Wealthy Affiliate Challenge
Want To Build A ROBUST Legit
PROFITABLE Affiliate Business...
If So Can I Show You Mine?
Hi, my name is Richard Penfold, and if you're interested in building a sustainable income online this is for YOU!
There's nothing to pay, just evaluated this system for yourself and decided if it's of interest...
Brace yourself; here's mine...
My strategy is to simply show & share with you what's working for me. If it's of interest to you great, if not no hard feelings, and thanks for your time :)
It's built on being transparent and authentic because it's way easier than learning how to 'sell'.
The objective of this content is to give you everything you need to evaluate the business model for yourself free from any marketing hype or 'tactics'....
No strings attached...
And please ask questions at the end.
My system is based on Affiliate marketing because it offers people a proven low cost point of entry that when done properly can be extremely lucrative, and highly automated, meaning a great business model for those looking for a 'lifestyle' business.
If you're new to Affiliate Marketing please read this great article here... (I'll wait).
Can you see that Affiliate Marketing is the easiest business model to start with?
No product creation, transaction processing, customer service, inventory, order fulfilment, or staff/contractors to deal with.
Just a requirement to find people with a need and introduce them to a solution to earn a commission (if they buy).
Easy, but you'll still need to skill up if you want to do this successfully.
My business goal is to fund Susanne (my wife) and my retirement lifestyle. Modest, but with a lot of mini travel adventures.
I've tried many affiliate business models, but only 2 have worked consistently for me over time, and this page is going to share with you the best...
To build this robust affiliate business you need to take the following 8 steps...
(1) You need to be crystal clear about your WHY, your beliefs and principles that underpin all that you do. This is about what you stand for and stand against. It provides your 'North Star' to guide you through the challenges ahead.
It will also attract like minded people that share your beliefs ...this is powerful.
I believe most people can own their own profitable, legit, evergreen affiliate business if they follow these steps...
And that affiliate marketing should be fun, honest, authentic and help people immediately. I stand against hype, lies and fake scarcity.
(2) To save time take Tony Robbins advice and find a MENTOR that echos your beliefs and is proven to help people similar to you reach goals similar to yours.. You have to resonate with your mentor, because you'll be required to follow their strategy, their roadmap and action plans without question.
A good mentor will also provide inspiration and ideally a way for you to validate you're on track.
A side benefit will be your mentor could also provide you a lucrative affiliate opportunity for later steps...
(3) It's CRITICAL to build YOU, before promoting anything. The best way I've found to achieve this is done through a process of learning something, implementing it, and showing and sharing what you've done to HELP others interested in the topic.
LEARN, DO, SHOW, SHARE.
This will enable you to be UNIQUE and IMMEDIATELY HELPFUL without needing you to an expert.
Simple, but it has amazing power which we'll discuss later.
(4) HELP PEOPLE from the get go. Your earnings are tied to the value (help) you deliver. My results get better the more I focus on helping people above all else.
Money is the scorecard. A reflection on how much value you're providing.
Don't lose sight of it, but don't put it first.
I've found 'showing & sharing' what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and the RESULTS I'm getting to be the most effective way for me to help people because it's fun, simple and transparent. I'm just being me, showing you what I've learned, how I've implemented it and how its working...
The good and the bad.
It frees me from trying to 'sell' or push...
I just let people make their own decisions, no pressure.
No strings attached.
(5) Build your list. By helping people first and then offering them the opportunity for even more great information that will take them towards THEIR GOAL you'll have no difficulty in building a responsive email list.
A list filled with interested, engaged, people eager to consume more of your helpful content.
(6) Follow up. Provide even more help and value and where appropriate show people how you've achieved the required steps, share the training, tools & services that have helped you to do things better, faster, or for less cost all linked to using your affiliate links if appropriate.
Always value first, followed by natural honest 'sharing' of things PROVEN to help.
(7) Make sure you can TEST, TRACK and ANALYZE your messaging so that you can focus on what works for you, correct or ditch the things that aren't.
We need to understand what helps people the most, and how they want to consume it (text like this, or video, or other).
We need to TEST our ideas, engage, offer help, answer questions... learn and grow.
Done correctly this helpful content sequence (some will call it a 'funnel') will improve over time until you get to the goal of ...
Being able to HELP PEOPLE PROFITABLY...
Meaning advertise to attract people that you then HELP and can see this reflected in the affiliate commissions your help earns... to the point where you spend less on advertising than you earn in commission.
(8) People, Visitors, Traffic. This business refers to people as TRAFFIC which is fine, but treat them as you'd like to be treated yourself... with courtersey, respect, honesty.
With all the above in place you're now ready to launch your affiliate business...
Help people...
Introduce one traffic source at a time and TEST it through your message sequence for engagement, conversions (email subscribers), sales and PROFITABILITY.
Once your message sequence or 'funnel' is helping people profitably hitting your financial goals is simply about testing different traffic sources and keeping the profitable ones.
Simple - right?
That's the theory...
But does it work?
RESULTS RESULTS RESULTS
What follows is a series of screenshots taken from some of my affiliate dashboards to prove that some(?) of this system is working well...
The screenshot above is from my Active Campaign (Email Service Provider) affiliate dashboard which I've been using for about 18 months.
So for transparency the results shown are across this whole 18 month period not just the last few months which most of the others are.
The above is my GetResponse (Email Service Provider) affiliate dashboard. I use both Get Response and Active Campaign.
This again is an older income stream that also benefits from a early version of my current system.
There's a few things I'd like you to notice about the above results...
(1) Most of these commissions come from promoting ONE 'Ultimate' product as an affiliate.
This one product has built most of these commission streams for me!
As a natural part of the business building process this product trains people on.
This is ...the 'secret'.
This product does a great job of helping people go from A - B, pain to pleasure and in doing so it shares the tools & services that make this journey easier (with MY affiliate links!).
Yes. This is the first top quality program I've seen allow its partners to use their affiliate links for the recommended 3rd party tools & services needed to implement the business.
These commissions are all coming from separate best of breed service companies that people need if they're building this type of affiliate business.
So by promoting one great training program I'm earning multiple streams of income from separate companies.
Without doing any extra promotion or work...
I've never been able to do this before.
I highlight this fact because this will be copied by other companies in future. So if you see it please understand the value of this privilege.
(2) Because these commissions are spread across multiple companies my business is not dependant on any one of them ...it's more robust.
(3) The commissions represent a mix of frontend (fast sales) backend (after the initial sales process) and recurring (monthly ongoing) commissions at different price points. This mix is ideal for sustaining a steady growth reliable affiliate business.
To be clear I'm a very new to this approach to affiliate marketing, and though I have some major flaws in my implementation (shared later) it's already...
Profitable.
Which leads us to how it's done...
I call it 'Smart' Affiliate Marketing...
'SMART' Affiliate Marketing
Is like your affiliate engine...
That allows you to build your own unique and independent presence online.
It demonstrates to people how your building it, it shares your why, and reflects your beliefs and principals in what you do and how you do it...
This will help you to 'attract' like minded people interested in your topic.
It's 'SMART' because like a modern engine it has a management system, so you can see what's working and what's not... giving you the opportunity to fine tune for peak performance over time.
This business is unlikely to be successful overnight.
But built with quality in mind this will be the only business you need...
Below is a high level view...
NOTE: In the model above I'm promoting what I've labelled an 'Ultimate' affiliate program. If you want to model this approach you can promote any products that you deem helpful to your audience in place of my 'Ultimate' program.
So let's explain it...
TRAFFIC SOURCE 1: For me once I've built out my helpful content sequence or funnel I like to test it with people who are searching online for information that I think my content could help.
I start by using Bing Pay Per Click advertising around a very few sometimes only one targeted keyword.
I start with a very small budget, often spending less than $5 per day.
My advert is unique to me because I'm promoting my content on my website. This is unlike most affiliates that are promoting the same offer through the same shared resources...
This unique start builds me and helps people from the get go...
My engine management system is in place here as well. Because I can test ideas, headlines and copy to see what people respond to.
Because I have a full time job I prefer the speed and convenience of paid advertising to attract people to my content, but if you have the time and skills to developing free traffic sources you can use these instead or as well as.
TRACKING & A/B SPLIT TESTING LINK: This is the unique link that allows my engine management system to test different content formats to find which people prefer.
It also allows me to identify which traffic sources perform best right the way through all my content and record affiliate sales that may happen day's or even weeks after the initial advert 'click'.
Once you can spot what's working PROFITABLY this business becomes very easy...
In theory!
This is the part of my business that's not working as it should :(
I'll be sharing how I resolve this later, but for now just imagine how powerful this will be when working correctly!
Note: If you're using free traffic sources you can still track all of this. Imagine knowing that 30% of your sales all originate from one YouTube video as opposed to only 5% of sales coming from other content. You'd be wise to create more content around the subject of this video and 'test' ideas.
These insights are vital to the growth of your business.
FUNNEL / WEBSITE / SOCIAL PLATFORM: There are no hard and fast rules here. This is where your helpful content is hosted. It can all be in one place or distributed across platforms.
A popular and proven setup would be to use YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook for the initial 'attraction,' introduction, and first value delivery, then linking to a lead capture system where you'd collect email addresses of people interested in getting more of your helpful content.
For people on a tight budget this is great. You can start a very profitable affiliate business with free social media and website platforms, an email service provider, and a tracking solution.
We'll look at budget setup later in this sequence. For now know that it can be done.
Here's a picture of what this start looks like before people subscribe to get more of your helpful content...
EMAIL LIST & FOLLOW UP CONTENT THAT HELPS EVEN MORE: A list of people interested and engaged in your topic is your most valuable business asset.
But it only works IF your list is INTERESTED and you've PROVEN your ability to deliver value, and you make it your obsession to continue to so...
Intimidating?
I think so.
It's the mindset I've adopted (learned the hard way), and would suggest for anybody that wants to stand out in this world of constant attention seeking 'NOISE'.
It's not the EASY way...
But I believe it's the best.
Here's what this looks like...
After somebody subscribes to your email list I would suggest you send them to what's known as a 'Thank You' page or 'Confirmation' page.
Rather than just thanking people and telling them to 'look out for my email', or worse yet trying to sell them something they haven't asked for...
Why not demonstrate your promise of further help...
By delivering further help.
As an example in the sequence of information your in now I start by sharing the 8 steps required to build a robust affiliate business - right?
Well in my opinion the most help I can then give is the details on what and how I built this business...
This is in a thank you page that links to all the information people need to implement the 8 steps to build a robust affiliate business.
Nothing is left out or held back so people can work through in their own time.
Also, I'll be sharing the 'Ultimate' affiliate program which is like an amplifier for my business...
For my email follow up series I'll be linking to my website content that shares alternate ways of implementing these steps, as well as some of the business breakthroughs I've made.
I mentioned a tracking problem I currently have in my business. I'll turn this problem into an opportunity to share what will be a helpful to many solution.
I'll also help by answering any questions you may have via my website comments and email replies.
What To Do Next...
If you're interested in building a robust affiliate business I hope this content has proved helpful.
If you have questions or ideas how this could be better please fire away in the comments below.
If you'd like to build your own profit pulling affiliate business I'd suggest you follow along with my 8 Steps case study by clicking the button below...