Is Affilorama a legit opportunity? They have a free starter membership enabling you to learn how to make money online selling other people’s products. Affilorama is a training platform that caters to, not only newbies to the field of Affiliate Marketing, but also marketers with some experience and others who are making a living from it.
In the Affilorama stable, there are a couple of products; Pathway to Passive, and Affilojetpack
The Pros & the Cons
PRO #1: Free starter membership.
PRO #2: Quick Start Guide, Videos, and Success Road map
PRO #3: Comprehensive tools and training PRO #4: Useful content in their blog posts
CON #1: Doesn’t seem to have any recent (last 6mths) blog activity.
CON #2: As per Con #1 – does this mean that interest in Affilorama is waning?
Who is Affilorama For?
Affilorama is a training platform for affiliate marketers of all levels.
Affilorama Tools & Training
There is a wealth of information within the free training. Over 100 videos with PDF notes for each of the lessons will give you a playbook to launch your entry into the Affiliate marketing field. They explore all the foundations of an affiliate marketing business and They’re staged to provide a step-by-step path to follow on the journey to making money with an affiliate website. Subjects explored are essential resources, market research, site building, content creation, marketing ideas, search engine optimization, understanding and using pay-per-click advertising, and outsourcing.
Affilorama Support
There is chat support 24/7. Peer support is available from current members, as well as email and phone support.
Affilorama Price
Free Starter Membership
Pathway to Passive: $37.00USD
Pathway to Passive is a program to kick start an affiliate marketing business including finding profitable niches and discovering or attracting a target market for the products particular to your chosen niche. There are also pointers on content creation that’ll help draw buyer-ready traffic and leads.
AffiloJetpack: $997.00USD
AffiloJetpack is a comprehensive product to turbocharge your initiation into affiliate marketing. Select 5 niches from 18 handpicked for their earning capabilities. Newsletters, e-books, content cheat sheets and header graphics are used on their own WordPress theme with hosting on their platform and 1 year free. Access to their private AffiloJetpack members’ forum.
My Final Opinion of Affilorama
From dipping my toes into the free starter membership I can see that there is a lot of solid information here that is both useful and actionable. As with any free offering out there, the information is only as good as the action taken to move the reader forward in their journey.
I was lucky enough to be present when the owner of Affilorama was putting together another training for people to create their own product. He left no stone unturned to produce a program that could carry a newbie learner from an idea to making an income online. Much of what he produced in that training will be available in both the Pathway to Passive and Affilojetpack.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing and ready to start getting your feet wet Affilorama has the tools to enable a good start. Follow along with the program. Take action on what you learn. Rinse and repeat.
The stories we tell ourselves are part of a never-ending story. I apologize if it sounds cliched or that I stole the opening from a movie.
Our entry into this existence came about through the story our parents were telling each other at the time. It may or may not have been a love story. Whatever it was, it set us on a path, and as we grew we added to our stories.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Some of the stories we tell ourselves remain finished, complete, and left in the past. A door closed and then another opened onto a new story or a new chapter of the same story.
Other stories we have carried, or perhaps they carry us through the seasons of our lives. Some of these stories we may be unconscious of and yet are to our benefit. Or perhaps they are dogging our steps in the world to our detriment.
At night our dreams tell us stories. We daydream stories. These stories enlarge our sense of self and are ways of knowing ourselves. Through the stories, we’re creating meaning for ourselves.
When people are talking to us often we’re hearing just snippets, we’re hearing what we want to hear. And from those snippets we create stories. This means something good, that means something else. And at times we don’t question what we’re hearing in case we’ve heard it wrong. We may be more interested in what we’re telling ourselves than checking in to make sure we actually know what is going on.
We tell ourselves stories about our businesses, too. I recall a story told by a motivational speaker about a meeting he had with a businesswoman. This particular speaker used to chew his fingernails quite severely. On the verge of signing the contract, the businesswoman discovered these unattractive fingernails and pulled the plug on the deal. She stated she couldn’t do business with someone who didn’t have the discipline to care for their fingernails.
In her mind, she was telling herself a story about this other businessman and perhaps missed out on a lucrative opportunity.
Stories that Don’t Serve Us
It is entirely possible that we think 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day according to estimations based on scientific research. And nearly 80% of these are probably negative. Given that, do we really have a chance to be positive human beings? Thank goodness we are not our thoughts and most of them we may be barely conscious of as they sail through our minds. Even so, the negative thoughts that are captured in the middle of this constant flow are creating stories, stories that don’t serve us.
We may have inherited these stories from our parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives, friends, teachers, and further down the track bosses, spouses, religion. When we notice our minds playing back these stories we need to stop and check that it is actually our story. If it is, then we need to process it further. Do we think it is true? If it isn’t, then we can reject it or perhaps it needs to be reframed to provide an outcome that is beneficial rather than detrimental to our life path.
Empowering Stories
For all those negative thoughts there are at least a few thoughts or memories that we can look back fondly on. The beautiful thing about these memories is that our mind accepts them as real at that moment. We don’t have to be physically experiencing something empowering to reap the benefits of the event.
By bringing any empowering event from our past or imagining something empowering we wish for our future our mind will produce the associated feeling in our bodies. In fact the HeartMath has a piece of research that proves the benefits of re-experiencing positive emotions. They found the levels of both DHEA (the vitality hormone) and ImmunoglobulinA (IgA) were raised by focusing on encouraging thoughts.
So when we catch ourselves descending into to negativity we can arrest the downward spiral. By bringing to our imagination an empowering story we can change our minds and hearts and bring a sense of wellbeing into the moment. The story I mentioned previously about the fingernail chewer has a parallel in my own life. I remember I also used to chew my fingernails. It wasn’t until I saw someone who chewed their fingernails worse than me that I stopped. I used the leverage of the sight of the fingers to provide me with the impetus to resist chewing my nails anymore.
Reframing our Stories
We can leverage our stories through reframing. By looking at our growing edges as challenges rather problems. Reframing our stories can build bridges for us across gaps in our thinking and believing. It can provide the impetus to scale and achieve greater rewards for not only ourselves, but also our customers.
Often we need to seek an outside perspective. Being in the thick of things we sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. Having a mentor in this instance can be invaluable. Or sourcing a coach.
These stories that need reframing may not only be related to our business. There are other areas of our lives that could require the services of a coach or mentor. Relationships, our finances, our physical fitness needs, spiritual or mental states may need some inspiration.
Creating Meaning
The stories we hear from others and the stories we tell ourselves need to be checked for meaning. What we hear is filtered through our minds and compared to our experience then we add meaning like we add sugar to coffee. To oftentimes sweeten the message.
What we accept as a meaning may not be the meaning intended by the person we’re communicating with. It can be more prudent to communicate with questions rather than making statements about what we thought we heard. Then we can be sure when creating meaning we’re not in error, that we heard is what was meant.
Creating meaning around communication and experience involves looking at the events from different perspectives to ensure we’ve captured the essence of what happened and are not being led into delusion about it.
When I was doing Life Coach training that was one of the most pointed observations made to me, “Are you sure you’re not under some delusion about that”. Whatever it was. It certainly gave me pause to consider the experience more deeply.
Conclusion
The quote by Blaise Pascal has particular relevance to our stories.
“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
If we can develop the discipline to sit in a quiet room alone, we may come face to face with the stories we’re telling ourselves. Those stories can provide insights. By working with those insights we can build new modes of being and actions that better serve us and the present we are creating.
How to know yourself and what are the benefits of this awareness? In my current employment, I was told that one staff member, before he left, had referred to me as “Captain Cruise”. This sounded interesting to me. Another person’s perception is just one way you have of how to know yourself.
I didn’t know until after he’d gone that he nicknamed me that. It sounded synonymous with being, “So laid back he’s almost horizontal”. While I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of myself that way I had often heard myself described as such.
Anyway, I decided to call this website – livinghorizontally.com to honour that.
What is an affiliate marketer looking for? For me, lying in a hammock watching the sunset – Living horizontally. Or at least, living life on your own terms. Being able to finish the day out with a sense of satisfaction. That cruisy attitude comes from a knowing that we can only give our best – we can only control who we are on the inside – our thoughts and feelings. With such an attitude we’re able to put people at ease. We have no control over what is happening in our external reality. Just how we respond to it. What are you looking for as an affiliate marketer? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.
One of the primary attributes we need to hold as Affiliate Marketers is who we are. When we know who we are, we know what we have to offer. We gear our offers to people just like us. Perhaps our customer avatar is a reflection of who we are? Sure, we may want to believe that everyone out there is a potential customer. But the more we narrow our idea of who our perfect customer is the more likely we are to lasso them from out of the herd.
So how do you know yourself?
How to Know Yourself
One of the more interesting exercises I was introduced to on my personal development journey was while doing a Certificate in Life Coaching. We had to pair up with another participant and for 5 minutes the other would ask the question, “Who are you?”. Each time the question was asked you had to come up with an answer… Male, son, husband, partner, chef, cyclist, father, teacher, boy scout, student, gardener, movie-goer, reader, writer. It is amazing how many ways we can answer the question. And all of those are ways we know ourselves. We internalize our experiences of these roles and become a vehicle for all of these aspects.
And what happens if our idea of one of those roles is broken. When I stopped being a boy scout, I still carried the experience of a boy scout. Likewise, when my marriage broke up I wanted to understand more about myself, my part in the failure, even though I would carry onward the notion of marriage.
As I said earlier, one of the ways we can know ourselves is by hearing what others think of us. Often it is those we trust that can feel comfortable enough to speak something like that out loud. And others will talk behind our backs.
Noticing our feelings when we’re communicating or interacting with others can be a great source of self-knowledge. Joe Vitale speaks of this being an instructive opportunity to get in touch with counter-intentions. Intentions that are throwing sticks into the spokes of your wheel, that are keeping you from fully expressing who you want to be.
There are many modalities and aspects of psychology that can give us pointers to what can be preferred ways of being – more ways to know yourself.
What helps when you want to know yourself.
Again we do have preferred ways of being. I was introduced to these personality preferences through astrology and numerology. NO, not the ones you used to find in the newspaper and can now find online. I gleaned these insights from books, finding the ideas that resonated with me and rejecting those that didn’t. Maybe these are just energetic forces acting on us rather than traits that are set in concrete.
When I was first planning this post I imagined going into some detail about different ways we can know ourselves. A lot of personal development programs have come up with some sort of personality typing modality. Even my medical herbalist has a typing framework.
Two that immediately spring to mind are; Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. The links are to free online questionnaires at LonerWolf that can give you insight into a variety of traits. I’ll reiterate these are just preferences. There is nothing concrete about them. They are fluid. For more comprehensive professional testing go the Myers-Briggs Foundation and for the Enneagram at the Enneagram Institute.
Another that I find myself returning to is the PMAI (the Pearson-Marr Archetypal Index). This links to a free archetypal test that’ll give you a close representation of the actual PMAI which is based on the Hero’s Journey. If you want to dive deeper into this go to StoryWell.
And the VIA Character Strengths survey. And the VIA is a 15-minute free questionnaire that provides you with a small report of 24 different strengths that apply to you.
But perhaps the most defining way to know ourselves comes from the Good Book. “Ye shall know them by their fruits”.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits”
As an affiliate marketer, what fruit are you producing? Your results will point towards the service you’re providing and how good it is.
The niche you choose will be a great indicator of where you imagine your strengths lie. That niche is a tree that you plant in the internet garden. The content you create becomes the nutrients and water you keep the tree healthy with. The healthier the tree the more fruit it will produce – the better your results will be. It may require pruning to retain the tree’s vitality.
The saying, “Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on earth” is apt here. By looking after your tree (creating good content) you are producing more fruit for your customers. You are being of service to those that have an interest similar to yours.
What happens when you know yourself
Affiliate marketing is a way of turning your obsession into your profession. The more you focus on your niche the more confident you become. Your niche flows from who you are and what you do. And when you express that love in content creation you show the world who you really are.
Your niche is what you are being in the world. I heard this idea listening to Zig Ziglar… “Before we can have we must do and before we can do, we must be”. The Doing and then the Having flow outwards from who we are Being. The act of content creation is an outflow from your being an expert in your niche. Trust the knowledge and wisdom you have gained along the way. The smarts you’ve got from being totally involved in your niche.
Knowledge, wisdom, experience, passion, smarts – these are the fruits we talked about before. Being immersed in your niche is how you’ve been tending your tree, watering and nourishing the ground it has taken root in. This care will be evident in the quality of fruit you produce.
By focusing on our being we create a vibration of trust that draws customers to our offers. They want to know what we know.
Moving forward
And we can’t rest on our laurels. We need to keep moving forward. We need to reach further if we can to maintain the mantle of expertise that our customers rely on. I said earlier that there are a few modalities I return to check my journey. To see if I’ve changed over the course of years. The VIA Character Strengths Survey is of particular interest to me as it reiterates that my prime character strength is a love of learning.
What better way of increasing the experience of learning than to share it with others. Seek to become a better provider and inspiration to your customers by staying at the forefront of your profession or craft. Challenge draws us on to greater expression of who we are.
By adopting some sort of reflective practice we acknowledge that there can be improvements made to how we present to the world. If we think back on our day there may be moments that we might have responded or acted in a way that served us better.
Community
Having a community around us is a great source of inspiration and support for the journey we’re on. Engaging with others, and maintaining the attitude of the observer when we notice triggers, provides us with the nourishment we need for the trail. The triggers may be both positive and negative. Both will be beneficial.
The tribes we gather around us when we put ourselves out there online have become interested because they can see the confidence evident in our content. Our self-knowledge has created the trust we need to become a leader for others who are seeking our expertise. This also means we may open ourselves to detractors, those people who seem only to want to pull down what we have spent time doing.
I said earlier that being conscious of how other people may trigger us is a great source of self-knowledge. What we imagine is making us angry when we view the behaviour of others could be a reflection of behaviour we also exhibit though we’re unaware of it. If we can acknowledge those triggers and gain insight into our own conduct it will enable us to continue to grow as marketers and people.
How to promote your business online? This has almost become a perennial question.
There are so many options out here these days. Shall I work with a web designer and create an online presence – my virtual storefront. Do I set up a Facebook page for it so I can have engagement with customers? Will I tweet and engage that way? Post on Instagram? Post on Pinterest?
What will be my budget to put all this out there? Will I outsource and get some expert to do it for me? Will I try to do it myself so that I have control of the whole process? How am I going to carve out time to add all this to an already busy life? Is this going to upset the delicate balance I have almost gained between work and family?
Is your head starting to spin? My biggest barrier is making time to do it. I spend at least half an hour each day in meditation. Most days I manage an hour. I work shifts. Some days I have early morning starts (0530). Other days I start late in the morning (1100). Couple this with a rural property of close to 3 acres with the work that takes and I sometimes wonder how I get to sit at the computer and create the content that helps to promote the affiliate business I’m building here. Yet I know I must. And I like the creative process.
What Do You Do?
So you now know the business I’m in is affiliate marketing. You know what I’m promoting. What do you do? Based on what I’ve learned in 13 years online I can help others build a similar business or show them tools to expand what they already have.
Whatever you are doing it will fall into the category of a material product, a service, or a combination of these. All of these can be promoted online with the right tools.
Tradesman, Salesman, Teacher, Retailer, Coach, Consultant, Doctor, Nurse, Vet, Healer, Manager, Minion, Artist, Lawyer. Each of these and others I haven’t mentioned here, may offer services and/or products online. Something has brought you to this site. So you’re perhaps looking for something to help you in your endeavours. You have a story to tell about who you are and how you’re going to promote your business online.
It all starts with a story…
How Do You Promote It Online?
This is one of the prompts in Wealthy Affiliate‘s content creation platform SiteContent. Blog posts are a starting point for your promotion. What can you tell your potential customers about what you do? How did you get into the business? What prompted you to get into the service you are promoting? Is there something interesting to pass on to your clients about the products you offer? How do you promote it online?
If you are creating a niche-based affiliate marketing business you can provide product or service comparisons. There is probably a story about how you evolved into your niche. How did your fascination with your niche arise? If there are products associated with the niche, perhaps you started off at the lower end of the market. As the interest developed further, maybe you began looking at higher-end products. These are areas to explore in creating reviews and comparisons for your websites.
Links to these reviews can be placed on your Facebook pages or can be created within Facebook itself if you have a presence there. The same with LinkedIn. Provide a link or build your content right on the platform. Tweet them. Use the images to post on Pinterest and Instagram and link to articles on your blog. Make video presentations of your products and service and upload them to Vimeo or YouTube.
Don’t feel the need to explore a range of social media options all at once. Pick one for getting your story out there and become fluent in it and familiar with the way it works. When the traffic begins to flow, that is a sign that a particular option is gaining traction. Stick with it or if you feel the need then add another to your arsenal.
What Other Tools Do You Need and Where Do You Find Them?
All these different social media platforms where you can engage and connect with others are tools. They help move your business forward. Platforms that were initially set up for one thing (YouTube – video) have evolved their platforms to include a social media aspect. What other tools do you need and where do you find them?
There are training platforms out there where you can not only learn things relevant to your niche but also add your training to the collective. Many universities are creating platforms and adding training to them that can be accessed for free. Think EDx, a collaborative venture between Harvard and MIT. Or, Coursera, which brings together open courses from the likes of Stanford, Yale, Google, and IBM amongst others. These have evolved out of formal institutions. They’re just the tip of the iceberg.
The platforms where you can provide and receive training include, Udemy, and Skillshare. LinkedIn started off as a social media platform for professionals and has developed its offering to include training and job search. If your business has a training aspect Kajabi offers a platform for building, marketing, and selling your course online.
I’m building this website by following the training of the Wealthy Affiliate platform. Their training focuses on all the aspects you may need in learning to create and build an affiliate marketing business.
Whether your creating your own site or using another platform on which to post, images are important. The places to access free images are Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, Freepik. Paid images can be sourced on the likes of Shutterstock, Getty Images, and Adobe Stock.
Once you have bought, downloaded or if you have your own images you’ll need some way of editing them. I have a few online options I use. Canva, Fotor, Pizap, and sometimes Pixlr. Each of these has similar functions. They all have templates that make it easy for you to create graphics for your creations.
Canva is great as an all round graphic creator. They have a comprehensive range of templates that you can adapt for your own use. You can also create a design size that suits you rather than fitting into some of their sizing. Once you’ve uploaded your photo it’s drag and drop and then add what you require in the way of text.
Fotorhas similar functionality as well as the ability to resize and crop your images manually. I find I’m able to do that quickly and then download to my computer to be uploaded to my site.
Pizap is a great option if you like funky fonts to add to your images and it also has a meme creator as well that you can have fun with.
If you need to create a png file one of the easiest ways I’ve found to do that is in PowerPoint if you have Microsoft Office. There is a remove background function in the application. Open a picture in a blank slide, select, and then use remove background. Right mouse click on the image that remains and ‘save as picture’. You’ll have a png file to use.
Outsourcing Options
Perhaps you haven’t the time but have some discretionary income you can put towards growing an online presence. If you have a clear picture of what you want and can articulate it you can post a job with any of the following.
Websites, mobile apps, graphic design, writing, editing, social media advertising. There’ll be someone on any of these to help you build and promote your dream.
Get Help with the Basics
Are you keen to have a go yourself? To start growing your dream. Wealthy Affiliate has all the tools and training you need to start your online presence whether you already have a business or have an idea or passion you want to share with the world. Get help with the basics. Dip your toes in the water. Start with a free membership and build a free website.
When a foundation is put down for a building the deeper and wider the hole that is dug for it has a huge bearing on how high the structure can go. It is the same with the foundations of Affiliate Marketing. The deeper and wider you create your base of knowledge on which you build your business the higher your potential for earnings. If you skimp on any of the following concepts, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice.
Just as there are four concepts below there are also four ingredients cement, water, sand, and gravel that make up the concrete that is poured for a foundation. There are certain percentages of each and if the proper ratios aren’t observed the concrete won’t have the strength to carry the building. Likewise, if you don’t have a good mix of training, niche, content, and engagement the base for your affiliate marketing business will be weak.
Foundations of Affiliate Marketing #1 – Training
Training is the cement that holds all the other elements of Affiliate marketing together. Without training, we wouldn’t know how to bind these different aspects into a strong base.
This isn’t something you’d have learned in school. Sure, you can learn Marketing at a business school but to take that rudimentary knowledge and apply it to an Affiliate environment takes specialised knowledge. Where will you find training that specialised? Training with the depth and breadth to build the foundations of Affiliate Marketing?
The training platform at Wealthy Affiliate is probably the most comprehensive you will find. With their free starter membership you get a taster for what is required to build an affiliate marketing business. If you advance to the premium membership you’ll feel compelled to follow both their trainings – the Online Entrepreneur Certification and the WA Affiliate Bootcamp. When complete you become a seasoned professional. As a premium plus member you’ll have access to further training carrying you onward to Super Affiliate status.
What can you expect from the Wealthy Affiliate training?
In the Online Entrepreneur Certification are 5 Levels with 10 Lessons per Module. The five levels are: Getting Started; Building your own Traffic Producing Website; Making Money; Mastering Social Engagement and Achieving Maximum Success through Content Creation.
The WA Affiliate Bootcamp has the following phases of training: Getting your Business Rolling; Content, Keywords & Conversions; Giving your Site Social Value; Get Visual, Get Aesthetic, Get a Brand through Media;Knowing your Audiences and Catapulting your Referrals; Bing, Yahoo and the Power of PPC and finally How to Scale Successful PPC campaigns.
Discovering a niche is the second of the foundations of Affiliate Marketing. One of the meanings of niche is that it is a hollow space created to hold a statue, the other is that it is a product, service, or job that has a specific focus. Both of these are relevant. The hollow space creates a focus for something special to you whether it be an art work or something sacred.
Your niche should be sacred to you. When people arrive at your site they should be able to see that you care about whatever it is that you’ve chosen as a niche.
Perhaps you’ve landed here because you’ve searched affiliate marketing specifically but you’re not sure how it works. So, what do you have to do to find this narrow and specialized service or product? Maybe you were thinking this could be a new way of creating an income and it is, but what is a niche?
You May Already Be Doing It!
You may already be doing it and have found your way here for a different avenue of putting your product or service out there.
Do you have a passion – something that you’ll do for free without expectation of payment.
Something you’ll help others with just because you can.
Have you ever watched someone who has model trains? They’re totally in sync with what they’re doing and be occupied for hours without noticing the passage of time. It’s what is called a peak state or a state of flow. Is there anything that you’re involved in that you’ve noticed creates a similar experience in you? If there is, this holds the possibility of a niche.
What challenges have you experienced?
Are there problems you are in the process of solving or have solved in the past?
Challenges and problems could specific to your passion or they could be associated with your current business. They could be affecting others who are looking for the solution you’ve already discovered.
You may have dealt with a health challenge in a way that caused a remission or easing of the symptoms. Use the knowledge you gained in the process to create a service or product to help others.
And there’s the million dollar question.
What would you see yourself doing if money and time was no object to you?
If any of those things resonate with you, There is no better time to start than now.
The third of the foundations of Affiliate Marketing is Creating Content. This is the engine that will drive traffic to your website and help you gain traction in the marketplace for your offer. Optimising the content for search engines and choosing relevant keywords will oil that that engine.
Going back to the concrete metaphor, one of the features of our content will be what is called pillar or cornerstone content. This is content that will serve to establish your authority as an expert in the field you’ve chosen. When a potential customer puts a search term into a search engine if you’ve done your SEO right your page or post may come up on the first page.
The more cornerstones or content pillars you have will be beneficial for your website. As I said before the deeper the foundation the higher you can build your business. Pillars and cornerstones sit on the foundations enabling a structure that can carry the weight of the building growth.
If you’re just starting out or perhaps you’ve been doing it for a while but have lost your way a bit your pillar content can bring you back to what is important.
Plan It
Before you begin to create your content, plan it. Write down your ideas. I think it was Whitney Young who said, “It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to be offered an opportunity and not be prepared for it.” Making a content strategy prepares you for that opportunity. To be ready when it arrives.
Have some goals for content creation. How many words will you write each day? How many posts will put out in a week. Will you create video for YouTube or Vimeo. Are podcasts going to feature in your strategy.
If it’s a passion you’re going to focus on, you’ll know how you first got into it, if you made some mistakes along the way, also remember and recount your successes. What are some of things you need in the undertaking of this passion? Are some better than others? Can you write about the comparisons of products you have used and perhaps didn’t use while in pursuit of your passion.
If you’re providing a solution to a challenge or health issue you have, again you can set the scene, tell readers about your accomplishments and share your defeats. Let them about the battles you lost on the way to winning the war.
Wealthy Affiliate has a dedicated platform for creating posts to be published in WordPress. Using the Site Content platform can enable to create and achieve goals around your subject matter on the way to building out your website. Once you have this process happening there are avenues to encourage engagement with your posts through comments also on the platform. This is also a boon for search engine optimisation and better rankings.
Engagement – Being Social
Engagement is the last of the foundations of Afffiliate marketing we will be covering here. I’ve just said engagement will help boost SEO for your site. The other thing that it does is increase your personal authority. When you’ve posted a review of a product and have received questions regarding the review, the way you answer it will demonstrate your knowledge of the subject.
Described as the World’s Greatest Marketer, one of the things Seth Godin says about marketing is that it is about telling your story. I tell the story of how I got to doing this in my About Me post. And what do people need to get from your story. They want to know, “Who are you?”, What do you have?”, and “Why they should care.” Based on your story your readers or the people watching your video content, or listening to your podcast will make a decision on whether they can trust you. Establishing the trust of a potential customer will give you traction in your particular niche.
Social Media
Social Media gives us a great gift for being able to create a relationship with current and future customers. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, YouTube and others are all ways to open up a channel to engage with your audience. Also if you’ve ever signed up to do an online training you’ll have accepted an invitation to join a private Facebook group or you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other participants within the platform itself.
Wealthy Affiliate has this function built into their platform. They have an avenue for you to post comments in other members sites and in doing so be able to receive comments on your site. A nested ability to create engagement. Anything you post with in the platform itself be it question or blog post can be commented on also giving plenty of opportunity to develop the skill in a friendly environment.
Closing thoughts
There’s a story I heard about a builder who was coming up to retirement. He’d grown a little tired of the industry and was starting to take short cuts in his work.
He received another commission to build a house from his employer. This job took him through to his retirement. Unfortunately his short cuts had become habitual. Doing the preliminaries before he started the build he ordered cheaper timber and cladding for the build and hired subcontractors whose rates were lower than what was an average price.
All the way through the build he had an indifferent attitude to the work. Consequently when it came to completion and he looked back at the finished product he felt less than satisfied. Twenty years ago when he was a in his prime the work he put in was immaculate. Now it showed the signs of tiredness that he was unconsciously experiencing within himself.
The day came for him to sign it back over to his employer. When he met with the company director and went to hand back the keys to the completed property, the director took the keys and placed them in the builder’s hand and closed his fingers around them. “These are yours now”, he said.
I think it’s easy to imagine what the builder was feeling as this happened. I know what I feel – If I’m the builder engaging contractors for specialised work, I’ll employ them for the quality of their craft. Instead of indifference, I want the pride in my work that I had at the peak of my career.
Excellence
Bring your best you to the business of affiliate marketing. You’re building the house of your business here. You’re creating a virtual shop front. How do want customers to see you? Will they see a professional?
“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
Three months into Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What you need to know.
2020 Changed Wealthy Affiliate
Last year in the midst of Covid-19 a lot happened to the platform. 2020 changed Wealthy Affiliate. The interface changed. It was a bit of struggle initially to get my head around the newness and the way the functions now worked. Luckily things were bigger and easier to see so for the more focally-challenged. I was bit lost for a few weeks but eventually found my feet and was away again.
It is not a bad thing to have to relearn something. Having to rewire our brains in a new way to deal with new process creates a healthy resilience within us.
Thankfully the great stuff about Wealthy Affiliate didn’t change. The live chat function stayed in the same place on the right hand side of the page. The ability to set up our dashboard how we want it.
For me I love having the recent questions at the top of my page, followed by members blog posts. There’s always something there of interest, and a way of paying our experience forward by helping other members who may be new to the whole avenue of affiliate marketing.
On the home page everything became bigger. Text, images, comments, chat. And the menu being across the top at all times is definitely more user friendly if you want to change tack in the middle of a task. It’s interesting going through some of the older training videos and seeing how the platform was when they were made.
The icons at the top right of the screen have become bigger and again make task switching on the platform more user friendly.
Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about the Platform
Looking at the top menu from left to right – Clicking on the WA or Home will get you to your Dashboard. Find and click on the pin to the right of the Dashboard and you can select how you want your dashboard to look. Choose from stats, new blogs, questions or the Top 10 blogs. Some options give the opportunity to engage on the platform with other members through asking or answering the questions, reading and commenting on the blogs.
By engaging with members through blogs and questions you can increase your rank in WA. Liking comments and working through the training modules will also increase your ranking. As you grow in confidence using the platform you’ll be able to assist other newbies coming on board.
Stepping to the right on the menu you have access to the training elements of Wealthy Affiliate. As this is very comprehensive aspect of the platform we’ll examine it more closely in the next section.
Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about Websites
Moving right along we have Websites. In this tab we have:
Site Manager – you can view the sites you own or through siterubix, and where they at in terms of development. You can login here to them as well as accessing the email for each respective site.
Site Builder – self explanatory – get in there – click the appropriate button and follow the prompts. Any stumbling blocks, use the search function or ask a question.
Site Domains – purchase a domain here or add a subdomain to an existing domain you have.
Site Content – It is what I’m using to create this blog post and one of the best things about Wealthy Affiliate. Build all your content within the platform including images and then publish it to your website. Awesome.
Site Comments – By the giving and receiving of comments on your’s and other’s websites you gain traction in SEO on Google and this increases traffic to your sites. For every 2 comments you give you can ask for a comment on a particular post or page.
Site Feedback – By clicking on this again you can offer or receive feedback on a website. By offering to give feedback you can gain WA credits which can enable you to receive feedback or comments when you need them for a new page or post you’ve created.
Site Support – If you’re stuck for an answer through the search function or something has gone wrong with the website you are building you can put a question to the site support team. They will reply promptly to any query.
Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about Classes, Research, Promote, Publish and Help
Next to Websites there is Classes.
In Classes, there are a whole array of trainings. If there is a diamond next to the training it is available to Premium members. A crown next to it means you’ll have to upgrade to Premium Plus. You can search for different categories of training down the right hand side of the page.
Following Classes to the right is Research. Clicking this takes you to the Jaaxy website – Wealthy Affiliates own keyword research tool. As a premium member you have complete access to Jaaxy Lite. There are also Pro and Enterprise packages.
Promote is next after Research. Promote is dedicated to providing Affiliate programs to promote through your websites if they can align with the niche you have chosen.
Publish takes you directly into the Site Content function.
Help – In the Help Centre you can access Site Support, Ask a Question (to the community) access the private messaging function, or talk to someone through Live Chat.
Search – Click on this and enter whatever it is on your mind about what you’re doing in Wealthy Affiliate. Select the option that seems the most relevant to you.
Live chat – Ask questions, or engage with the community
Pencil – This will open up more icons. They are quick actions enabling you to:
Blog at WA,
Create Training,
Write an Article,
Build a website, or
Find a domain
Dollar Sign – Your personal access for tools to promote the Wealthy Affiliate opportunity.
Bell – Your notifications. You can personalize this setting up with different options.
Envelope – The inbox. Private messages and communications with Site Support will turn up in here.
Files – Allow to toggle between the Wealthy Affiliate Site and the Jaaxy Site
Your Picture – Accesses everything to do with your profile.
Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about the Membership
To excel in any field requires practice. Affiliate Marketing is no different. We can paint a picture of ourselves in our minds as successful affiliate marketers but until we start taking action that is all it will be – a picture. When we begin to take the plunge into what is required then we build real muscle for the business.
If we come into it raw we are firstly going to need some training. I have trained under other platforms and can say that Wealthy Affiliate offers the most comprehensive training I have seen. Below are the features of their training.
It helps to know that there are three different levels of membership at Wealthy Affiliate. The starter membership is free and gives you two free websites that you can build out yourself to get a feel for what is required in this affiliate marketing business. In the starter membership you also have access to the first module of the Online Entrepreneur Certification.
The premium membership unlocks access to all modules of both the Online Entrepreneur Certification and the Affiliate Bootcamp as well as 52 video trainings per as well as other training offered by other members on different aspects of webpage building, affiliate marketing, wordpress, dropshipping, social media and other aspects that are relevant to the business.
The next level membership is premium plus. Everything mentioned before in regard to training plus more training available only at that level. For members wanting to stretch themselves into Super Affiliate status.
Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about the Training
Online Entrepreneur Certification
5 Levels – 10 Lessons per Module.
Getting Started
Building your own Traffic Producing Website
Making Money
Mastering Social Engagement
Achieving Maximum Success through Content Creation
Affiliate Bootcamp
7 Phases – 10 Lessons per Module
Getting your Business Rolling
Content, Keywords & Conversions
Giving your Site Social Value
Get Visual, Get Aesthetic, Get a Brand through Media
Knowing your Audiences and Catapulting your Referrals
Bing, Yahoo and the Power of PPC
How to Scale Successful PPC campaigns
My Training Activity
Whenever you access any training it will come up in at the top of your Training Activity. You can then scroll through those subsequent trainings if you haven’t finished with any of them.
Training HQ
Follow the prompt in the search field to find a specific training or scroll through to see the many offerings.
Classrooms
Choose from 13 different classrooms to access tutorials in those featured classrooms.
Earlier there was an invitation to launch off the Wealthy Affiliate platform and dive right in. There is no better way. You can dip your feet in to see if this is something you want to continue with. Start wading into to shallow end of the pool until you become more confident. Use your starter membership to get a feel for the opportunity that is available. If it feels right use the premium membership as a springboard for your successful affiliate marketing business.
It has been a little over twelve years since I started my first blog CreativeMythology It grew out of a fascination I had with mythology at the time and how it fit with the personal development arena I was exploring at the time.
I tried monetizing it but somehow the ads that came didn’t seem compatible with the content I was producing so I removed the ads and just kept adding content that sat well with what I was trying to do with the site.
Fast forward eight years and I’m introduced to affiliate marketing and I imagine this could be the answer to monetization. At the time I’m struggling with motivation and believe this is the opportunity to really develop some traction online using motivation as a niche.
Only trouble is I’m dabbling, I’m the guy who came to the swimming pool to swim, I see all the other swimmers in the pool and I sit on the edge of the pool and just dip my toes in. I’d picked up a few skills along the way and could maintain a presence in the Wealthy Affiliate forums helping out here and there. I started well with posts and then my interest would wane. I started another site and same thing. A few posts and then….
WHY YOU WANT TO HELP PEOPLE
Yes, I was that guy who was helping other members from the side of the pool. And perhaps the entrepreneur side of Wealthy Affiliate isn’t my piece. After creating some content for another of my websites WhatILearnedBy.com I realized that all the personal and professional development courses I have done over the years could be particularly relevant to marketers endeavouring to get an online affiliate business launched.
THE GOAL OF YOUR SITE
My mission now is to create a site that not only facilitates a learning process for aspiring affiliate marketers wanting to set their own website, but also provide other tools to assist them if their motivation and productivity begins to fall away
If you ever need a hand or have any questions, feel free to leave them below and I will be more than happy to help you out.
All the best,
Andrew Michael Challies
AndrewsAffiliateToolbox.SiteRubix.com
