An e commerce mentorship program can help you develop skills to earn online from your digital efforts. On the surface this doesn’t sound like it would be too difficult. But with all the conflicting marketing strategies and products available online, it can become a minefield.
Which products do you use? What does this allow you to use for your marketing? With low value e commerce products, such as physical affiliate products, for example, you only make small commissions (3-11%). This doesn’t leave much scope for marketing. It tends to mean you’ll need to use some free marketing strategy. This can take months or years to come to fruition! Most will quit long before this happens!
E Commerce Mentorship
An e commerce mentorship can help both in terms of product choice and marketing strategy; and of course the psychology aspect too. With a good business model, you can make far faster progress; especially if it allows the use of paid marketing strategies.
When I started looking into making money from e commerce, I learned affiliate marketing. I did the work but nothing happened and I struggled for years. That was because I was using the wrong business model and the wrong marketing strategies!
Free marketing strategies can take a long time to work. Blogging takes a long time to work, for example. When you don’t get the reassurance that you’re on track, it’s easy to dismiss your efforts and simply give up. E Commerce mentorship can help by giving your the reassurance that you’re on track!
E Commerce Mentorship Program
I found an e commerce mentorship program and met founders Jay Kubassek and Stuart Ross. After some initial scepticism, I was able to overcome many of the issues holding me back online:
Doubt and fear that it wouldn’t work
Uncertainty of my marketing strategy
Using the right business models
Following others who have already succeeded online (modelling success)
Focusing on what I wanted to happen, rather than doubts and fear
Using The Right Business Models
When I first started in the affiliate marketing space I use affiliate marketing. One of the first programs I joined was Amazon. But Amazon only pays its affiliates 3-11% commission on any of its products. This means all of my marketing strategies had to be free! As mentioned already, free strategies take time and are incredibly slow.
I learned to use a better business model instead:
High Ticket Digital Products – Digital products typically pay much more commissions than physical products (40%+)
Besides the business model variations online, there’s another hidden blockage to your success. It’s in your mind. When you can follow other successful online entrepreneurs and do what they do, you know you are on track. But it’s usually fear which holds people from doing this. “What if’s” are the splinters in your mind which stop you from doing the things successful online marketers do.
What if it doesn’t work? I’ll lose money! “What if it’s a scam?”, or “what if I fail?”.
A poverty mindset can stop you taking the right actions in an online business because you’re afraid you’ll lose money or lose face if you fail. Old mental “loops” of thinking will keep you stuck forever if you don’t uncover the perpetrator and banish it! See why affiliate marketing does not work!
Get Mentored
If you’re serious about making a serious income online, or even a part time income, it’s well worth getting the right training and support. I struggled for years online and it was only through the support that I was eventually able to make it work.
You can access a free workshop series of videos by clicking on the image below. You’ll be able to meet (virtually) one of my personal mentors Stuart Ross.
Are you looking for a business mentorship and entrepreneurship program? A while ago, I was looking for a way to earn an extra income online and stumbled onto a business mentorship program.
I was able to join a community and follow business mentors both online and in person, at local events. Since the pandemic started in 2020, in-person meet-ups have been replaced by a more dedicated online service. Anyone can use this service to build an online business from scratch.
Here’s a picture of me with one of the co-founders of this digital business system and mentorship program, Jay Kubassek.
Me with Jay Kubassek at a London Momentum seminar in 2014
Business Mentorship And Entrepreneurship Program
The entrepreneurship program which is offered by The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) offers a few online business strategies. They include import and export businesses and an affiliate marketing business model. There’s also a marketing coaching side which any business can benefit from.
With the affiliate model, you can promote The SFM’s product range as an affiliate and earn up to 101% commissions on certain products. The system setup is built in a step by step modular process which anyone can implement to build a working online business sales funnel.
A sales funnel is basically made up of a landing page and email marketing campaign. You’ll also get access to a range of digital products which you can place in your own “digital store”.
Here’s what the back office looks like.
Business Mentorship and Entrepreneurship Program – Getting Set Up
You can have a digital business system set up within a few days if you work through the modules fairly quickly. You’ll have access also to a community of online entrepreneurs and coaches and mentors who can help you with this process. Plus, you can access chat support and you’ll get your own personal consultant.
With the software and tools in place, set up is fairly simple. Use drag and drop software and work through the modules to set up your website, landing pages, autoresponder (email automation service) and range of products. Products will be pre-built within your sales funnel with your affiliate I.D’s already set up.
Once you’ve completed set up you’ll need to turn your attention to marketing your sales funnel.
Business Mentorship & Entrepreneurship Program – Marketing
Marketing is usually the biggest challenge for new people entering into the online entrepreneurship space. That’s why the SFM offers a broad range of training and mentoring opportunities.
At the basic level of membership you can access a number of training groups which will help you with your online business. You can also access many question and answer webinars, archive training videos and even 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching sessions at the higher levels of membership.
During a mastermind with other SFM members
Transitioning Into Entrepreneurship
Moving from an employment mentality to an entrepreneurial one can be tough. With an online business you’ll get paid for your results, not the time you spend, like in a job. That’s why it’s important to manage your time and choose the right money producing activities when you’re working online.
At the beginning, it’s likely that you’ll be learning a lot. It’s important not to get stuck for too long in “learning mode” though, and not move your business forwards.
Most online businesses will take several months, at the least, before the owner starts seeing any traction. This will all depend on the actions you take and what you can invest in your business. With a paid marketing campaign, for example, you can build an online business much more quickly than by using only free marketing strategies.
Technician Vs. Visionary
A person in an employment role might get very good at their “role”. If they then take that role into their own business, they can often fail at entrepreneurship. That’s because they have taken their role as a “technician” and tried to use it in a business. But a business requires a different outlook than a job.
You need to be the driver of your business and get good a marketing it, not just working “in” it, as a technician. Good online marketers learn this very quickly and delegate and outsource the work which is less important so they can focus on driving the business forwards.
The SFM offer a number of tools and resources. These will help you both build a workable online business system and train your mind for success as an entrepreneur. More about the SFM digital business system here.
Access Training Or Learn More
You can access The SFM’s digital training resources through this link with The All In One Package. This package gives you membership to the online community plus loads of training. You’ll also access a digital business system which you can use to sell digital products and earn commissions.
Or if you would like to learn more about The SFM’s training and education platform, access a free workshop series by clicking on the image below.
A business mentorship program can help you build an online business from scratch even without any skills or experience. With a business model known as affiliate marketing, and the right payment structure, anyone can build an online business from anywhere in the world.
All you is a laptop, an internet connection and the drive and determination to succeed.
Business Mentorship Program – A Quick Background On Me
I started out looking for ways to earn from the internet back in the early 2000’s. Back then, it was much more difficult because there just wasn’t the available tools and training available today.
I began with Forex marketing but moved on after a couple of years of studying Forex. Then I worked on eBay buying and selling. You can see the strategy I used in this article here.
After a while I realised there had to be a better way to earn money from the internet. I wrote a couple of ebooks and tried to sell them. Struggling with sales I turned to a few online courses to help me better understand marketing. This led me to learn affiliate marketing – selling other people’s products online.
One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that you can use the internet and digital technology to automate sales of products globally. Websites and marketing platforms work around the clock, so it’s much more efficient using automation to make income than working a job, trading time for money. An online business can help you do it.
Business Mentorship Program – Getting Started
I had been a struggling affiliate for several years before I found a business mentorship program. Before finding one, I tried several online courses and tried various strategies.
Despite putting a lot of work in, I was still struggling and in 2014 I found a video of this guy on a pedalo.
Stuart Ross – Co-Founder Of The SFM
Meet Stuart Ross, co-founder of the Six Figure Mentors – a business mentorship community which offers tools and products to help people become digital entrepreneurs. In 2010 Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek joined forces to create an online business community and offer help and assistance to people who wanted to transition from regular employment into the digital entrepreneurship arena.
Of course since I had already joined several online training courses, I was pretty sceptical. Most of those hadn’t given me the results I had wanted online. You can read about some of these courses in my digital profit course review. But SFM was different. I was able to meet both Stuart and Jay at an event in London. I was also able to network with other members and meet up in person with them at various local venues near me in the UK. Here’s a picture of me with a group of SFM members at a local meeting in Chester, north of England.
Business Mentorship Program – What You’ll Find
Inside the SFM’s digital business mentorship program you’ll find the back office. This is where you can build out your digital sales funnel. This is an online marketing platform and business system where you can populate your “digital store front” with a range of digital products and earn commissions based on sales you make.
You’ll be able to use drag and drop software which makes the process of building websites and landing pages straight forward and simple. You’ll also be able to build a email marketing system and use pre-existing products to sell from your sales funnel. This process involves a step by step process with detailed tutorials, but you’ll also have access to support through the chat option and a personal consultant.
Inside the back office you’ll find the modules where you’ll set up your business system and sales funnel – complete with range of digital products which are pre-made with your own personal affiliate links.
Getting Help And Support
What make the SFM digital business system and mentorship program different to many other courses is its level of support. You’ll have the chat option, a personal consultant but also a community of other entrepreneurs to go to when you need it.
The support is one of the most valuable things the SFM offers to its members. You can choose to connect with other members outside of the groups too. Also access regular question and answer webinars and use a huge archive of seminars and webinars too. These cover all aspects of building your own fully functional sales system and all aspects of marketing too.
Depending on your level of membership, you can also access 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching with top earners in the industry. But even at the basic level of membership, you can access many groups and benefit from experienced six figure earners within the industry. See Six Figure Mentors Cost for details of membership levels.
All In Mentors Access
Mentors All In package offers access to various training and support through the SFM mentors program. You’ll also be able to earn 101% commission on this same product $100 (product sells for $99) – current at time of writing (October 2020). Have a look at just some of what you’ll be able to access below:
The two types of affiliate marketing are digital affiliate marketing and physical affiliate marketing. With physical products, affiliates typically earn much less than with digital products. Amazon, for example pays affiliates 1-11% commission on their physical products through the Amazon partner program. Digital affiliate marketing however usually pays much more – from 30-100% in some cases and typically around 40% of the sale value.
Physical products carry more costs such as manufacturing, postage and handling costs. Digital products on the other hand have far fewer costs associated with their sales.
Therefore digital affiliate marketing is better, right? In some ways yes and in some ways no. Physical products can be easier to sell than digital products because customers usually know exactly what they’re getting. With certain digital products, the value of the product is less obvious, so affiliates might need to become better marketers to sell them.
Digital Affiliate Marketing – Selling
Take for example a camera. As a physical product, most people know exactly what they’re getting. Compare this to a course on dating advice, for example. The course is far less tangible than the physical camera. So the affiliate might have to work harder at making the sale.
With a digital product, affiliates usually have access to sales pages, testimonials and a number of other marketing materials to help them make the sale. But a product such as dating advice can also be harder to sell because the information may be freely available elsewhere. How would the customer know it’s worth the money?
For this reason and many others, digital affiliate marketing is often done through the use of an email marketing list. A camera sale can be made more easily straight from a review website, for example. But a digital product might take some more work to show the customer the value in the product.
Digital Affiliate Marketing – Types Of Digital Products
There’s a lot of digital products you can sell as an affiliate marketer too. Some products offer more value than others. Many affiliates start out on Clickbank which has thousands of digital products for sale. With most of these products, you’ll earn around 40% of the sale value when you make a sale. However, it’s worth focusing your efforts on products which pay out recurring commissions.
This could be in the form of a membership or some kind of software which is used for business. For example, an auto-responder is one of the best software products to promote as an affiliate. With an email marketing service (autoresponder), you can earn ongoing commissions for the lifetime of your referral.
Other digital products can offer multiple products from which you can earn commissions too. Most affiliate products including digital affiliate products only pay you once though. So it’s worth using a sales funnel with a range of digital products in it which you can earn from. See SFM digital business system for more on this.
High Ticket Digital Products
High ticket digital products offer more value to the customer and of course give affiliates larger commissions. A high ticket product might be a seminar or training course which helps business owners earn more income, for example. High ticket products are a good idea for affiliates for a few reasons:
Selling a single high value product is easier than selling hundreds of small value items
A high value product gives you a large commission
You can offset advertising expenses more easily – allowing you to access the more expensive marketing platforms
Scaling up into six and seven figure businesses is more easily done with large value items in your sales funnel
Digital Affiliate Marketing – Platforms
Marketing platforms for digital affiliate marketing include Adwords (Google), Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Instagram and a whole host of others. Ideally choose a marketing platform which suits your marketing budget, business model and interests. For a long time I focused on blogging.
Blogging is a long term marketing strategy but it can work if you stick at it. Paid marketing of course is much faster and more reliable. If you’re promoting low value digital products, it’s going to be much more difficult to use paid marketing and return a profit. So it’s worth using a large value product within your digital product offering.
With digital products, it can be helpful to focus on video since you’ll be able to let your customers know more about you and your product from a video than from a single text advert. In a text advert, there’s much less information available to the customer to help them come to a buying decision. With video, you can explain a lot more about your offering. Here’s a video I’ve used on YouTube to generate leads and sales to my online business.
A digital affiliate marketing business can be life transforming as it can give you complete time and geographical freedom. Learn more about digital business mentorship.
Joining an affiliate marketing mentorship program is one of the best things you can do to achieve success online. Without help, affiliate marketing can be a complete nightmare! Before finding an affiliate marketing mentorship group, I struggled for years with affiliate marketing. Get help by signing up on this site for the free video series.
You’ll find the same mentors who helped me achieve success online through affiliate marketing. To promote products online and earn commissions is simple when you know how; but can be very difficult if you don’t!
Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – What Affiliate Marketing Is Not
A lot of people come into the affiliate marketing space looking for a quick buck. I was the same when I first started. I got dazzled by the excessive claims and the “fast money” courses. Unfortunately most of what I tried didn’t work. At best, I ran into a lot of problems.
I didn’t get any traffic to my websites, I got advertising accounts shut down, I got lost in the maze of continuous learning. Many of the problems I encountered would have been avoided (or quickly resolved) had I had access to other affiliates ahead of me on the journey.
But I was all alone. It took me years before I got the help I so desperately needed.
Affiliate marketing is an awesome way to make money – when it works. But until it works it’s just a series of difficulties and struggles. Most of what you do doesn’t work. There seems to be no reward for a lot of work, at least that was my experience. That’s why so many just give up – they don’t get anywhere. A mentorship program and community of support has changed that for me. It could do the same for you too!
Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – Stuart And Jay
Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek founded the SFM in 2010. They created an online community and mentorship program for people who want to transition into digital entrepreneurs. Since then, thousands of people have joined the community and have accessed online training and resources from all around the world.
But what’s different about the SFM to any of the other digital profit courses I took prior to finding them? Before the SFM Mentors, I took several online courses which claimed to teach how to earn online. But earning online isn’t easy! It does take time and effort. One of the first things I noticed about Stuart and Jay was that they weren’t overstating the ease of earning online like many of the other marketers I found prior to them.
As I went on to find, they actually show up for their members too. Other course founders were nowhere to be seen! Stuart and Jay showed up for webinars and (pre-pandemic) in person too! I met Stuart and Jay in London shortly after joining the community in 2014. They still turn up for live calls today (October 2020).
Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – The Community
But Stuart and Jay have created so much more than their own coaching program. There’s now many mentors and coaches belonging to the SFM who offer 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring through Stuart and Jay’s community.
There’s many groups teaching all kinds of marketing and self development entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. Mindset training was something I never thought I needed. But since going through the training and personal coaching sessions I’ve come to realise how important it actually is for building a profitable online business.
Mastermind sessions with other SFM members
With the wrong mindset, you could be working for years in all the wrong activities. Your thinking is a vital part of a successful business online. The SFM mentors helped me to realise and understand what personal thinking limitations I was carrying around with me which were holding me back.
Why Mentorship Is So Important For Success Online
Many struggle with building a successful online business because their thinking doesn’t accommodate for what they need to do to succeed. One of my own personal issues was a poverty mindset. I struggled to overcome this for many years. Even with a large ticket sales funnel, I was terrified of spending money on advertising because my work was sporadic and money was limited.
But of course this was the case because of my existing mindsets about money and lack. If you don’t think you have much, you create the circumstances to prove yourself right! You can still be poor and have an abundance mindset.
Frugal thinking can help you live beneath your means and survive, but being frugal with my advertising budget didn’t help grow my online business! I used cheaper alternatives and still do. But paid marketing has been fundamental to growing beyond my comfort zones and achieving a larger income online.
Of course whether or not you can use paid marketing will depend on your business model.
Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – Business Model
When I first started doing affiliate marketing I chose products I knew of. I used Amazon and eBay and referred people to products on those sites through my affiliate links. But physical products tend to pay the least to affiliates. Look at Amazon’s commission structure for example.
They pay from 3-11% on a sale to affiliates. Later I learned to sell digital products and could earn 40%+ on my sales. But I was also in the dark still and have learned through the SFM Digital Business system to use recurring income affiliate programs, high ticket items and even multi-tier sales to make an affiliate business more lucrative and my efforts more efficient.
The six figure (plus) business model pictured above offers multiple earning strategies within a product range:
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
A product range – refer a customer and benefit from lifetime commissions and later purchases
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals.
High ticket items – using high value digital products gives you the best reward for your efforts and makes affiliate marketing more efficient.
The SFM Digital Business System offers all of these benefits at the highest level (DEA Partner Member). But it also offers a range of “buy-ins” which allow you to position your sales funnel at an affordable level that’s right for you. As a basic member, you can benefit from the following sales system and model. The commission structure even offers 101% commission on the All-In-One Package. (See chart below).
As a DEA partner member of the SFM you can benefit from the following commission structure.
Access A FREE Video Series & Learn More
If you’re interested in learning more about affiliate marketing mentorship with the SFM , you can access a free video series and meet Stuart by clicking on the image below. You’ll be able to watch a few videos with Stuart and learn more about his and Jay’s digital success mentoring program.
What does it take to build a successful digital business from scratch? While many people will believe this is far from their reach, this isn’t so. With a business model known as affiliate marketing, it can be relatively straight forward to build a successful digital business from scratch, even without any products of your own or any previous experience.
With affiliate marketing, the “affiliate” joins a program and refers customers to products through their unique affiliate link. The affiliate link is simply an identifying link through which to sell other people’s products. When a sale is made through your link, it gets tracked. Any sales you generate are automatically credited to your account. You get paid a percentage of the sale price, according to the terms of the affiliate program.
Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program. Anyone can join Amazon’s “partner program” and make money by selling items from the site. Since there’s thousands of products to choose from on Amazon, it’s a relatively simple way to monetise a website. If you already have a website, which sells golf supplies for instance, simply link to golf related products from your site. Each sale you generate is recorded by Amazon and you’ll get paid a commission based on what you sell.
Hey presto, you have a digital business! But what if you don’t already have a functioning website, and a tonne of traffic? Well that’s something you can learn and there’s programs which will teach you how to generate sales online. (Sign up on this website to access one).
Successful Digital Business – Commissions
But before you rush off and join Amazon’s affiliate program, there’s something pretty important you should know. Amazon’s commission rates are the lowest in the affiliate marketing industry. They pay between 1% and 10% commission on most of their product referrals. That’s not much. If you were to sell a $100 product and get the largest possible commission, it would still only be $10! So you’ll need to sell a lot of products in order to make this kind of business profitable.
But there’s other products you can sell instead. Digital products for example pay much more than Amazon will. Most digital products will pay between 30% and 40% commissions if you refer a sale.
That’s a huge uptick from what most physical products pay. Some digital products pay recurring commissions too. These are software type products or memberships. These can be very lucrative once you learn how to make a sale. There’s also high ticket products which pay much larger amounts per sale. The most profitable digital products pay both high ticket commission and recurring commissions for subscriptions/memberships.
No Sales = No Commission
No sales equals no commissions with the affiliate marketing business model. That’s why so many people drop out. They don’t get any traction because they get stuck with the sales part of the business. Affiliate marketing is performance based business model which means there’s no limit to what you earn earn. The downside is that if you don’t learn a strategy which lets you make sales, you’ll struggle to get traction. This is why it’s worth getting help and support with an affiliate marketing business.
There’s several different online marketing strategies you can use to make sales with affiliate marketing:
PPC – pay per click is one of the most popular methods of marketing online
Organic – organic marketing methods such as blogging and video blogging allow you to get traffic for free
Social media platforms can be used to marketing too
Email marketing can be used in conjunction with other marketing methods
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation lets marketers rank their content on Google and the other search engines
Ideally choose a strategy which you can stick with over the longer term. If you jump from one strategy to another, you’re less likely to success in any.
Investment
To give yourself the best success with a digital business, you need to invest in both your skills and in marketing your business. If you’re going to focus on organic marketing, it can take much longer to build a digital business. With paid marketing methods, it is both fast and scalable. This means once you have a profitable marketing campaign, you can simply turn up your budget to make more sales. With organic marketing methods such as blogging, this is much more difficult to do.
Paid marketing can get expensive too, which means you’re better off with a business model which offers multiple products and includes both high ticket and subscription commission opportunities. Learn more here. With lower value products, you’ll need to use organic and free marketing methods. Free traffic is much more difficult to obtain than paid traffic. See also affiliate marketing business models.
What is freedom business mentoring? A freedom business can give you both the time and financial freedom to live in any way you choose. You can work from anywhere from a laptop and build your business around your life, rather than the other way around.
Since the arrival of Covid-19, of course, the term freedom business has had a different meaning. Rather than allowing you to travel and live anywhere in the world, which is much more difficult now, a freedom business can give you the ability to work from home and replace an existing income from the internet.
This is more important than ever for many because their incomes are under threat or they simply don’t want to return to work, after a period of working from home or furlough.
Freedom Business Mentoring
Whatever a freedom business means to you, it’s worth investing in freedom business mentoring for a number of reasons:
Building a freedom business is not easy, it takes time and effort
You’ll save a lot of wasted effort trying to build a profitable online business alone
You will need to tools and products to make your business work
A business mentor can help you uncover limiting beliefs which you wouldn’t find by yourself
It’s important to have someone to hold you accountable to stay the course
Here’s me on the left with one of my mentors Jay Kubassek
For a long time I went it alone online and attempted to build an income from my laptop for several years. Although I had one or two successes, the time and effort I put in was largely wasted because I didn’t have a mentor. I spent years jumping from one course to another and never really had the help I needed.
Freedom Business Mentoring – What I Didn’t Know
The business model I started out with was affiliate marketing. I came to find affiliate marketing after a short spell at learning Forex marketing and then running an eBay business. Knowing there had to be something better I looked for something which I could automate and run without having to be at the computer all the time.
Creating my own ebooks after seeing the simplicity of an automated online sale (and after struggling to sell them), I found a course which taught marketing. This led me down the affiliate route. I struggled with affiliate marketing for several years while juggling various jobs and eventually found a digital success mentoring program. This program was founded by Jay Kubassek and Stuart Ross (Jay pictured above).
What was different about this program was the community Jay and Stuart had built and their business model. A good affiliate business model has a number of strategies for making commissions:
High value digital products which pay out large commissions 40%+
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
Multi-tier sales – earn commissions from your referral’s sales.
A product range – earn from multiple sales even after your initial referral
Mistakes I Made
I made many mistakes while trying to build an income online. One of the first ones was not getting the help I needed. Back in the early 2000’s it was difficult to find anyone to trust online too. But also SFM Mentors wasn’t around back then.
So I tried various courses and learned some marketing tactics. However despite learning some skills I was still promoting low value products which only paid tiny commissions. I was using Google Adsense too on my content and earning only pennies (cents) on each click. It was no wonder, looking back now, that I had such a difficult time.
Physical products too pay very little. If you look at Amazon’s commission structure for affiliates it’s not great. You can earn between 1% and 11% commission on a product sale from Amazon. Compare that to many digital products which pay out 40%-100% commission! Plus many digital products pay recurring commissions too. Of course I did not know these were the products to promote as an affiliate back then so I wasted a lot of time.
Blogging For Traffic
Blogging was my primary focus for finding customers back when I started affiliate marketing too. What I didn’t know was that this was a very slow strategy for getting customers. I worked and worked for months without really having any success. It was the most frustrating experience. Of course this is a blog post too, so you can guess that things did eventually turn around and start working!
But in the early days I didn’t know how labour intensive blogging would be. If I had a mentor back then, I would have made much faster progress with my online business. Paid marketing is of course much faster and more reliable. Plus you can set pretty much any daily budget to suit you while you learn.
But paid marketing isn’t always the answer. It really depends on your own personal circumstances and the products and service you’re promoting.
Freedom Business Mentoring
So what else can freedom business mentoring give you as an online business owner? Mentoring isn’t only about getting help with the technical side of your online business, or with your mindset. It’s benefitted me massively simply to sit in on webinars and seminars which are run be those who have actually succeeded online in a big way. To interact with other business owners at live events (pre-Covid) was also a massive key.
Stuart & Jay In London at a live event in 2015
Learning from experts who have succeeded online has been key to my online journey. At the bottom of despair I nearly quit my online business in 2017 and reached out to the online community. I was assigned a couple of mentors who helped me escape some demons and put me back on track. I was able to sit in on regular weekly live Q&A webinars and ask questions and get involved.
One of the biggest issues with an online business for many is trust. It certainly has been for me too. When you understand something, it’s so much easier to move forward with a certainty of purpose and vision. When your mind is filled with doubt and cynicism, it’s almost certain you won’t succeed.
Access a free workshop series by clicking the link below to learn more.
Are you looking for an online business mentorship program? Since around 2000 I searched for ways to make money online, trying several programs. Checkout my digital profit course review in which I review a number of courses I took.
Most of them have faded away now though but I was lucky enough to find a mentorship program in 2014 which helped me build an online business from scratch. I found a program which offered 1 to 1 coaching, online webinars and live seminars to its many members around the globe.
Here’s a little about my experience.
Online Business Mentorship
Back in 2014 I was a struggling affiliate marketer, trying to make sense of all the conflicting information online around building an online business. I found a video of a guy called Stuart on Faceboook and joined his program. (Click image below for access)
Of course I was sceptical and the company was called SFM which stands for 6 figure mentors. As a sceptical Northerner, this seemed a little “scammy” sounding! I wasn’t looking for a 6 figure business – just another income stream to help me out and to get out of debt. However, once I got to meet the owners of this company I was reassured they were real people who were turning up to live events and genuinely helping their members.
At an event in London, UK
I had taken a number of courses prior to this one and had learned some skills. But they hadn’t allowed me to make any consistent income from the internet and I was still struggling.
I got some help straight away and was able to make my first high ticket sale within the first few months. I attended events locally and in London and was surprised to see many other people who were members of this online business community. This gave me much more confidence in it. Previously, I had never met anyone from an online course or even any other affiliate marketers.
I made a couple of early wins, partly due to my sponsor helping me and creating an advertising co-op. But I got stuck in a strategy which wasn’t working after that. Fearing I was in over my head, I reached out to the community thinking I would drop out. I was struggling and the results just weren’t there for me. I was given a couple of groups to join and a couple of coaches offered regular webinar (zoom) support.
If it wasn’t for this I would probably have dropped out. I’ll always be grateful to two of the mentors who helped me through my ‘dark patch’, Jill and Frank. I persevered and kept going, changing strategies too and joining a Facebook group led by an awesome mentor who has hugely helped me with my business. Dan created a private group and has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs already. I’ll always recommend his group to people joining this community. Dan runs weekly sessions through the mentors group covering all aspects of online business:
Mindset
Technical issues
Business skills
Money management
Knowing your numbers
etc.
I realised that my knowledge was what was at fault and by focusing on learning, rather than the results, I pushed on. I made a huge breakthrough in 2020 with my first ever 5 figure sale!
Getting Support
Having gone through some serious highs and lows building an online business I would definitely recommend getting support from a community. It’s not something I would ever attempt on my own again. It was a mistake to even think I could do it alone.
Joining the various online groups and getting involved in the membership challenges helped me to push my comfort zones and think differently about what is involved in an online business. My thinking was at fault and I believed I could stick to my favourite activities online and have easy success.
The journey has definitely not been an easy ride but things are now much clearer. I’ve overcome a lot of procrastination fear, and doubt and learned to get my mind right – probably one of the best skills I could have learned. Not coming from a business background, I simply wasn’t aware of what was involved in building a business. In my early days of purchasing courses online back in the early 2000’s, I was “sold” the idea that an online business was easy money. I jumped form one course to another looking for the “golden goose”!
The Online Business Journey
Unfortunately it wasn’t easy but I did change route along the way. The business system and help available through the SFM is pretty unique in my experience. The personal coaching and mentoring sessions I received have been the most valuable to me. Before the 1 to 1 coaching, I struggled with mindset issues and procrastination. I doubted myself and the business system.
Getting a clear idea of how the business runs, knowing my numbers and overcoming the technical issues relating to online business have been a few challenges. But once you have done the work once, you can use the automation of the systems in place. This is a huge factor and was my early vision of what an online business could do for me -give both time and financial freedom.
Building an online business is hard work but much more rewarding in the end. Once you have set up your business system, it does most of the work for you. You still need to learn the marketing side of the business and this is an online process of self development and business development.
What are the most effective digital marketing strategies? An online marketing strategy is different to a marketing technique or method. A single method of online marketing will never be as effective as a broader strategy. For example, blogging is an example of a marketing technique or method.
Using blogging, re-marketing and email marketing together is a broader strategy. Blogging on its own can work wonders as a marketing method to bring targeted customers to your business. But when you start adding other marketing methods to that technique, you can create far superior results with a much bigger and more effective marketing strategy.
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
The most effective online marketing strategy for one business, might not work as well for another. For example, if you’re an affiliate promoting physical products, your strategy might work really well. But if you applied the same strategy to digital products, you may find the results aren’t the same. Digital products are very different to physical ones. For example, a digital product might need more explaining than a typical physical product who’s value is more obvious. Therefore you might need more touch points with a digital business model.
Most customers don’t buy on their first visit to a website, which is why you need to apply a bigger strategy than just using one marketing technique. Here’s a few marketing techniques you may already be using to bring customers to your business/products:
Email marketing – collecting emails from a website/landing page and following up with automated emails.
Social media marketing – placing content or paying for ads on social media sites
SEO – search engine optimisation (gearing your content for optimum exposure from the search engines)
Link building – a part of search engine optimisation
Most Effective Online Marketing Strategies
Most customers will need multiple touch points before they will buy and most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit of your website. How many touch points before a sale? Usually 6-8, depending on your business.
That’s why it’s good to use at least two methods of marketing from a website: the first to get visitors there in the first place, the second to bring them back and make the sale. You can use blogging as an SEO strategy or PPC (pay per click advertising) to get customers to your website. But to keep them there and/or bring them back you’ll need another marketing method such as re-targeting and/or email marketing (preferably both).
Once you have zoned in on a marketing strategy which works, you’ll know it because you’ll be getting more sales. It’s likely to be different across the board depending on your particular business, the products you sell and the customers you attract.
Let’s start with your ideal customer: the customer avatar!
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies: Your Customer Avatar
Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will love you, your products/service and remain a loyal customer for years to come. They will recommend you to everyone who asks! Imagine this person, what they look like. Get an idea of where they hang out, where do they go online? How old are they, where do they live and what are their interests?
The closer you can get to knowing the intricate details of your perfect target audience, the less time and money you’ll waste on targeting the wrong customer with your marketing. When you know your perfect customer well, you’ll know their pains and problems and you’ll be more adept at talking to them in a language they understand. See customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Every single interaction with your customer is a point of contact and all points are an opportunity to send a marketing message. The wrong message will push customers away, the right one will attract them.
Targeting In Your Advertising Campaigns
Online marketing platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Google Adwords etc all offer a huge amount of potential for targeting your customer avatar. You can target people from the searches they conduct online, but you can also add other demographics such as location, language and audience segments. That’s why it’s so important to know who your perfect customer is (customer avatar).
You can target people by how they have interacted with your website too (re-targeting) and use other filters to zone in on the most likely candidate to buy whatever you’re selling.
You can use video too and pay to show your video on YouTube for certain people who meet your criteria. Show your ad according to the interests and other videos which your customer avatar watches.
Most Effective Online Marketing Strategies: Re-Targeting
Re-targeting is definitely one of the most effective online marketing strategies you can use in combination with other tactics and techniques. Once you have brought visitors to your website, through organic traffic or paid traffic, most of them will leave without taking any action. That’s why re-targeting is a good idea. With re-targeting, you can track them and show your display adverts to them on other platforms and websites which they browse on.
By calling their attention back to your offering, you remind them of their prior interest. You’ve probably seen retargeting being applied yourself when you browse online. After you have been searching for a particular item, that item tends to follow you around on other platforms! It’s super targeted advertising because you are showing the ads to people who have already shown an interest in the product.
It’s also cheap too because you can target only those people who have landed previously on your website. They may see your advert, but only engage again if they intend to see your site again or make a purchase.
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies: Email Marketing
Email marketing is a similar tactic which allows you to re-engage with your audience after they have landed on your site and signed up to your email newsletter. Email marketing is much better than re-targeting though because it allows you to maintain contact with subscribers over a long time frame than is possible from a website.
On a website, most visitors are gone in a few minutes never to return. But if you offer them something of value, in exchange for their email address, you can continue drip feeding them information through your emails week in week out. This can extend your connection to a potential customer for weeks, months and even years and decades.
It also allows you to talk about your products and showcase its value. With digital products this is particularly useful because digital products typically are more obscure than physical ones and therefore may need more explanation for a sale to be closed.
Split Testing
Split testing is used in multiple ways in online marketing and it allows a marketer to show two versions of a landing page, advert or email message, to see which one performs the best. In the case of landing pages, split testing allows you to see which version of a landing page performs the best. The best one can then be split tested again and again until your find the best performing version which gives you the cheapest cost per lead or best conversion rate.
You can also split test adverts too to find out which ones are best and why. Through split testing various elements of a sales funnel, an online marketer can optimise the system for the best profit and the least cost.
A good split testing software is Convertri, which allows marketers to split test pages against each other to optimise performance.
Summary
So there’s a few marketing strategies which can be used in combination with each other to optimise your marketing campaigns. No marketing method is perfect on its own and there’s no real definitive marketing method which is better than the rest. However, paid marketing is much faster and more scalable than organic marketing. Organic marketing can work wonders too over time, bringing in traffic for free!
Your overall marketing strategy will depend on your products/service, your marketing budget and business model. With low value products to offer, it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and still turn a profit, for example. But with the most profitable digital products, you’re much better off using paid marketing methods because you can recoup that expenditure and turn a profit much more easily. Only by testing and measuring different techniques combined will you truly know the most effective online marketing strategies for your own business/products and unique audience.
Ideally use a combination of marketing methods in your overall marketing strategy including:
Social media marketing – paid and unpaid social media marketing methods are available.
SEO – search engine optimisation allows you to get free traffic from the search engines
PPC – pay per click advertising is the best way to generate instant traffic quickly
Email marketing – lets you collect emails from a website and follow up over a longer time period than is possible from a website.
Re-targeting – lets you “follow” your website visitors off your website to other platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, eBay and other websites which allow advertising
Split testing – split test landing pages, adverts, email messages and any other element of your marketing to optimise for best results.
There’s many things to sell on the internet. You can sell stuff you own, using platforms such as eBay, or Facebook marketplace. But you can also sell products you don’t own, with business models such as drop shipping and affiliate marketing. With drop shipping you partner with a company already delivering and selling products and essentially become a third party referrer; referring customers through an online website.
The same is true of affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you join an affiliate program and promote your affiliate link online. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models in which third parties refer other people’s products. What’s great about affiliate marketing is that you can start from anywhere and sell products without dealing with customers or inventory.
With affiliate marketing you can sell almost anything you could think of. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Take a look on Amazon at the many products you can find and sell. Here’s a quick glimpse of what’s available on the site.
There’s other types of affiliate products you can sell too, such as digital products. Digital products are good to sell for a number of reasons. Firstly you can sell them internationally because there’s no need to physically post the products. Digital products can be accessed and downloaded over the internet instantly. This makes them perfect products to sell for affiliate marketers.
Digital products pay more than physical products too. With Amazon, affiliates will typically earn between 1% and 10% commission on any sales they refer. That’s not great and you will need to sell many products to make a viable business using Amazon. But Clickbank, for example, hosts multiple digital products and you can earn much larger rates of commission if you choose to sell digital items. Typically digital products will sell for 30%-40% commission, so you can earn much more from a similar number of sales of a physical product.
Things To Sell Online: Courses & Software
Courses and software products offer some of the best ways to earn online through affiliate sales. There’s a huge number of people looking to invest in their online skills to enable them to shift to a more flexible way of working. You can promote and sell digital training courses which help people to develop online marketing skills, earning commissions at the same time!
The benefit of selling an online training course is that many have subscriptions attached because they are membership products. With a membership product you can earn ongoing commissions from each sale you generate. Software products are good too for the same reasons. See business mentorship program for more on digital training you can sell.
Many software products offer recurring commissions because they are subscription products. Aweber is an autoresponder service which is a good example of a software product used for online businesses. It’s a good product to sell for affiliates because it is so useful and essential for anyone who wants to build an online business.
High Ticket Items
High ticket affiliate products are a good idea for affiliate marketers too. How does high ticket affiliate marketing work? With your standard affiliate product you might only earn a tiny portion of the sale. Amazon, for example pays between 1% and 10% on most of their products. But with a high ticket affiliate product which carries a much larger price tag, your commission is going to be far greater for each sale you generate.
Take a look at this product, for example, which carries a large price tag of $395,000. Hammacher Schlemmer, the company who sells this item pays affiliates 8% of any sales referred. So as an affiliate making the sale, you could earn $31,600 on any sales of this item which you generate. Compared to a $100 item on Amazon which pays only $8 (given the same percentage) and you can see the power of high ticket affiliate marketing products.
High ticket items, subscription products and digital products are some of the best things to sell on the internet. As an affiliate, you don’t need to own these products yourself either, so there’s no having to handle products or even deal with customers. What you do need to learn however is how to sell online. You can access a free video series here to learn more about it.
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