But it scared me and I have been a little more careful since. The idea was a bad one and I kind of threw caution to the wind, desperate for success. Really, what affiliates “should” do is carefully craft their advertisements and test and measure with a small budget. Only when you have a profitable campaign should you scale up and spend the big bucks. However, if you’re marketing in a competitive niche and don’t have much capital, it doesn’t leave much room for error. That’s why it’s useful having a high ticket sales funnel which has a number of recurring income products and high, medium and low ticket items to sell. (use the most profitable digital products)

When you have that “ace” up your sleeve, it’s much easier to learn marketing using paid ads. Paid ads are the best strategy because they are scalable. I’ve spent a heap of time building content through blogging. Blogging can give you passive sales but you can’t control your traffic. So it can take a lot of work just to see a little result.

How Do Top Earning Affiliates Do It?

Top earning affiliates also build an email list. This was something I only started doing in 2014. Before that I didn’t know the power of an email list. I was trying to sell directly from a website and collecting visitors only through organic means. That meant I got sporadic traffic at best and most of your website visitors won’t buy.

But when you build an email list you can gain greater control over your traffic. With organic marketing or paid advertising you’re either paying for traffic or working for it. With an email list, you’re in charge! Google can always change their algorithm and paid ads are only getting more expensive. But get your own list of subscribers, send them useful information and you’ll build trust. Trust is something pretty special online and worth its weight in gold (or affiliate sales!).

The list is a must if you want to do well at affiliate marketing. It allows you to connect with your prospective customers time and time again. Studies show that most online users will need at least 6-8 “touch points” of a product or website before they make a purchase. This is less so with sites that people trust already such as Amazon, but more so with affiliates who sell more obscure products/services.

An email list lets you connect with your subscribers over a much longer timeframe than is possible only from a website. I’ve made affiliate sales even years after someone has joined my email list. This just couldn’t happen if you don’t collect your website visitors emails and hope to make sales only from a website.

How Top Earning Affiliates Do It – Find A Need

Top earning affiliates find a need and deliver a product to meet that need. They don’t use their own products (at least not initially) and simply partner with the best and most valuable products available. One of my mentors explained how his main success came in the dating niche. He sold a product which helped out men using online dating more effectively.

The need was met with a digital product. The pain point was men struggling to get anywhere doing online dating and the product helped them gain confidence in the dating sphere.

When you can specifically find people who have a certain need/pain point, and deliver products directly to them via online marketing techniques, you can make a killing online!

This starts by defining who you are talking to online. Many online courses miss this vital piece of information. When you know who you’re talking to, you can speak in a language which specifically identifies them and cuts out all the other noise. This is particularly helpful if you’re paying for views. On YouTube, for example, you pay for views after the 30 second mark (this may have changed since I used YouTube). So you want to get rid of the 90% of people who aren’t interested straight away so you don’t pay to show them your ad! 

When you know who your customer avatar is (target audience), this is much simpler.

Having The Guts (and the budget)

Now marketing budget aside, it takes a fair amount of gumption to run an advertising campaign and spend money not knowing the outcome. When you see money being sucked into the marketing machine of Google, YouTube, Bing and other marketing platforms, you can see how they are able to make a lot of money very quickly. You need to be careful when spending marketing budget because you can lose a lot very quickly. This is why you test and measure at an affordable cost first, before increasing budget when you’re regularly making profit.

But initially this is very difficult and often this is because of our programming. We are programmed to think of spending wisely and perhaps not even spending at all! With advertising, if you’re never done business before, advertising costs can seem huge and you may want to quickly retreat when you see your marketing budget quickly disappear.

Those who I have seen make a fortune online have the guts to run advertising campaigns. But often they have come from 6 figure incomes too, so they have the budget to run huge campaigns.

Spending $100 To Make $200

Once you’re spending a budget of $100 and making $200 in revenue from affiliate sales you’re golden! You can simply increase your marketing budget now to $1000 and make $2000 and then $10,000 and make $20,000! The difficulty lies in the getting to the point of spending £100 and making $200!

Many affiliates quit because they struggle here. I’ve struggled too to get any consistency with paid ads. The top affiliates don’t quit and they keep on spending budget. If you look at this as lost money, you’re not thinking like a top affiliate. They look at this as an investment of their time and money, rather than lost money. They learn from the ads which fail as much as they learn from ads which win!

By testing and measuring different elements of their advertising campaigns, top affiliates learn how to not only double their money but often quadruple what they spend when they start making sales.

Get Help

The other thing which top earning affiliates have in common; they get mentored! Mentors have already done the hard graft and they know what it takes to succeed online. If you can get close to someone who has done it already, you’re going to save yourself an awful lot of time and energy.

I wasted a lot of time in my early years as an affiliate. I sold the wrong kinds of products (which made peanuts) and used bad marketing tactics which didn’t work very well. When I learned how to leverage the right products (which pay recurring commissions) and use an email list, things magically got better! It wasn’t magic really it was the power of persistence and of finding a good mentor who can steer you in the right direction.

Find out more about getting an affiliate mentor here by signing up on this website.

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