Complete Transcript – Episode 4

Affiliate Marketing Mindset: 
Developing the right mindset for successful affiliate marketing.

Hi and Welcome to the Smart Affiliate Marketing podcast.

My name’s Paul, and in this episode I’ll be explaining how to develop the right affiliate marketing mindset, thereby preparing you for a long term, sustainable affiliate marketing business.

In this first section, we’re going to look at setting expectations.

First up, affiliate marketing is a business. It’s not a get rich quick scheme.

You have to have patience, you have to be determined, you have to continually learn, and you have to be prepared to do some hard work.

It’s not a case of becoming an internet marketer turning on some money tap that makes you rich. This is a long term business.

Therefore I recommend you focus on building long term value for your audience. Give your audience value. Help them be there for them. Build trust. If they contact you, make sure you take the time to answer them correctly in a friendly manner and help them to the best of your ability.

This is going to help you in the long run. You’re going to be building trust with your audience and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. They’ll grow to know, like and trust you.

In terms of developing the right mindset, you have to have a compelling “why” – the reason why you doing this.

We went through this in episode one. You need to keep this firmly fixed at the forefront of your mind. Without having your reason why and your daily affirmations, you’re likely to lose track of why you’re actually doing this, why are you spending all this time and effort doing affiliate marketing when perhaps you’re making no money right now, one negative thought could finish you as an affiliate marketer if you don’t keep your why and your affirmations at the front of your mind.

So you need a growth mindset. You need to be growing. You need to be overcoming challenges.

You need to adapt to changes. You need to keep learning and adapting to changes in the affiliate marketing landscape. It’s really not that difficult. It’s just a case of remaining focused and doing your next step.

The next part of affiliate marketing mindset is having goals and tracking your progress.

 So, I believe it’s very important that you have a series of goals.

You may have your ultimate goal, such as, say, $10,000 a month, and at that point, you will be jacking in your job and living the Internet lifestyle. Fantastic.

However, it can be too easy to give up on such a big goal, so it’s better to have a series of goals.

To break these goals down, have a series of goals, for example, your first goal could be to make your first affiliate sale. Your second goal may be to make at least one sale per week and so on, and keep building on your goal, so you have a series of goals until you reach your ultimate goal, and you can, of course, go on from there afterwards.

But by having easy to reach goals initially, you’re more likely to stick with this, stay focused and keep at it, because at the end of the day, anyone can become a successful affiliate marketer. It all depends on you not giving up.

You will also need to track your progress, so perhaps weekly, you will track your progress, review what you’ve done and what results you’ve had, and then decide what you’re going to do during the next time period of the week or month or whichever period you choose.

This leads on to building resilience.

You need to be able to deal with setbacks and learn from your failures.

There will be times you feel like you’re failing, you’re not making progress, you’ve done all this work, but you’ve made no sales. Okay, that’s fine. It’s not a failure. It’s just another step on the path towards success.

Most Successful people had a series of failures before they became successful. So why should you be any different?

You can turn this around and say, okay, failures, they have such a negative connotation. But if you change the way you look at failures, from their negative to “failures are a part of becoming successful”, and if you look at it that way, you’re less likely to give up when you encounter one.

The bottom line is you need to be able to deal with setbacks and failures as and when they occur, and just keep on, keeping on. Be persistent.

The only way you’ll fail, ultimately, is if you give up.

You have to have the mindset that keeps you focused so that you can be great at time management and productivity.

Keep a track of your next steps. Write things down that you need to do next and then create time slots in which you’re going to achieve them.

It’s great if you can find yourself an accountability partner, perhaps somebody else you know is going into affiliate marketing, and you could both become accountability partners for each other.

I find this is a great way that helps you stay focused and productive, and it doesn’t actually cost you anything except the time you share together, which is mutually beneficial.

It’s also useful to stay up to date with developments in the affiliate marketing industry.

This could involve attending webinars, having say searches on Google or Yahoo, for example, reading industry blogs and following successful affiliate marketers.

Another part of the mindset for successful affiliate marketing is to develop one income stream at a time, remain focused and work on just one thing until you become successful at that.

 And this also applies to traffic sources.

Work on traffic streams, one at a time, so that you don’t become overwhelmed and lose focus.

Once you’ve mastered one, you move on to the next and you add and build your business.

When you’ve done that, you can diversify your income streams.

You can then add other affiliate programs, for example.

You could create your own products or services and offer these alongside your affiliate offers.

 I would highly recommend not jumping niches until you are well and truly on your way in one niche. In fact, I would possibly argue against ever doing it if you select the right niche in the first place – You hopefully wouldn’t need to do this, but you do need to remain focused until you hit your goals.

Another part of long term sustainability is building an email list. This is because, no matter what happens to any other platform such as Facebook or any social media site where you may be building a following, if you have an email list, you will never lose your ability to communicate with your audience, and also you need to focus on giving your audience value.

Only promote products that you’re familiar with. Don’t promote products just to make money, because that will kill the relationship between you and your audience faster than I can say goodbye! You need to be honest and ethical, test out these products whenever you possibly can before promoting them, or at least be familiar with the person who is selling the product.

And by only being genuine and promoting honest and decent products and services, your customer satisfaction and audience relationship will result in increased business and longer term

sustainability.

I hope you’ve been taking notes on this episode.

I encourage you now to look at your own goals and develop an action plan for building a long term sustainable affiliate marketing business.

One resource that I highly recommend is the Evergreen Passive Income book on affiliate marketing by Rob Cornish. You can obtain this book by going to affiliate marketing by numbers.co.uk, I’ll give you that again – It’s quite long – Affiliate Marketing by numbers.co.uk,  and you can obtain this book free of charge. There is a fee for shipping and handling, but the book is absolutely free.

Again, go to affiliate marketing by numbers.co.uk, to receive your evergreen passive income book.

If you’re liking what you’re hearing, feel free to follow and subscribe, and in the next episode, we’ll be looking at time management and the challenges of balancing affiliate marketing with your day job. Okay, until next time, take care, and I’ll see you soon.