Updated: March 2nd, 2023.
Things To Keep In Mind When Looking For A Mentor
Over the years I’ve learned to not be easily impressed by what people show me on social media.
❌ That expensive car that people brag about – the one they sometimes can barely afford (but can afford to rent for a day for PR purposes).
❌ All the money screenshots they post mean nothing if they’ve helped no one except themselves.
❌ All the smiling selfies on the beach don’t always tell the whole story. Same with all the smiling selfies in front of “their” mansion (also easily rented for a PR stunt)
❌ That laptop lifestyle. Don’t even get me started here… who the hell takes a laptop to the beach… really now? Sand and laptops don’t mix! And who can read the screen in the blazing Sun?
When searching for a mentor you should ask yourself a few things:
✔ Have they actually helped people or only helped themselves?
✔ Do they actually add value or just brag about how much money they make daily?
✔ Do they represent your core values and beliefs?
People easily get impressed by money screenshots which can be faked very easily in Photoshop by the way (or in other ways), or what people buy.
Here’s a demo video showing the shocking truth about how veteran internet marketer Gobala Krishnan can get $1.5 million – or any amount he wants – to show up daily in his JVZoo account.
Don’t worry, Gobala is an honest marketer who’s always ethically earned income online by selling useful products and services.
His intention was not to mislead anyone.
In the video, he shows how easy it is to modify the values on a page by using the “Inspect Element” tool in Google Chrome.
And it’s easy to take a screenshot of the results.
Someone else’s lifestyle doesn’t help you one bit.
What matters is: will they actually help you?
When I started out, there were very few criteria for selecting a mentor.
Someone who seemed to know more about a topic was pretty much it.
But, over time, I came across so-called “mentors” and “gurus” who didn’t live up to that description for a number of reasons.
So, with experience, I became more picky about the people I chose to learn from.
The mentors I’ve selected over later years had qualities I valued like:
✔ They care about their customers.
✔ The ability to teach me to level up my thinking in my personal life and business (they go hand-in-hand).
✔ They were a family person and very balanced in their personal life which is something I wanted for myself.
✔ They were motivated by impacting others more than how much money they make for themselves.
✔ They were very direct, didn’t sugar coat things and will call me out on my BS. This forced me to constantly play big and stop making excuses (which is so easy to do).
By surrounding myself with people like this, their beliefs, values and morals rubbed off on me.
So when looking for someone to learn from, don’t look for anyone who posts money screenshots on social media.
This is not helpful at all.
Make sure they’re generally a good person and can help you level up in your life.
At different points in your life you will need different business mentors to teach you different business and life skills.
I will always have a mentor in my life to keep helping me level up to become a better person.
Currently my mentor is Zach Crawford (see below).
The final note I want to touch on here is never sign up to mentoring programs with the attitude of “help me!”.
Never expect your mentor to do the work, to constantly motivate you and make you feel good.
A real mentor will not tolerate your small minded thinking, they will call you out when you make excuses and they will expect you to go full out to your full potential.
Someone who just posts cute quotes and makes you feel good in the moment is not a mentor.
Motivation is very short lived.
You want to surround yourself with coaching mentoring that will push you to grow up, level up and take action to reach the goals you set for yourself.
I remember one time when I hit a wall and went to my then mentor pleading for help.
I said “But Adam, I don’t know how to do XYZ tech thing”.
He said “Gary, you know how to use Google and Youtube and how to buy a course to learn, right?”.
What he taught me is that successful people don’t make excuses; they always do the adult thing and find a way to solve the problem they’re facing.
They’re self-reliant and self-motivated and take responsibility for their own actions…or lack of them.
Remember…
Find a mentor who will help you level up. It’s the best investment you will ever make. 
Recommended Affiliate Marketing Mentors
Here are some mentors I can recommend from personal experience:
| My Top 5 Mentors | |
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Zach Crawford – teaches affiliate marketing. He focuses on list building, email marketing and using funnels to collect leads and subscribers. He has a free introductory web class here in his facebook Group. He’s a straight-talking guy who’s made several million dollars through affiliate marketing. His students love him because he interacts with them every day, offering advice and answering questions. Watch a short documentary about him here.
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Spencer Mecham – he’s in the enviable position of being Clickfunnels‘ #1 affiliate in 2018. He earned over $1,000,000 in commissions (not sales). He’s won a couple of Dream Cars there as well. He has a free web class here where he talks about this and how he achieved it along with a case study on how he made $10,000 in 30 days. He also has a free affiliate marketing course here. He too interacts daily with his students. |
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Justin Sardi – there’s not much about YouTube Ads that Justin doesn’t know. He’s one of the most knowledgeable people on the subject of advertising on YouTube. He has a beginner’s course that runs infrequently (it may not be open when you check it) and a comprehensive course that you can sign up to any time. As part of that course, you get 3 months or 6 month’s access to his TubeSift software which is used to easily find videos on YouTube where you can insert your own video ads. Once you start paying renewal fees for the software via the course, it’s less expensive than subscribing to TubeSift directly. This is the software most top marketers use to place ads on YouTube and pay pennies for views. Advertising on YouTube is less expensive and more efficient than advertising on Facebook. |
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Wilco de Kreij – as you probably know, getting quality subscribers for your offers is probably one of the hardest aspects of building your email lists. Wilco is an expert on creating lead generation campaigns that go viral and pull in huge number of subscribers. People who visit your funnels are encouraged to share them for rewards which boosts the audience you can reach enormously. Wilco also provides all the tools you to build these viral marketing campaigns. |
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Russell Brunson – no list of mentors would be complete without this guy. He is the co-founder of Clickfunnels and an absolute marketing expert. Russell and his team have created a number of marketing courses and books on a variety of topics. And he does provide a free affiliate marketing Bootcamp course that will get you started. He also runs the One Funnel Away Challenge every 2 weeks that teaches you how to build your first sales funnel using Clickfunnels. His 3 most popular books are DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets, all pretty much essential reading for any marketer. |
| Other Top Mentors | |
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David Sharpe – he’s been an internet marketer since the 2010 and has been building, running and constantly updating his Legendary Marketer affiliate marketing training course. Like Anthony Morrison, his course is focused on teaching you how to sell his products primarily but there are good general marketing strategies taught here too. |
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Kyle and Carson – these two guys created the Wealthy Affiliate training platform (I reviewed it here) which teaches the “affiliate marketing through blogging” business model. Their course is the most comprehensive available on this strategy and is constantly being updated. There’s a thriving community where it’s all about helping other members. Hands-down, it’s the best course available for this business model. They also provide free web hosting for up to 50 websites for their members.
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Jim Cockrum – he teaches how to sell on Amazon rather than affiliate marketing. Jim has the best course on being an Amazon Seller and you get access to dozens of other courses (see here) as well at no extra cost. He puts his customers first, support is first-rate and his goal is to help people build successful online businesses. He runs a regular podcast as well where he interviews students and coaches about various aspects of online business.
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John Thornhill – teaches something he’s been doing successfully since 2004 and teaching since 2005 – product creation. However, his free webinar has a unique twist as it provides a solution where the attendees can license his products to create the ultimate sales funnel in under 30 minutes that helps build their list while generating an affiliate income at the same time. In fact, I recently signed up for this program and have been documenting my progress with it starting with this post.
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Luke Maguire – puts out some great products in the affiliate marketing, online business and cryptocurrency niches. He doesn’t have an affiliate marketing course as such but all his products do come with individual training. He also runs regular webclasses where he teaches marketing strategies to his customers, If you become one, he’ll email you when the next webclass will take place (usually one every week). Here’s a couple of his products to give you an idea of what the guy is like:
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These are other mentors I have no direct experience with (and haven’t signed up for their courses), but they have been recommended by others I trust:
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Robby Blanchard – is Clickbank’s #1 affiliate. He has some free video training where he talks about how easy it is to earn money online promoting Clickbank products from the comfort of your own home. And there’s his Done-For-You Package 25 Of The Most Profitable Ad Images. Here’s Robby being interviewed by Justin Atlan of Clickbank: He recently launched his latest course called Commission Hero Pro that includes all the tools needed to remove all the manual groundwork students still have to do with his previous Commission Hero system. |
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John Crestani – has a training course designed to help you create a successful affiliate marketing business that generates you a sizeable income month after month. His goal is to help you make $2,500 a week. He discusses all this is his free webinar. |
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All the best,
Gary Nugent
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P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:
This post is as close to perfect as I’ve seen yet. I love how informative and inspiring it is. The fact of telling people of the fakes out there while also informing of the latter was a genius method and I hope to read more of these.
Thanks, Cody. I’ve been burned in the past by fake “gurus” and it’s no fun when you see that a big chunk of your cash has been wasted. Refunds are fine, when they happen, but sometimes they don’t. I just don’t want people falling into the same traps as I did.
Gary.
Dear Gary
Thank you very much for your fantastic website that shows the cheapest and most effective approach to start up your own business which can grow gradually.
Kind regards,
Andrey
Glad I’ve been of some help, Andrey. There are tons of ways to make money online but a lot of these are short-lived as anyone can see by the number of new low-cost products in this niche are released each week. Some are good, some are bad. But even the good ones won’t work for all that long as they exploit loopholes that eventually get plugged.
Building an online business is the only way to create a consistent income. You have to plan for the long term and expect things to move slowly as you build your business up. It’s like the old story of the Tortoise and the Hare. Slow and steady wins the race here too.
While quality online-business courses are seen as expensive, typically being in the $500-$1,000 price range, they should be seen as a business investment, not an out-of-pocket expense.
And having a really good mentor is what will make the difference in helping you succeed when you hit the inevitable obstacles.
All the best,
Gary.
Mentors are awesome things to have. I’m unqualified and don’t personally have a personal mentor. (That was a weird sentence). Then again, I am a hardcore introvert. I have to wonder about the whole laptop at the beach thing. I never gave it much thought. Plastic keyboard cover, screen guard, special glasses, idk. I’ll wait until I get my Lambo and mansion, then let you know.
LOL! 🙂 I too am a hardcore introvert, Cathy. It’s why I keep stalling on making videos that I actually appear and speak in. My lack of courage in putting myself out there means I use Content Samurai to make videos instead. But my mentor, Zach Crawford, keeps telling me I NEED to get over my inhibitions and start making those videos. I think he’s getting frustrated that I won’t really push myself outside my comfort zone on this. I have gone so far as to buy a webcam and a lapel mic and record some videos of me talking that will never see the light of day. Yeah, they’re that bad.
But Zach keeps telling me that’s part of the process of growing as a marketer and a person. Everybody sucks in their first few videos until they start to become comfortable with the process.
Plus, no matter who you are, there are people who are going to like you and people who won’t. And you can’t let worries about those who dislike you stop you in your tracks.
Turns out, Zach was like many of us when he started making videos – he was introverted, camera-shy, lacking in confidence and depressed. He pushed through. So why can’t we?
Lesser mentors would have said to me (and others in the same situation): “Whatever, Dude, it’s your call. I’ve got better things to do.” But Zach keeps pushing me and his other students. And it gets results.
The thing is, you don’t need to wait to get the Lambo and the Mansion to feel you’re qualified to train or give advice to others.
Did you ever see the movie Catch Me If you Can? The movie centers on a con man, Frank Abagnale. When he was just 17 years old, he got a job as a teacher. When he was finally caught, he was asked how he got that and kept that job at such a young age (before teachers even graduate from College). Easy, he said, I just needed to stay one chapter ahead of the class!
So, you don’t need to be a expert. You just need to know more than the next guy and be willing to share your knowledge. That’s what good mentors do and they follow what they teach. Bad ones will teach you one thing and do another.
Gary.
Thank you for this post and I am sure it will help newbies in finding the right mentor for sure. I too hate people who boast about their Lamborghini and villas and private jets and so on. Good to know that I have been mentored by 3 mentors from your list 🙂
Yeah, Prav, the good mentors really do stick out and put their students ahead of their bottom lines.
Hello Sir!
my name is Africa Romeo! I am interested about your program, I want to become an affiliate marketer! Please I need to take some courses from because I am new in that business. Thank you
Hi Africa, I can see that you signed up for the training at GaryNugentMentoring.com. That’s a good place to start as the free lessons there will give you a very good grounding in what affiliate marketing (selling other people’s products for a commission) is all about, and how you can build a business with it.
Affiliate marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It will take time to build your business. All too often, low-priced products and courses are designed to hook the unwary into parting with their money with promises of easy online income.
Take a look at my Why Do You Think So Many People Quit Affiliate Marketing? post which goes over the reasons that most people ultimately fail with affiliate marketing.
This isn’t to put you of or deter you but to get you to realise that having unrealistic expectations will undermine you from the outset.
Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way of making a living (I do it fulltime myself) and gives you so much more control over your life.
You will need to find a mentor and buy their course and follow what they teach if you want to fast-track your results.
Yes, there’s plenty of free training on YouTube but you don’t know who the teachers are, their true level of success and expertise and you don’t get a framework for building a business.
Getting a mentor is something I resisted for a long time. Yes, I did buy courses, but there was no real support after they course developers got my money, So they weren’t mentors.
But I’d reached a stage where nothing I did seemed to move my business any further forward.
And at that point I had to reluctantly admit that I couldn’t do it all on my own. I needed help and guidance.
And the mentor I chose is the very one who’s teaching the free lessons you’re starting to receive.
If you’ve any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’m here to help.
I did a search on finding a mentor and i found your site. Great site! I started affiliate marketing.
Thanks for letting me know you found my post useful, Darren. Maybe you’ll come back at some stage and let us know how your affiliate marketing adventure is going?
Gary