a successful affiliate marketer and not about eBay.

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Fail Forwards

So I started looking at selling my own eBooks. This was my first mistake because, even if I had written a masterpiece, I was still unable to sell it because I knew nothing about online marketing. I wrote a couple of ebooks about getting into the film industry. This was something I had done in the past so I thought I’d write about it. I didn’t sell a single ebook but I learned some new skills and discovered my major weakness – marketing.

how to be a successful affiliate marketer

After joining a couple of online courses, (which promised me infinite riches ;), I went about building multiple websites, hoping to rank them on Google selling other people’s digital products. I must have had over 100 websites at one point. A couple of products did sell too, although the successes I managed to achieved were short lived. A lot of the strategies I used required ranking my website on Google and keeping them there. This is much harder than it used to be – especially for thin, spammy websites which was my specialty ;)!

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Never Quit!

What I learned from this (period of failure) was how not to go about affiliate marketing! I jumped from one topic to another, creating small niche websites on specific topics I knew nothing about! Despite all the failure, or what I like to call ‘feedback’ I kept going.

how to be a successful affiliate marketer

Although mostly they were failures, some of my websites did actually produce some results and it was this that kept me going. One of my first successes was a review article I wrote and published on the free blog site Hubpages.com. Reviews are good because they are usually the last thing someone reads before making a purchasing decision. The customer is in the last step of the “buying cycle”. Again, it was a short lived success, but it gave me the motivation not to quit! My article was about a piece of website building software which I had used to build a few of my websites. Each new thing I learned gave me a topic to write about.

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Obsolete Training

Many courses I bought were becoming obsolete, too. I bought a couple of training courses which relied heavily on generating organic traffic through my websites; few of which actually ranked on Google and so produced zero traffic and, (guess what?), zero sales too!

how to be a successful affiliate marketer

Although the strategies may have worked for the developers when they made the courses, things change quickly in the online world; especially if thousands of affiliates are creating tiny, valueless websites with little or no useful content!

Google changes quickly and relying on organic traffic for your business is a strategy which is incredibly risky. I found this out the hard way. I definitely wouldn’t write about something for the sake of building traffic any more. Writing about something which interests you is much more sustainable over the long term. Plus, if you write about something you love, your content will be far better than if you’re only creating something for the sales!

Trust On The Internet – How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer

Trust on the internet is important. After all, you really don’t know who you’re dealing with most of the time. I bought several courses from people who disappeared shortly after. This makes you incredibly sceptical. Why build a business on shifting sands? Each time I got burned, I lost a little more of my enthusiasm. I was a little more sceptical too. When I eventually found a legitimate company to learn marketing from, I brought all this old “baggage” with me!

Finding a company to stick to was one of my biggest hurdles online. I eventually found this company and have stuck with them ever since. That’s because I’ve actually been able to meet them and attend conferences in person. I’ve had a huge amount of value from them too. But that’s not the only reason. I found The SFM on Facebook though an advert and the marketing was spot on! The advert simply read “Struggling with your affiliate marketing business?” How could I doubt such amazing targeting? The internet was speaking to me!

How To Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Shiny Object Syndrome

One of the main reasons I was failing was that I didn’t have a clear path. I would wander about jumping from one ‘shiny object’ to another. Once I found a path which I could stick to, things began to fall in place. The SFM focuses on mindset a lot. A lot of their training is based around mindset. There’s good reason for this too and I’m still learning how important it is.

One of the reasons I failed so many times was that my mind wasn’t focused on the right activities. I worked incredibly hard and for a long time but it was on the wrong activities. I was studying continually, without putting my theory into practice – the perpetual student. See also my article on affiliate marketing mistakes newbies should avoid.

Even now, I’m learning to let go of my favourite activities, and focus on more meaningful and powerful actions to make my business move forwards more quickly and easily.

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – The Right Business Model

All of the best intentions in the world won’t help you with the wrong business model. I found this out the hard way. I blogged for years without success, not knowing what I was doing wrong. Having the right business model can make a huge difference in your ability to make the internet your sole source of income. Without the right approach and business model, you’ll make hard work of what should be a simple, straight forward business.

Having a range of products within your sales system is key. For a long time I promoted products with only a single commission. If I had only got the right information years ago, things would be so different now! I sold products which only gave me a single commission. Now, I sell products which offer a lifetime value to customers. This is one way to work smart. A product ‘suite’ can allow you to continue to make sales month after month, even after you’ve made your initial referral. Using the strategies below, you can make much more of your affiliate business that by only selling single point of sale products:

Choose to promote subscription products
Promote a range of products which have up-sells – Products sold later to existing customers
Promote subscription products and earn continually from each customer
Use high ticket products to increase profits and offset advertising costs – this makes paid advertising more viable too.
Having a built in sales team closing sales on your behalf.

You can benefit from all of these features with this program.

How To Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer – The Right Approach

The right approach to affiliate marketing is also massively important. Decide it’s going to be a ‘hobby’ business and you can make a ‘hobby’ wage. Choose to really go for it, and the internet can exceed all your expectations. Is this a business for you or a hobby?

Your circumstances do determine what you can do with an online business. I took the long route of blogging before I changed gears and speeded the process up with paid advertising. With a business model like the one described above, this is much more do-able. Smaller, low priced products don’t allow this option. You can’t use paid advertising with low priced items. or, at least, it will be much more difficult.

But for many people affiliate marketing is an option because they don’t have the money they need. That produces a bit of a dilemma. How can you pay for advertising with an online business when money is your biggest problem? The answer is to start very small a learn your ‘craft’. Top affiliate marketers who pay out tens of thousands a month for advertising didn’t start there. They started with a few small adverts at a budget they could afford to lose. They learned what worked and what didn’t work first. Checkout my book on paid advertising below.

How To Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Blogging

Finding a niche in the market is another alternative to going down the paid route. Although I struggled for years with this strategy, many make it work if they find a niche topic which isn’t too competitive. This is much harder than you might think though. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve got a topic you know about and are passionate about. Here’s a strategy which I picked up from doing niche websites years ago. I write my blog topics with the keywords in mind. You can check it out in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit below. If you’re reading this article, it might because this strategy has actually worked – especially if you’ve found this article through the organic search engines.

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Develop The Owner, Not The Business

For far too long, I spent time on my business, not on myself. Little did I know the source of many of my failures was what was lurking in front of the monitor – me! Again, this comes down to mindset to an extent. But it’s far bigger than that too. Unless you’re actively working on yourself, you’re probably going to suffer in your business because of a few internal battles:

Your business is limited by you – Your thinking in particular; It simply can’t grow beyond your self image
Who you spend time with – your well meaning friends and relatives might be sabotaging your vision and passion for a life of time and financial freedom see why your friends and family don’t want you to succeed.
Your limited knowledge and awareness will hold you back and allow you make bad decisions

Surround yourself with people who are better at this business than you. Develop your self image (read Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-cybernetics). Develop your understanding of affiliate marketing too, and whatever model you are choosing to use.

How To Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer – What Is Success To You?

Digital technology has already allowed many people to live lives of complete financial and time freedom. Does this sound possible to you? Perhaps not. We have been conditioned to think in a certain way, even if we think we are free. What would your friends and family say if you became financially free?

how to be a successful affiliate marketer

Would they be happy for you? Why do many lottery winners lose their money in only a short time? Often they find that the money ruins their friendships and relationships. They lose interest in life because suddenly they lose their purpose. Partly though it is because their self image is not capable of seeing themselves as having money, or deserving money.

Work gives us purpose. How would your life be different if you didn’t need to work? The industrial age created a working ethic which had people competing for the ‘hardest worker’ award! Working gives people a sense of who they are. Do you think you should struggle, and if so for how long? Your answers to these questions can give you an awareness of how you see yourself and how you relate yourself to work, what you deserve and money.

How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer – Summary

Still wondering how to be a successful affiliate marketer? Being successful is different for everyone. Some see only money, but others need something more to see themselves as a success. Knowing what success means to you is a huge asset if you’re trying to achieve it.

For affiliate marketers the goal is usually monetary success. But to attain this, you also need to become the person you need to be. How to be a successful affiliate marketer will be different for everyone. In short I would suggest finding a good mentor, using a ready made sales funnel and learning strategies which can be scaled up.

Even if it takes you a few years to learn, scalable strategies will serve you far better in the long run. Content can’t be scaled up as quickly and easily as paid strategies. However, it does depend on your current circumstances too. I started with lots of time and no money. So I used my time to learn many online skills. Developing yourself is a great use of your time, of course. “If you put your wallet into your mind, no one can take it away from you.”

If you do nothing else, get this book and study it. In Stuart Lichtman’s How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast is probably the best book I have read on goal setting and unconscious mind programming. What’s key to your success is aligning your values with your goals. If you succeed in anything, make sure it’s the right kind of success for you! Otherwise, you might find yourself in a situation you don’t like, because you chased the money without considering the many other knock on effects of your actions. Also, the path to your success is unique to you. This book will help you remove many of your unconscious mind ‘blockers’, which hold you in an old paradigm or pattern of belief and behaviour.

Access a digital business system and online business community here and meet my personal mentors. Good luck on your affiliate journey and please leave a comment if this article has been helpful! Best wishes, Tim.

May 6, 2018May 2, 2018

Automated Sales Funnel System

An automated sales funnel system includes a website (or landing page), an email series and a range of products. Ideally your range of products will include:

Multiple digital products which can be sold over the internet
Products which pay you commissions of 40%
“Up-sells” which you can earn commissions on from existing customers – a product range
High ticket products of $500 and above
Multi-tier sales – Earn commissions from sales made by your referrals
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
Subscription products which continue to pay you ongoing commissions

Automated Sales Funnel System

Take a look at the video below by clicking the image. In this video you will see how simple it is to set up a website which contains an automated sales funnel system like the one described above:

This website building software lets you create an automated sales funnel system which is integrated into your website. You can access the software through the full video series here.

Automated Sales Funnel System – The Website/Landing Page

automated sales funnel system

The automated sales funnel system starts with a website or landing page. This is the start of the automated sales funnel system. You could say that it begins even before there with online advertising, but we’ll come back to that in a minute.

The website or landing page is where someone lands because of either your advertising or your content. By offering a giveaway products (I offer this video series), you encourage your website visitors to enter their details in order to get your content. They are now in the sales funnel. Your freebie should of course offer huge value. The more value you offer, the more the likelihood of your website visitors entering into your sales funnel.

Automated Sales Funnel System – The Email Series

You can offer a series of emails to your subscribers which answers their questions and delivers some useful content. While delivering value in your content you can promote various products and services which may be of use to your customers. By getting your website visitors into a sales funnel, you dramatically increase the timescale in which your visitors can make a purchasing decision.

Over time you can build multiple emails into your funnel which can offer more value to your subscribers. By delivering good content and building a relationship with your subscribers, you can generate more trust. Over time this has a powerful effect on your rate of sales.

People buy from people, not from websites. If someone lands on a website, they only have a short period of time to make a buying decision. If you get them into your sales funnel, this period of time can be extended to months, years and even decades!

Automated Sales Funnel System – Your Range Of Products

As has been mentioned already, your products are the key to a successful online business. Choosing the right products for your business can make a dramatic difference to your income. For example, physical products sell well on the internet but they pay out much less to affiliates than digital products. Digital products pay affiliates 40% in most cases. Physical products pay out between 1-10% commissions as you can see on the chart below:

automated sales funnel system

Having a product range or ‘suite’ can mean you earn ongoing commissions from existing customers. This means you can earn a better income from fewer referrals than with many physical products. For the same or a similar amount of work, you can make much more income, if you choose the right products:

For example:

Subscription based products pay out again and again for each referral
High ticket products pay you multiple times the commission you would receive from lower value items
A commission structure which rewards you for later purchases from existing customers is more lucrative than a single commission.
Multi-tier sales allow you to earn from sales made by your referrals.

These are just a few of the ways of working smarter with an online business. Much of the work will be the same, but if you choose the right products, your efforts are multiplied.

Marketing An Automated Sales Funnel System

Once you have your automated sales funnel system set up, you’ll need to learn how to market it. You can learn all aspects of online marketing and get your own automated sales funnel system with this online digital business education and training platform.

Once everything is in place you will need to send targeted visitors to your website or landing page. This can be done through either paid advertising, content generation, or, a combination of the two. Paid advertising is the fastest method of getting people directly into your sales funnel. Content marketing takes a little longer and is more time consuming. If you’re time rich, focus on the content. If you have no time but have the money to invest, focus on paid strategies.

You can access my ebooks on both these topics below:

Paid Marketing – Automated Sales Funnel System

Paid marketing is a strategy with a number of advantages over content generation. Firstly, you don’t have to spend hours creating content. You only need to set up adverts and test and measure them. If an advert is working, you can cross test it with other, similar adverts. Once you find the best ‘winning’ advert, you can scale it up to reach more customers.

Adverts which don’t produce the required effect can be scaled back and stopped. Initially there is a fair amount of trial and error with this strategy. You want to find an advert which converts your visitors well into subscribers and gives you a good return on investment.

automated sales funnel system

Having a sales funnel set up like the one described in this article can help here too. If your funnel has high value products within it, you’re much more likely to recoup your advertising budget, than with low value items.

When you find an advert which works, you can scale it up. Then, move on to another one and so on. Eventually you’ll have a number of paid strategies all bringing in customers to your business on autopilot.

Free Marketing Strategies – Automated Sales Funnel System

‘Free’ marketing strategies, although free, to do take much more time and effort. If you find a ‘winning’ article, which generates traffic and gets opt-ins, scaling up is much more difficult than with paid advertising. You can’t recreate the same article and expect to reach more people. You’ll get penalised for duplicate content! But you can continue to write quality content, or create quality videos which bring in more customers.

automated sales funnel system

As your content reaches more people, and they opt-in to your sales funnel, you’ll have created content which can potentially continue to earn you new customers without paying. That’s great if and when it works. However, it does take much longer to make this happen. You’ll need to do a lot more work for much less in the first instance. Over time, and as your content gains more traction, you can find you are getting free traffic. This leads to opt-ins and then sales.

However, your content need to be very focused on your ideal customer. Getting the wrong people to your website, for the sake of ‘any old’ traffic, is a mistake. You need well targeted website traffic first, and therefore well targeted content to get that traffic.

Access a 7 day video series and learn more about building an automated sales funnel system.

May 3, 2018July 1, 2020

Autopilot Earning Software

Autopilot earning software consists of:

Successfully combining all of these elements is the main skill and ‘key’ to building an online business system.

autopilot earning software

Autopilot Earning Software – Where To Start?

There’s so many so called ‘autopilot earning software’ platforms out there. Which is the best one to choose? Firstly you should know that just because you purchase the ‘software’, you shouldn’t expect instant earning power. You also need to successfully implement a marketing strategy, even if you have a sales funnel with all the best products within it.

autopilot earning software

Autopilot Software To Make Money – Invest In Yourself

If cash flow is the ‘lifeblood’ of your business, then marketing is its ‘heartbeat’. This is especially true of any so called autopilot earning software. Expect to aggressively market your business for it to have any effect at all on your bottom line. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you can build a profitable online business fast, just by using some ‘plug and play’ system alone.

There’s work to be done too; both in learning and implementing strategies to build your online business. Ben Franklin once said, “If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the highest return.” This is very true of an internet business too. Access an online business system and learning platform and connect with an online business community. Start here.

Email Marketing System – Autopilot Earning Software

An email auto-responder is one of the key tools which online marketers use to communicate with their customers. Emails can be collected automatically and email delivered en mass via autopilot too. As an email list grows, marketers can sell more and more products by doing the same things over and over. Most people trade their time for money.

autopilot earning software

They can’t generate much leverage without working more hours. Having an email list, allows anyone to generate leverage by connecting with multiple people at the same time. By using digital products or any affiliate products really, online marketers can sell thousands of products to a number of people by sending a single email. Emails can be automated too. This makes it possible for affiliate marketers to leverage their time by selling products over the internet through a list of email subscribers.

Best Autopilot Money Making Software – A Range Of Digital Products

Many people are put off the idea of building their own internet business because of their age or lack of technical experience. However, technology has evolved to remove much of the technical aspect of building an online business. It’s far easier now that it has ever been. Take the building of a website for example. Checkout the video by clicking this image to see how easy it can be to build a website with an integrated product suite within it:

Within this website you can integrate a range of digital products through a product suite and sales funnel. This can be built in a few simple steps and you will have a fully automated online business system up and running. Once there, you simply need to promote it and send qualified website traffic through your sales funnel. Having a range of digital products makes the process of selling online much simpler. By having products which offer:

Digital products – which offer 40% commissions on sales
High ticket items – Let you earn larger commissions on products priced at $500+
Up-sells – Products for existing customers
Multi-tier commissions – earn from a team you build up over time
A built in sales team – closes sales on your behalf – no direct selling needed.

As you can see, a digital business system like this one means you don’t need to be a sales person in order to build an online business system and start making sales.

Autopilot Earning Software – Various Online Marketing Strategies

A digital business system like the one mentioned has a number of advantages over a traditional business:

You don’t have to make sales personally
Work remotely from anywhere – from a laptop with an internet connection
You can access a global audience with digital products
Use scalable systems and automation to run your business on ‘autopilot’
Build your business around existing employment

There are various online marketing strategies you will need to use in order to make your digital business system profitable which can be both paid and free marketing strategies. Paid strategies can be scaled up and deliver traffic instantly into your sales funnel. Free strategies involve content creation and it takes a little longer to generate the traction needed to start making sales. It’s also more difficult to scale up content generation.

Checkout my ebooks on both paid online marketing and niche blogging below.

Paid Marketing Strategies include software like:

Google Adwords,
Facebook’s marketing platform
Bing
Yahoo
YouTube

‘Free’ strategies include building website content (like this article), creating videos and various other content marketing strategies.

Access an online training and education platform which gives you a fully ready made sales funnel and all the training you will need.