When new online marketers think about “Affiliate Marketing”, they think primarily in terms of marketing the products and services created by other businesses they have come across. You can make good online incomes doing this sort of thing. You find good products from good companies that you trust to pay you, and you promote those items far and wide using whatever strategies you can think of, websites, forums, social media sites, video adds, e-mails, etc. and you build an income stream for yourself online.

Exponential growth in your online business is difficult to achieve utilizing this strategy, but as you work, you can create a comfortable at-home income for yourself doing it.

Yet, there is a totally second side to this coin. Perhaps you as an entrepreneur should also be thinking about creating your own online assets and then finding entrepreneurs utilizing the above business model to sell your assets for you. As a small entrepreneur, you can succeed at this just as the bigger corporate entities can – you just need a focus, a niche, a strategy, some drive and you need to work at bringing people closer to you that you can share a vision with and that you can then collaboratively, present your product or services portfolio to the world and you can all make money at it.

You won’t be able to initiate this sort of strategy immediately if you wish to sell your own products as you start to work for yourself as you have no products of your own to promote and sell. You first need to build these and then roll them out after they have been created.

But you can start almost immediately looking for affiliates to help sell your services if you are wanting to trade your time for money directly. Let people know what your service chargeout rate is and what percentage of this rate they can get if they promote you to others. This is how professional consulting and freelancing service models have worked for years. The only downside to this is that you are still trading time for money. You only get paid when you physically work to create something for someone else and the time you take at doing this takes away from time you could be using to build your own passive income business; one where you do not directly have to trade your time for an income. You don’t get to wake up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, go to your computer and see how much money you have made since the last time you logged on.

So now let’s look at affiliate marketing from a product provision perspective where you can actually earn a passive income from products you create. If you have budget, product creation skills (such as programming, web and database development skills for example) coupled with good product ideas and possibly investors at hand, you can build and sell physical products that have taken time and money to create and then you can go after the affiliate world to help sell it. But this usually takes a considerable amount of time and money.

What if you have neither? You want to create something you can sell and get others to sell for you but you don’t have any product development teams at hand or budget, etc. You are a “one-person-band” creating online and wanting to make a good and growing passive income. The logical fallout to what you can achieve is to create “Knowledgeware” products of some sort that people will purchase and affiliates will want to market for you.

If all you want to do is create the product and then have others sell it for you without you directly having to support your product, work with and directly grow your own affiliate base, then you are looking at doing things like:

• Writing E-Books and self-published paperbound books on sites like Amazon, Create Space and Ingram Spark.
• Creating online training courses and publishing them on sites like Udemy, SkillShare, etc. where the sites themselves and the site’s affiliate members sell your created Knowledgeware products for you.
• Etc.

This can make you an income and even a growing income over time but your trade-off here is that you are giving away the greater parts of each sale to those hosting/marketing websites and the affiliates that they work with. Your net take-home revenue is much lower than the full retail value of the product on each sale – yet your benefit is that you have very little work to do to market your product as they are taking care of that for you. Create enough products and a decent passive, monthly revenue stream can be generated.

This brings us to the final business model for selling your products online. One where you choose to be in complete control of your product and marketing it, bringing in your own affiliates. Now you can keep most of the money for your products yourself except what you choose to give away to your own affiliates which will increase your per product profit margins. This model has the potential for the most exponential revenue growth for your business but it will take the most work to create and manage, at least in the first year or two.

You will find there are several things you will need to build out to be successful under this model. The list below may seem daunting to you, and I have by no means listed everything you will find you need to do, but if you want to attain the real growth in your business and the higher levels of incomes that are possible, all the tasks I include below are things you will need to work on. Here is my list:

• Create products that trend well and sell well – probably of a “Knowledgeware” variety sort and hopefully, easily downloadable from the Internet or easily distributable to your target markets.
• A website to showcase and sell your created products.
• Information on each of your products consumers can use to make decisions with.
• Product promotional e-mails and advertising/promotional videos.
• An affiliate signup process and revenue sharing model – and this should be automated.
• Affiliate training documentation and videos.
• Tools you create to help your affiliates sell your products such as: logos, banner and other adds, advertising copy, trackable hyperlink codes for each affiliate so as they sell, they will automatically get tracked in your system and can get paid. This needs to be fully automated.
• Auto-responder set up informational e-mails geared to supporting your affiliates.
• Methods to facilitate easy communication with your affiliates when they have questions or run into issues.
• Programs put in place that enable additional incomes or bonuses for your affiliates if they bring in even more affiliates to your business.
• Sometimes, you may also even be wanting to build in the capability of generating “affiliate brandable” websites that you host to aid them in their marketing and sales efforts – but you can evolve to this.
• The building of promotional videos that affiliates can use and distribute themselves to help them promote your products and business.

So this last method of generating affiliate revenues for your business is significantly more work that the other methods discussed in this lecture. It is something you evolve to in your business once you have created a substantial and saleable product portfolio.

But here is where the real money is in affiliate marketing. This is how you can work hard for a few years to build a strong online business capable of generating for you a significant monthly income.

Pause the Cat Videos

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to make millions of dollars as an affiliate but you’ve not had thousands of dollars available to spend on coaching to find out, then listen up. Set that cell phone to silent, turn off the TV, close Facebook and YouTube (don’t worry, you can still catch the cat videos later when you have your affiliate program bringing home the bacon on automatic pilot).

You Can’t Come in Here Dressed Like That

This sounds a bit weird but have you ever tried to get into a nightclub and the bouncer turns you away because you’re wearing sneakers and not shoes? This happened to me once and just as I was walking away feeling dejected, rejected and ejected, I bumped into an old school friend.

Won’t We Get into Trouble?

My friend asked me where I was going and I pointed to my scruffy Converses. “Come with me”, he said, “I’ll get you in the side door”. “But, won’t we get into trouble?” I asked. “There’s no-one to get into trouble with,” he replied. “I’m the manager.”

You Can’t Promote This

Affiliate marketing can be a lot like this sometimes. You see a really cool product on JVZoo which everyone else is promoting and making a ton of money with. You go and try to promote it and submit your application, but you get refused.

I’m a Sensitive Soul

Slam. You get turned away at the door by the big bad bouncer. And it hurts. As Pumbaa said in The Lion King (you’ve watched this with your kids, right?) “I’m a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned..” If only you knew the manager!

I Know the Manager

Well here’s the good news and the bad news. In affiliate marketing you do know the manager. You’re the manager. Now sure, there are some multi-nationals who have layers of managers to wage through before you eventually get to the affiliate program manager, but in internet marketing you can cut right through the bureaucracy and manage your own affiliate program.

No Middle Men

The benefits are you have no middle men to pay. You don’t have to worry about employees turning up late for work (you are your own employee). The downside is you have no-one to blame. You have to keep hustling, keep networking, keep applying to promote programs, keep sending traffic and slowly, the cogs will start to turn. Then, when you have banked your millions, you can fire that over-zealous bouncer and buy the nightclub yourself.

A lot of affiliate marketing beginners stumble a lot under supposed complexity, but it does not have to be this way for you. Advances in referral technology on the web will help you set up an affiliate marketing program, without a lot of expense or problems. You can use the advice outlined in this article to help you with your affiliate marketing plan.

1) If one affiliate program is not going well for you, then maybe you should try finding another that fits your needs better. Not all affiliate programs work the right way. You should check out your favorite vendors to see if they have an affiliate program that you can try out.

2) Only choose to work with companies that offer current statistics. You want to be able to keep up with all the methods being used to bring in sales. Data that is out of date may not give you the accurate information you need to adjust your methods to the ones your customers use the most.

3) Ensure that your affiliate company offers resources that help you to generate sales. These resources should include banners and text links, as well as templates for recommendation letters. An affiliate company should be willing to help you earn as much commissions as possible.

4) Ask for reviews of the product you are considering before you promote it. This will prevent you from losing credibility with your customers or subscribers by promoting a product that is sub-par, and insure that you advertise only high quality items.

5) You should always be experimenting with different styles and techniques. Since the internet is in a state of perpetual evolution, your affiliate campaign should be as well. Some things you try are not going to work, but you simply will never know unless you try them out. Experimenting is the way to go.

6) If you are a business owner considering setting up an affiliate program, you may want to limit the number of websites that promote your product. At least in the beginning. If you have an overwhelming number of affiliate links and articles, they can actually bury your product page in search results. Only allow quality sites to link to you and limit their number. If the site isn’t performing, consider revoking their affiliate status.

7) Make sure you’re getting the most out of your work day. A great way to do this is by using time management software. Time management software helps because it records exactly how much time you spend doing various things on your computer.

8) If you really want to drive home the benefits of a product you’re trying to push through affiliate marketing, then you should use bullet points and subheadings to create different categories and to allow each benefit to stand out on its own. This way, readers can comprehend how this product will help them.

As you can see from the advice above, it is easier and cheaper than ever before to get into the affiliate marketing business. Follow this advice to keep your costs low while creating a great affiliate marketing program.

A crucial element to having success online when working a business as an affiliate marketer is to know your Target Market. That is to say, you need to know who, what and where your customers are.

When you understand your Target Market before you get into the nuts and bolts of your business then you save yourself time and money. You will also learn how to run your business on cold hard facts rather than running it on guess work and luck which is what most people in Affiliate Marketing seem to do.

The 3 main elements to Target Marketing are as follows,

1) Who Are You Attracting. You need to identify specific persons within your chosen market so that you can tailor your business to them. For example, if your market is Golf then rather than trying to attract everyone interested in golf go a bit deeper and target “lady golfers in the UK” or “Junior golfers”.

Focus on the right people, give them what they want and you will have much better results.

2) What Are Their Problems. Now you know who they are you need to now know what their problems are within your market. If you identify their problems you will then be able to offer them solutions such as your Authoritative Website content and of course your affiliate products.

Using the Golf example, if you discover lady golfers have trouble finding equipment for their size then you now know that affiliate products aimed at this problem will be perfect to promote.

3) Where Are They. OK you know who your Target Market is, you know what their problems are, you now need to know where they hang out. Where do they visit online and in the real world. What kind of websites do they read, what real world places do they visit.

Understanding this kind of information will help you when you come to placing your affiliate adverts and the products you are promoting.

To Sum It Up

If you do your Target Marketing correctly then you will know exactly who your customers are. You will know exactly what they want to buy and you will know exactly where to place your adverts.

For me this information is critical not just as an affiliate marketer but as any kind of business owner. If you do not understand your customers then you will never understand exactly how to tailor your business to them.

In this article you will learn how content marketing can be used to lead readers down a logical path filtering people out who will not make a purchase and keeping those interested in making the purchase in a content funnel leading them to an affiliate sales link.

When it comes to affiliate marketing we can become so consumed about how to get people to click through to our affiliate sales link that we can forget what we are creating and what we are creating is content for our blog or website. By writing a review or a recommendation we are creating more content.

The biggest difference between content for content marketers and content for affiliate marketers is that content marketers tend to be focusing on answering a problem in the market place and the affiliate content creator is writing either a recommendation or a product review.

As both a content marketer and an affiliate marketer I like to use both types of content and I have found that content marketing works better at attracting people to my blog. Let me explain, if I write an article that answers a question it is easier to market that piece of content and it is more share-able, meaning people have shared my how to articles more than any other type of article that I have written.

A good strategy that I have used with a great deal of success is to use my content to market my blog and in my blog I have recommended my product review post inside of another piece of content which is relevant to the article that I am writing.

If I were to use only affiliate marketing content types like product reviews or recommendations then I would as a strategy focus on the best features of the product and promote those articles, for instance I would write “The Top 10 Best Hidden Features Of The Samsung Galaxy Tab.” Then from within that article or series of articles I would leave a link either to a full product review or a link to purchase the product.

Here is how I would do that, after writing a series of articles I would prefer to leave a link to the full product review, here’s why, you will get more targeted people reading your review and clicking on your affiliate sales link who are interested in buying because if they have taken the time to read the first article series of the top ten best unknown features, then clicked on the product review link, you can guarantee that those people are more interested in purchasing the product.

Doing this you may find that you get fewer clicks, but they are more targeted because they have taken the time to read what you have to say and then clicked on the review article.

Sometimes I struggle to cope with the demands and challenges that are put before me in my endeavor to find success with my affiliate marketing business to make money online. I think to myself, “If one more change or challenge comes down the road, I am not sure how well I am going to manage it!” We get overwhelmed. The pressure to get everything done and done right can make us feel doomed!

How can we find the resilience that we need to meet the demands of running a successful affiliate marketing business and make money online? We need to do more than just cope, as coping would have the element of just getting by, and often implies that we continue to struggle, perhaps just keeping our heads above water.

Having resilience, on the other hand, is defined as the ability to bounce back from adversity or challenges with a renewed sense of energy, competency, and hope. When we are resilient, we are able to navigate difficult or stressful situations without falling apart AND we learn valuable lessons from the experience that allows us to move forward with a renewed sense of purpose.

Highly resilient people have the capacity to deal with disruptions and uncertainty. They handle unexpected and/or changing expectations and adapt to a new way of doing things when the old way no longer works.

If you want to grow your affiliate marketing business so that you can successfully make money online, you will need to strengthen your resilience capacity by development the five essential components of resilience:

1. Purpose: this is about knowing what really matters to you. What really make your life meaningful. You know what your values are and what goals you are committed to. Achieving your goals is what gets you up in the morning and provides you with the motivation to keep going when times are tough and rough. Having a sense of purpose and intention creates the internal compass that keeps you on your path.

2. Perseverance: this is the steadfast adherence to a court of action, belief or purpose. This is your ability to keep going even when there are challenges that get in your way. You will use patience and sheer grit to turn mistakes into learning experiences, never giving up on yourself or your dreams and finding your way around the obstacles. Perseverance takes courage, stamina and commitment.

3. Equanimity: The quality of being able to “hold your seat” and stay steady even when the ride is rocky. With this trait, you can remain calm and open to what is happening in your live even when things aren’t going your way. You will recognize that change is ever present; that anything can happen at any time and nothing is ever certain or secure. You can take it, you can take everything that comes your way in stride, neither clinging to what you wish was happening nor resisting what you wish wasn’t happening.

4. Self-reliance: this depends on you, yourself, your abilities, your judgment and your resources. You trust yourself and take responsibility for dealing with the challenges, successes (and failures) and experiences. During your difficult times, your self-reliance will allow you to ask “How did I contribute to this situation? What was my part in this?” rather than finding blame on someone or something else outside of yourself. You experience that sense of control over your own life.

5. Complete self-acceptance: Deeply realizing your own worth and goodness is what this is about. Being comfortable with who you are, warts, and all! You are able to offer yourself the same compassion, forgiveness and kindness that you would aspire to give to others. It is about treasuring your own uniqueness and knowing that you have a right to be YOU.

You can be resilient! You can have success and not grow weary to the point of quitting! Build your resilience so that you can be a success in your effort to make money online with your affiliate marketing business.