Your Blogging Mentor

What To Do About the Recent Amazon Affiliate Commission Changes

Affiliate Sales • Making Money 2 Comments

Have you been affected by the recent Amazon affiliate commission changes as a blogger or influencer? Read this for some practical encouragement & advice!

Amazon affiliate commission changes

Those of you who are Amazon affiliates probably know that Amazon released some pretty significant changes to their commission structure last week.

For a lot of people, this was really devastating news — especially if Amazon is one of your primary sources of income.

I have personally experienced this in the past with Amazon, and I want to offer some hope and encouragement!

My Past Experience With Major Commission Decreases

Not only did I get my commissions cut last week, but years ago Amazon did a major cut to my commissions.

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How to Get over Your Fear of Marketing to Your Audience

Affiliate Sales • Blogging Tips • Email Marketing • Making Money • Product Creation Leave a Comment

Do you have a fear of marketing to your audience? Are you afraid of coming off as a sleazy sales person? Read this for some encouragement and practical advice!

how to get over your fear of marketing to your audience

Do you want to grow your blog and make a part-time or full-time income, but you’re afraid of selling to your audience? Are you fearful you might come off as a sleazy salesperson to your readers?

If you have a fear of marketing, I promise you’re not alone. This holds a lot of new and even experienced bloggers back from increasing their income!

Here’s what I suggest for getting over your fear of selling to your audience…

1. Change your mindset.

First off all, it’s important that you change your mindset — from selling to serving.

Instead of thinking about marketing to your audience, think about serving your audience well.

Serving your audience can often coincide with income-earning opportunities!

You might be letting your readers know about a great deal with an affiliate link, creating products that will meet their needs, or providing services that will help them be successful.

When you prioritize serving your readers well, it changes your perspective on marketing to your audience.

It’s a win-win opportunity. You can serve your audience well and also earn an income for your family (and maybe even eventually your employees!).

This will also help you think about opportunities from a service mindset instead of a selfish aspect.

Remember — it’s about making an impact, not making more money. The money will come over time, if you focus on serving well.

2. Ask yourself if you believe in your product.

If you’re going to sell something to your audience, you have to genuinely believe in what you’re selling.

Ask yourself if you believe in what you’re sharing and if you believe it will change lives.

As a blogger, you will be thrown SO many different income-earning opportunities. And it’s important that you believe in the ones you choose to promote.

I’ve turned down thousands and thousands of opportunities over the years because it’s not a good fit for me, my audience, or both.

You shouldn’t sell something that you can’t stand up on a stage and confidently declare how it makes a difference in your life.

And this includes your own products! You have to believe in your own products before you can get others to believe in them. Because if you don’t, nobody else will.

If you believe your product will change lives, you don’t have to beat around the bush, be mousey about it, hold back, or apologize for marketing. Because you know the product has the potential to change people’s lives, and you’re excited to share about it!

The truth is that your product won’t change everyone’s lives, and there will be people who don’t like it or disagree with you. And that’s okay.

But you need to believe that it will change the right people’s lives — the people who are eager for it, need it, and ready for it. Your market.

If you hold back out of fear, people will miss out and you won’t impact people the way you want to!

3. Provide free value to your audience regularly.

Don’t always sell.

Offer stuff for free regularly to serve your audience, build a relationship, and establish trust.

When you provide a lot of free value in this way, the money will come naturally later.

In fact, you might find that people even BEG you for premium products and services when you provide free value regularly and build relationship and trust with your audience.

Then, when the timing is right, you can make an offer or sell a product to an audience that is ready for it!

I try to serve, serve, serve…then sell.

So for every one time I sell something, I try to serve in free ways three times that amount.

And when you provide great value for free, people know they can expect amazing value if it’s a paid product!

What tips do you have for getting over a fear of marketing to your audience? Let us know in the comments!

Need More Affiliate Marketing Help?

Psst! If you’re looking for some ideas on affiliate programs to try out, be sure to sign up for our FREE list of 20+ top affiliate programs perfect for beginner bloggers!

The 4 Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Affiliate Sales • Blogging Tips • Making Money 8 Comments

Are you brand new to using affiliate links? Take note of these biggest affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid!

affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid

If you’re just starting to use affiliate links, it’s really important to know how to use them to your best advantage so that your affiliate marketing strategies can be successful!

What is an affiliate link?

First of all, if you’re brand new to blogging and don’t know what an affiliate link is, it’s simply a link that a reader clicks on and earns you a commission by taking a certain action or making a purchase.

Affiliate marketing is a really great way to make a lot of money as a blogger. You can promote your favorite products, great offers and deals, sales, and more using affiliate links.

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One Simple Tip to Increase Affiliate Conversions

Affiliate Sales • Making Money Leave a Comment

Do you have a big product launch or affiliate promotion coming up soon? Try this one simple tip to increase affiliate conversions!

Increase affiliate conversions

I tried something new a couple months ago during a big affiliate promotion, and it worked so well for me that I wanted to share it with you! I couldn’t believe how much this one simple tip increased my affiliate conversions!

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How I’m Making $100 to $200 Extra Per Day — On Autopilot

Affiliate Sales • Email Marketing • Making Money • Product Creation 7 Comments

One of my big goals for 2019 was to increase passive income by redoing all of our email newsletter welcome sequences and creating some really intentional funnels for each of these.

(See my business goals list below. You can see all of my 2019 goals here.)

blogger's business goals for 2019

I have been hard at work behind the scenes learning how to set up funnels, experimenting with what works, and discovering a lot of things that don’t work. (I don’t know what it is, but it seems I’m the person who always has to learn things the hard way!)

And I’m truly having so much fun with this! Plus, I’ve been shocked by the results!

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How to Make More Money This Weekend (plus a HUGE sale!)

Affiliate Sales • Making Money 3 Comments

Black Friday is in two days and this is an amazing time of year to promote some of your favorite deals and sales. It’s one of our biggest earning times of the year and I can’t stress enough how fantastic a time of year this is to share deals with your blog readers using referral or affiliate links — especially if they are deals on great Christmas gift ideas!

I’ve got 4 proven tips to help you make more money as a blogger during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, but before I share those, I wanted to let you know that our HUGE Black Friday sale is LIVE!

See all the details of our 2018 Black Friday Sale here.

Psst! If you’re not signed up for our affiliate program, you can sign up here and share your affiliate links with your followers (using some of the tips I share below in this post) and make 50% commissions on any sale generated through your link!

Black Friday Sale Pricing — Our Best Prices of the Year!

Here are all of the courses included in the Black Friday sale + the price you’ll get with the coupon code:

Want to purchase more than one course? Go to this page and you can add multiple courses to your cart at one time.

Don’t forget, use coupon code BF2018 to get the 50% off pricing. This coupon code is valid through Monday, November 26, 2018.

And now for my best tips on how to make more money this weekend…

My Top Tips for Promoting Black Friday Sales

1. Share your personal experience with a product.

Talk about how it has impacted you and why you think others should buy it. Don’t just say: Here’s a sale you should check out.

Nope, tell people exactly how this product is going to make a significant difference in their life. Don’t tell them that they should buy; convince them as to why they should buy it.

Some questions to ask yourself as you write posts/do Facebook Lives & IG stories/put together email newsletters about products:

  • What problem did this product solve for you?
  • How did this product meet a need in your life?
  • How did this product impact you in significant way?
  • How will people benefit right away from buying this product?

2. Send out an email newsletter about this product/sale.

Blog posts and social media posts can be effective, but they will never hold a candle to how an email in someone’s inbox will convert. Don’t be shy; write and send out emails to your email list. (Be sure to keep this in mind when you write your email newsletters.)

Pay special attention to your subject line — that’s what’s going to convince someone to actually open your email. And then make sure that you write an email newsletter that is both interesting but also compelling.

Maybe start by sharing a story of something personal and then tie in the product to that story. Finally, close with

telling people how the product will impact their life (bullet points can work great for this!) and why they should buy this weekend because of great sale.

Be sure to include a clear Buy Now button or Click Here to Buy Now type of live link at the bottom. Make it incredibly easy for people to take advantage of the sale!

3. Talk about the product on a Facebook Live or Instagram Story.

You guys, I know that I sound like a broken record, but live video is where it is at. It’s one of the most effective ways to convert sales — in an incredibly organic and engaging way.

Seriously, you gotta try FB Live and IG stories. I know it’s scary. I know it’s outside your comfort zone. I know that it takes practice. But it really, really works. In fact, oftentimes, live video will beat out or match the conversions we see when we send out email newsletters.

Plus, the more you do it, the easier it gets. For real. (I never, ever thought I’d fall in love with live video. But I have!)

As always, the more you can point people to your own personal experience with a product, the more you can promote the specific benefits of a product, and the more you bring your own unique voice, the more effective your promotion will be.

A few tips for live video: make sure that you are personable (use people’s names if they are leaving comments), have a simple outline, be interesting and overly enthusiastic (it translates to energy on the camera), make your call to action very clear, repeat it multiple times, and use your affiliate link in your teaser text on FB Live and in your bio on Instagram (if you don’t yet have the swipe up feature).

4. Promote the product/sale in multiple ways.

For instance, when I promote our Black Friday sale and Cyber Monday sale on my products to my audience, I will do multiple blog posts, multiple Facebook Lives, multiple Instagram stories, plus I’ll send out multiple email newsletters and post on Facebook.

I know that might seem like overkill, but remember that not everyone follows you on every platform, not everyone logs into every platform every day, and all platforms now have algorithms in place so not everyone who follows you on them sees all of your posts.

But more than that, what I’ve seen to be so true is that people need to hear about something multiple times before they will decide to actually get up and take action! ?

What I Am NOT Saying To Do

Now, I’m not saying that you should post the same photo five times on Facebook. That would be boring and would frustrate people.

What I AM saying is to get creative and come up with multiple ways you can promote the sale — focusing on different aspects of the product, sharing it from different angles, sharing a quote photo that you can weave in a message about the product, sharing a picture you took of the product, sharing a video where you talk about how the product has impacted you, and maybe sharing a post specifically about the sale (this is usually most effective during the last few hours of the sale).

Any time I’m planning to promote a product in earnest on my site/social media, I will sit down and brainstorm ideas for different ways I can promote it, different pictures I can use, different angles I can approach it from, different features I can focus on.

Then, I think about which platform is best for which type of promotion and then I map out a plan for promotion where I write down each idea and what day and what platform I’ll use.

This really helps me so that I’m able to promote the same sale over and over again without frustrating or boring people — and it also helps me to not fall into a creative rut.

Now it’s your turn to get out there and make some great commissions! I’m cheering for you and your success as an affiliate this weekend.

And don’t forget to go use coupon code BF2018 to get 50% off all of our courses!

P.S. Our Black Friday Sale is our best pricing of the entire year! I don’t want you to miss this opportunity to grab some great deals on blogging courses and other courses to help you be more organized, calm, and intentional in your every day life.

How Google Analytics Can Help You Increase Your Affiliate Income

Affiliate Sales • Making Money • WordPress Tutorials 6 Comments

Google AnalyticsGuest post by Micah Klug from HomeFaithFamily.com

Tell me if this sounds familiar…

You start blogging because you have a message you want to share with the world, but you also want to help supplement your family’s income.

Once you start deep diving into the many ways you can monetize your blog you might begin to feel uncomfortable as a salesperson or worry about being too pushy in linking to products on Amazon through their affiliate program.

But it’s very possible to make money blogging without feeling like a sleazy salesperson!Continue Reading

How to Make Money as a Blogger on Amazon Prime Day

Affiliate Sales • Making Money 26 Comments

I recently received an email from one of my Your Blogging University™ students asking me how they could make the most of Amazon Prime Day as a blogger.

In case you didn’t already know, Amazon has an excellent affiliate program called Amazon Associates. And if you’ve followed me as a blogger over at my other site, MoneySavingMom.com, you know that I’m a big fan of Amazon deals.

In fact, Amazon has consistently been a big source of affiliate income for me for many years! And one of the best annual earning opportunities as an Amazon affiliate is on Amazon Prime Day.Continue Reading