An affiliate mentor does more than provide you with an affiliate manual to read.
Affiliate mentoring involves personal, one-to-one teaching.
It involves being taught how to build an Internet business.
The right mentor can be your adviser, coach, role model and sometimes become a friend.
Expert affiliate mentoring can mean the difference between success and failure for an affiliate.
While a small proportion of affiliates do exceptionally well – for example, I’ve been earning a good living from affiliate commissions since 1998 – many affiliates struggle to earn much more than pocket money.
Excellent instruction manuals and training courses are available for affiliates, such as Rosalind Gardner’s Affiliate Blogger Pro and the comprehensive Action Guide that comes with Ken Evoy’s SBI system.
For some affiliates, either of those top-notch guides is all they need. They follow the step-by-step instructions and in six months or so they’re earning hundreds or perhaps even thousands of dollars a month.
If you already own a good affiliate training manual, what you need to do is this: Dig it out, print it, study it carefully chapter by chapter with a highlighter pen in hand, making notes as you go.
Each night, make a list of the six most important things you need to do. Next day, do those six things. Every day, ALWAYS do something to improve your business. Watch carefully to see what works. Repeat those things. Carry on until you’re successful.
If you do this, you’ll have a good chance of succeeding without hiring an affiliate coach.
If you do need an affiliate mentor, read on…
One-to-one affiliate mentoring
The big difference between learning from a book and learning from a coach is that the coach provides feedback. The coach can look at what you’re doing and correct your mistakes.
The right coach can help provide good ideas and keep you motivated.
A coach can help keep you on track, encouraging you to do the tasks you need to do to succeed.
Do YOU need an affiliate coach? Only you can answer that. Some affiliates do, some don’t.
Before you get excited, I have to tell you that it’s almost impossible to find truly expert, real, one-to-one affiliate coaching.
Here’s the reason. Imagine you’re a real super affiliate earning, say, $100,000 or $200,000 a year. If you were coaching affiliate students one-to-one, they wouldn’t be able to afford your hourly rate.
As a newcomer affiliate, you’re in a Catch-22 situation. Once you ARE successful and are bringing in useful dollars for a good affiliate merchant, the merchant may phone you and start giving you a few tips on how to improve your website and your methods. However, it’s very unusual to receive this level of attention until you are already successful.
Another way to get affiliate mentoring is to make friends with a highly successful affiliate. That’s a Catch-22 situation, too. If they’re visibly successful, they’ll have lots of people clamoring to be their “friends”. You need to have skills to bring to the table.
So what can you do, apart from just buying books and instruction manuals?
Option 1: Form your own mentor group
Get together a group of affiliate friends who live within driving distance and meet once a month to share the results of your research and experiments. You’ll learn faster if you have someone to bounce ideas off.
Try asking on our affiliate forum if there are any affiliates in your area. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Option 2: The path I recommend for any affiliate newcomer
Get SBI! and the comprehensive instruction manual that comes with it. It teaches you how to build a business. It’s not just software, it’s not just web hosting. It’s a whole suite of tools which would cost thousands of dollars if you had to buy them separately.
But even better than the tools are the people behind it. They’ll provide you with excellent support, including a fantastic private forum that has a wonderful, caring, sharing atmosphere, where SBI coaches and SBI users – or should I say raving fans – share tips and help each other. You get the collective wisdom of thousands of successful SBI users.
On the SBI private forum, one of the really helpful coaches, Debs, has now made more than 27,000 helpful posts, answering affiliates’ questions! That’s incredible mentoring. Debs is an adviser, coach, role model and friend to thousands of affiliates.
I strongly recommend you start by getting SBI! because of the complete training you’ll receive. It’s not just about affiliate marketing. It’s about building an online business, with a choice of various revenue streams.
What if you’re not ready to get SBI yet?
Here’s a really good free option:
Join the company’s SiteSell affiliate program. When you’ve joined, log in. Have a good look around and get a feel for the company and the people behind it. (You can use the knowledge you gain to promote any OTHER products or any other niche.)
You’ll be pleasantly surprised by expert, extremely comprehensive Internet marketing and affiliate marketing training you’ll receive – without paying a cent.
SiteSell Education’s course Building a Successful Business Using the Internet (and SBI!) is taught in more than 30 universities and colleges around the world. It’s a huge success. SBI’s eLearning course has been incorporated into the training you receive when you subscribe to SBI and follow the Action Guide and videos.
Option 3: Personal mentoring – and a website! – from super affiliate John Gibb
If you’ve already joined Affiliate Blogger Pro or SBI and want to try something else, I recommend you check out what John Gibb is offering.
John, who looks like a workaholic to me, is a very successful affiliate who owns hundreds of websites and has been an affiliate coach for three years. He recently ramped up his coaching with even more intensive, hands-on training.
What’s more, he even builds a website for you, and provides high quality links to it.
His approach is to target affiliate programs that pay residual revenue, often by using low traffic pages and precisely targeted “buying” keywords, which means that the visitors you get are ready to buy. That’s a valuable technique to learn.
John calls his new elite affiliate training service Niche Site Formula. See the details here.