Choose your Toolset
When you want to start your own business, it should be easy to find information about how to register a business in your local area of residence.
Almost always, such information is readily available online.
Here is a simple example:
When you’re a US resident, the following is a very good article by Forbes Business Advisor:
How To Start An LLC In 7 Steps (2023 Guide) – Forbes Advisor
In the Netherlands, my country of residence, one can find a lot of useful information on starting a business on the webpages of the ‘Kamer van Koophandel’:
Just follow the outlined steps and, if possible, choose a form for your company that limits your personal liability. This business type is a tool to protect your private life from limitless liability in the event that not all your business endeavors return a profit.
Profit first—what does it mean?
Through the content I offer, you can learn how to apply a ‘profit first’ approach to your new business. You then need to start with limited investments—only what you can spare. If you can spare nothing, don’t worry, as I will show you how to start for free or almost for free.
Profit first means, in simple terms, that you make limited investments that you are sure you can maintain month over month, and you invest time and effort in proven methods and skills that are easy to learn and apply and have a high likelihood of resulting in additional income on a regular basis for you that is higher than the investments you make each month.
Tools you can use to administrate your business and keep your bookkeeping up-to-date are important to have right from the start. In today’s world, many governments are very keen to see businesses conduct themselves transparently. Tax authorities and relevant rulings are fine-tuned to prevent the evasion of taxes. But if you put the profit first formula in place, paying taxes where they are due does not need to become a challenge for you.
To grow your business, the best tools I have found are those that automate marketing and CRM (customer relationship management) for you. Here is my list of favorites:
Systeme.io - The only tool you need to launch your online business
ClickFunnels™ - Marketing Funnels Made Easy
AWeber | Email Marketing & More for Small Businesses
SamCart | The eCommerce Platform for Creators
CreatorU | Home (creatoru.com)
Learn Business & Join a Community
Starting a business means performing day-to-day activities that result in creating opportunities to earn an income.
Where possible, express your talents as best you can while you do it. This combination makes you attractive as a business owner.
When you start off, the most important first goal to achieve is your first success — your first income as a self-employed entrepreneur. See it as a motivational kick-starter goal. Achieving this goal will give you confidence and momentum to continue to invest by being consistent with your day-to-day tasks, without which you would not be able to foster success.
How precisely to achieve your first goal is something you don’t need to invent from scratch. There are plenty of learning communities and offerings out there to join. Do your research, though, to be sure the offering you pick is mature and legit.
Here is a page from WikiHow on this topic:
How to Know if an Online Business or Company Is Legitimate (wikihow.com)
Best in class Business Development Course and Learning Community
for starting and marketing your online business:
Solutions that teach you how to grow your business typically include step-by-step tutorials in form of an online course.
After doing about a year of research, here’s the program that I chose to promote due to its quality and high ethic standards of its creators:
That Course is the “Roadmap Exclusive”.
The Roadmap Exclusive Course comes with a very supportive community included!
You can also apply to become an affiliate yourself and by that this Business Development and Marketing Automation Course can be your first product to promote to others. This can be especially useful if you do not have any own products yet to sell online.
In that manner you can earl while you learn, which makes this an integrated approach to start your own online income.
But most important I find this course to be very mature and comprehensive. For more, simply visit:
https://stan.store/modernmarketinglead
Here some key benefits:
You can be an absolute beginner - no problem!
Learn everything from scratch with more than 100 video modules outlining it all step by step!
This Course is kept up to date, for example tools you will learn to use have integrated AI option.
Imagine: You can start your own digital marketing business TODAY even with no prior experience.
Once you have setup your tools as outlined in the course, you are right away ready to start.
You can also learn how to automate your business and marketing using best-in-class software solutions.
Please remember…
Learning is not doing, or, in other words, learning how to perform business activities, like marketing, is not the same as putting into practice what you learned. Learning communities and course creators and marketing companies might charge for their services, but they also can deliver great value. My assurance to you is that I will only promote courses or other products after having vetted these to be of great value, to have no hidden fees and which are advertised for correctly in regards to what the product is and what it can or cannot deliver.
Affiliate Marketplaces
It all begins with an idea.
Your core business might not be affiliate marketing but yoga, or you might run an IT training company. But my personal view is that affiliate marketing should always be a part of your business activities.
Affiliate marketing can be:
your primary source of income,
your secondary source of income next to a day job,
or your secondary source of income for your own business.
Let’s stay with the examples.
If you teach yoga, then your affiliate offers can be yoga clothing, yoga mats, interior decoration, ebooks, and online courses either around yoga, meditation, or similar.
If you run an IT training business, your secondary affiliate marketing income can come from computer sales, IT software sales, desk setup accessories such as monitor stands and desk mats, and much more.
What is affiliate marketing?
If you sell your own products, then of course you do marketing to sell them, and the revenue that you generate is 100% yours.
Affiliate marketing is when you help advertise another company’s products and earn a sales commission for doing so. In that case, a part of the revenue is shared with you as your affiliate commission. But your costs are also lower.
You don’t need to
create more of your own products;
or manage product delivery,
shipping, fulfillment, or refunds.
This is all done by the company that owns the products you help sell through your affiliation.
Affiliate marketplaces are basically online shops where you can pick a product you want to help sell, and on such platforms, under your user account, the marketplace automation creates links for you to use to advertise for those products of your choice. The marketplace software also automates payment so that you receive your commission for each sale made through your specific links.
The product owners also provide marketing material, and often they also demand that you stick to the marketing material they provide.
That is also easy to understand, because imagine you misunderstand some of the product features and write your own text and marketing, and then, based on your own misunderstanding, you promote a product incorrectly. Not a good starting point.
So in short, marketing material or prebuilt landing pages are provided to help you, but also to ensure their products are promoted correctly.
All you need to do is create ads or landing pages for the relevant products that link to their sales pages. If any visitor then makes a purchase, you earn your commission.
Earning a commission every month
Often, affiliate products have recurring revenue; think of monthly subscriptions like a software suite such as Adobe Creative Programs or the e-commerce and marketing community solutions I mentioned earlier.
If you promote such products, you can also earn a monthly recurring commission. With both types of commission combined, you can slowly, or maybe even quickly, build up consistent income streams for your own business.
What amount of income can you create? This mostly depends on your own consistency and your mastery of relevant related skills like SEO (search engine optimization). You will not see ‘income disclaimers’ on my webpage here, as all the programs I know and also advertise for have their own disclaimers in place. As always in life, there are no guarantees. But there are best practices you can learn, like the ‘profit first’ approach I teach, which helps you build a consistent income and grow it over time.
My general advice would be to get used to consistently investing time in those daily or weekly tasks to advertise your own or third-party products and ensure you deliver consistent service so customers and partner companies you affiliate with appreciate you as a reliable business professional.
Once you have built up an income that is, in your perception, sufficient, you can start looking into making things step by step easier for you and creating more free time for yourself in addition to your financial freedom. More automation or outsourcing of tasks can help you with that. Read more under Task Outsourcing.
Affiliate marketplaces I find useful and easy to use are:
Ads and Social Media posts
It all begins with an idea.
Once you have started your business and you start selling your own products or advertising affiliate products, you will find that consistency in advertising is key to success in sales.
Under ‘Choose your Toolset,” you learned about CRM tools and software solutions where you can create landing pages, which you then use to connect customers to a product sales page. But how do you get traffic to your landing pages?
Advertising on social media platforms is a good way to create ‘lead magnets’ by simply placing ads and promoting posts for your products and affiliate offers. You can even have multiple accounts to promote your products. This is also a best practice because, through multiple social media accounts, you can easily focus your advertising on each product. The better you tune and optimize for a target audience per product, the more likely it is to convert leads into sales.
You can learn about this by joining a marketing and learning community, as earlier explained, but using social media is not complicated, and you might already know how to use TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. All those platforms offer tutorials as well.
Again, the key to success is consistency. If you don’t post at least a few times per week, social media platforms will see you as inactive, and their algorithms won’t keep promoting your posts. Then fewer people will see your posts, and lead creation for your offerings will go down. If you are consistent and you learn how to use hashtags well, which is a part of search engine optimization, or SEO, then the number of leads has a better chance of rising, and your chances of creating successful sales will grow likewise.
Your advertising and social media postings can also be mostly automated or even outsourced. On this page, I list some automation tools for you, and under the page ‘Out Tasking,” you can find resources to do just that.
If you want to automate your advertising work, I would advise you to use one or more of the most common content creation tools. My favorite tool is Canva, either as an app in the Apple App Store or Android Play Store or simply under:
Free Design Tool: Presentations, Video, Social Media | Canva
Canva has free-of-charge options that are limited but still high-quality enough for you to create an endless number of ads, posts, promotional material, or similar. The basic monthly and paid versions are what I would advise you to use because they deliver a lot of additional value, and I would think that anyone can easily earn back the investment.
You can also automate the creation and posting further using tools like:
Tailwind Social Media & Email Marketing Tool (tailwindapp.com)
Productive Habits
It all begins with an idea.
Most likely, you found my or similar web pages because of an idea you had, and you started to look around to see how you could realize that idea.
To establish earnings outside of a 9-to-5 job, one option is to launch your own business.
What does it take?
You might imagine that not all related actions you need to take are fun or super easy; there will be a learning curve. It helps if you have a creative idea or project to share with the world, but earning an additional income will still require you to develop useful habits, learn useful skills, and be consistent.
Then there is the aspect of marketing yourself and your business. The way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry too much about sounding like a pro or coming across as one.
If you force yourself, you might end up not sounding like you.
If you stay true to yourself and your story, you will also have stable motivation to translate what inspires you and what your goals are into repeatable, successful work habits.
How likely is it that you will reach people?
You might feel impressed and little by realizing that there are a billion or more websites out there; why would one more written by you matter?
Here’s something to realize: You’re connected to more people than you might think, and the reach of a website, a blog post, or posts on social media can easily add up to numbers that resemble a snowball effect.
Imagine getting 100 consistent followers on Instagram.
It is a fact that many users follow a huge number of other user accounts, so if 100 people follow you,
with each of those people being followed by another 100 users,
That amounts to a potential referral audience for you of 100 x 100 = 10000 people you can reach.
Be original; be you!
Your original story is what’s going to make you stand out from the rest. It is a cognitive effect called recognition. Someone who can identify with your story has something in common that resonates. That is how you find your audience and also peers to communicate with, learn from, mentor, and develop as a person and as an entrepreneur.
How do you know if you've found the right words to write or say? If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident, and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve, and your website, blogs, podcasts, or whatever it is you decide to do can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for now.
Later, it will take care of itself. It always does.
Yet another key to success is consistency. Make a promise to yourself to invest time each day in your business, whether it be reading, following a lesson, learning a toolkit, posting on social media, or keeping up with bookkeeping.
Keep the promises you make to yourself, because in the end, if you cannot trust yourself, why should any of your customers, clients, or partners trust you? Begin with yourself, and if it is not easy to be consistent, then think of one small thing you can do.
Make it so small that it would be ridiculous not to do it.
Do it, have a good laugh at yourself, and then do more per day.
Any skill improves when used, and a work habit gets easier the more often you do it.
Why not do something to develop your business and promote it each day? Small actions per day can accumulate.
Each useful action you take will already be rewarded by your own internal reward system.
Your body will, for example, release dopamine or oxytocin, hormones produced by your own body, if you focus on something interesting or complete a useful task.
Keep in mind what I mentioned earlier: steer towards your first success, your first sales, and your first additional income; the first one is the most important one. It is a proof of concept — a confirmation that something you do works. Keep learning and optimizing; pause from time to time and review what works best.
Is what you do in line with who you are?
Where can you improve in terms of effectiveness without making things too complicated? More financial freedom and the freedom to steer your own day and activities will feel great and be a huge benefit. This means it will be very useful for you to keep an integrated focus on success in sales and at the same time the question: ‘How can I best conduct myself precisely to aim at the additional freedom I want?’
Here a Method, an approach to regular activities, a best practive which is known to work:
Attract people who are interested in your services on a regular bases.
Warm up new leads for one or more of your offers.
Convert leads to become your customers.
Apply a method which ensures you delivery to your promises.
To achieve these objectives, and there is no growth in busienss without these, there are some critical choices and regular activities you need to comit yourself to.
activities which ensure to attrack significant more leads/people compared to the new customers you need and can serve. This is of outmost importance as not each lead or interested person will purchase from you.
to warm up leads for your products posting on social media regularly is essentiel. Chose one main platform! You can have more than one platform for posting, but if you divide your attention between many right from the start it will be harder to identify which kind of post works best and attracts the kind of customer you want to attrack.
To support converting leads to customers also use advertising. A good practice is to create one very recognizable ad. An evergreen’ advertising which you can use anywhere. This is like your signature and this one should focus on the precise problem or problems your services can solve for a potential customer.
Networking is key to keep yourself inspired, learn from peers and enable yourself to explore options to work with other creators or outsource some of your activities. At the beginning you might be able to do all service fulfilment yourself. However you are of course aiming to grow your business over time. If you do not orientate yourself within the niche of the services you are providing, optimization and modernization in how you deliver your services is likely to be somewhat more challenging. You can also learn to understand how to tweak your offers to distinguish yourself. What is your specialty within the niche of your products?
Reach out: Last but not least, this is an important key to success
when posting on social media likewise with offers that serve as Lead magnets: include the call to action to reach out to you.
reach out yourself on social media and ensure to contact others who might be interested in one or more of your products.
When you use advertising ensure to include links which ask leads to share at least their name and email address. Ensure the information reaches you (proper automation) and then ensure you react to people without significant delay. This can be partially automated but nothing tops your personal response. In the end people don’t just want to have a conversation with an automation routine You must be real, your services need to have the capability to deliver real results and you (or your trusted team) to directly support and care for your customers will ensure that a positive reputation around you and your services can grow.
Have A Plan - to achieve and do all the above you need (!) a plan
Without a plan you have nothing to go by. What is a method with activities without a plan which funtions to:
lead the way in regards what to do and when?
what to when not all activities lead to the results you need?
outline what to do next at each step of the process from attrackting leads and serving your customers
and what the goal is to work towards, at each stage of the method, at each milestone of your customer’s journey?
The key - regular repeatable actions and a system to perform and optimise these to aim at your ‘ideal customer’
Starting enterpreneurs can be shy in regards to defining their ideal customer. A fear of missing out of not attracting enough leads makes them define their customer group as broad as possible. But in fact daring to define your ideal customer makes you better at targeting precisely your target audience and those who are a match with you and what you offer will feel the right attraction towards you and your services.
Dare to define your ‘ideal customer’ and fine tune your social media posts and ads to that customer group. Apply all of the above mentioned on this page and keep going for at least 6 month. Then check the results and see what you can optimize.
Top 10 High Ticket Products
It all begins with an idea.
It sounds like clickbait, doesn’t it? Just an openly available web page listing the top 10 high-ticket affiliate marketing products for you to promote!
I am listing 10 such products on this page, not just to make you curious but also because it is a common best practice to develop for yourself a Top 10 product list to focus on and promote. Those products should have a "high ticket” value, which means that for each sale, the amount of affiliate commission you receive should be as high as possible.
The calculation here is very simple. Imagine you are promoting 10 products at a sales value of 100 USD, and your commission is 10 percent. Then selling 10 products translates to USD 100 in affiliate commissions for you.
But what if you promote 10 products with a value of 1000 USD each and the commission for each sale is 50%, thus 500 USD? Now, if you are selling 10 products, your affiliate commission is USD 5,000.
The effort it takes to place a post on social media for a 10-dollar product, a 100-dollar product, or a 1000-dollar product is virtually the same. You will have to find a balance within the range of products you have assessed to be of value so that your work to promote them has the chance to be rewarded at a level that you need or aim for.
Your need is to cover your costs, including the hours you are investing in your business, your cost of living, and let’s not forget the costs of any period in your career and life during lower income periods.
What you aim for is something on top of that — an amount that allows you to develop and grow, to enable you to be creative, and to have your moments of inspiration. Imagine for yourself exactly how that would look. Make an attempt to imagine this as a living, actual experience. Because only what you imagine vividly is something you can aim at.
To get there, there is always something you need to let go of and leave behind. Then there is something you need to start implementing in your life. It will not just be to implement something new and not leave anything behind. For example, you cannot keep watching the latest SiFi series each night while at the same time investing evening hours to get your social media presence up and running and filled with quality content. Binge-watching has to go at least to a significant extent, isn’t it?
A better motivation might be for you to imagine how you would feel if you wanted to take action to change your life, but then five months later you did nothing to even make a start, and you’re stuck with everything you actually don’t want anymore. That would not feel any good, would it?
Keep in mind what I wrote about productive habits: they get easier every time you do them. The ‘beasts’ you think you have in front of you either won’t be there for long or might not even be real. Just start, get going, and trust the process.
Here are 10 high-ticket affiliate offers to look into:
The first five are, I think, easy to understand when you read the affiliate program page. In the next five, I have added a description to explain what kind of product, marketplace, or service is offered.
https://www.shopify.com/affiliates
20% per sale, depending on the plan, recurring commission
https://www.500affiliates.com/#Home
Between USD 200 and 800 per sale, one time commission
https://www.villiersjets.com/affiliates/
USD 1000 or more per sale, one time commission
https://www.liquidweb.com/partner-community/affiliate/
Between USD 150 and 2000 per sale, one time commission
https://www.hubspot.com/partners/affiliates
In average about 270 USD, one time or recurring commission
https://fanfuel.co/affiliates/
50% or more per sale, multiple market leading brands in health and wellness, reliable repeat order tracking of customers which leads to a mix of one time and recurring commission
Between 20 and 50% commission, a leading health and beauty product marketplace, regular commissions above 300 USD for a typical combination of products sold
https://organifi.everflowclient.io/affiliate/signup
Organifi is a superfood-centric marketplace; commissions are at 30% lifetime commission on the front end and all upsells.
https://smartproxy.com/proxy-affiliate-program
Smartproxy allows business data comparison in competitive market spaces, search engine results page (SERP) scraping, ad verification, and more. You can earn up to USD 2000 per customer you refer.
https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030718573-Become-a-Thinkific-Affiliate
Thinkfic is an online course creation platform that has over 50,000 instructors and about 100 million courses. You earn per referral with a potential maximum of 1700 USD
Disclaimer:
None of these links are affiliate links in the sense that I would earn myself a commission if you clicked on them. There is no motivation for me other than to illustrate for you that high-ticket affiliate programs exist for many kinds of products and solutions. By providing this list, I hope to motivate you to look into High Tickets Affiliate Marketing as a potential source of income for yourself. There are no income guarantees, but to look into options for an additional income does not cost anything… right?
A general piece of advice:
Ensure to read the affiliate conditions in detail, which means the contract under which you can start to be an affiliate for a company and its products. Ensure you fully understand and can agree to the terms. If you have questions about the terms, simply reach out to the company (product owner) in question. Often, the terms included determinations that you’re not allowed to use spam (unsolicited emails) or methods like cold calling (just call any random number) or similar. Companies want their brands to come across as mature and respectful, minding privacy, rules and regulations, and the law. Affiliates are therefore asked to conduct themselves in a way that aligns with the brand’s values, which are woven into the terms quite often.