How do you get started with affiliate marketing?
Where does a beginner start?
(Hint: there’s a very bad way, another very bad way, and one solid-gold way.)
The fact that you’re here says you have some awareness of the advantages of Affiliate Marketing.
It’s how I made my first money online, it’s the focus of my business today and I remain convinced there is nothing else that even comes close to it.
➨ No selling. No products. No inventory. No customers. No orders. No delivery. No packaging, No shipping. No prospect questions, No customer complaints, No wrestling with the credit card company.
➨ The potential is there for 4-figure days and 5-figure months. The Exact Same business model that lets you earn occasional pocket money scales up to cover car payments, rent, mortgage, a job-quitting income and beyond.
➨ The hours are whatever you choose. Working from home or a coffee shop or a beach in Hawaii.
That’s one heck of a sweet set of characteristics.
And all you have to do is send traffic to an offer. Or from a different angle, get an offer in front of someone who’s interested.
You can delete a truckload of skills off your “Most needed” list. You can focus on a very few things and get results. So your learning curve is a fraction of what it can be for other Online marketing opportunities. And the time from “Go” to “Income banked” can be a lot shorter, too.
It’s real sad, given all those desirables, but I’d guess that 95% to 99% who intend to make a success out of Affiliate marketing, fail.
That’s because they take one of the two Very Bad No Good Going To Fail paths.
And just as sad, they do it with a hopeful smile on their face.
The 1st “Going to Fail” Path is this one:
Bad Choice #1.
It’ll cost you a fortune – although it starts by looking like the least expensive way to start making some money.
It’s this: Deciding you can figure it out yourself.
It wastes a LOT of effort-time, and it wastes a lot of calendar-time because it drags out over months while continually giving you false hope. Even over years. You know, even the Project Management experts in these types of projects miss their deadlines by 222% on average. Think you’ll do better? Think again.
And then, at the end of it you’ll realize you are only just now in the position you could have been 3, 6, 12 months earlier if you’d not been so determined to break a trail through the bush when there’s a paved road 10 feet to your left. And even 3-year-olds on tricycles are going faster than you.
Because you don’t know in detail what you need to know, you’ll waste a LOT of time learning what you MIGHT need rather than focusing on what you DO need. You can get pulled in to learning about a lot of interesting things that are quite complex, take HOURS to learn, days and weeks to get good at, and change all the time.
You’ll spend money you wish you hadn’t, because good learning material costs money (and for heaven’s sake don’t try to pick it all up via YouTube Videos. That’s about the only tactic I can think of to make a Bad Choice even worse.).
You’ll discover that “trial and error” can involve a lot of trials and a lot of errors and they all either cost you money or waste your time. Or both.
More importantly, and this is what the “I can figure it out” people don’t understand, you’ll lose months of the commissions you’d have made if you’d taken a better and faster path. With a roadmap set out by someone who’s not just been there but LIVES there and has taught scores of people who can point to their success.
Look: if “doing it right” gets you to $3K a month (for example) 6 months faster than your trial and error does, that didn’t just cost you whatever money you wasted on the way. And it didn’t just cost you $18K of lost commissions to “do it my way.” It also cost you the income lost from the following months that you could have been at $5K or $10K per month, sooner.
12 months from “Go” that decision to go it alone could be costing you high-4-figures or 5-figures a month.
Go figure. Seriously. Think about that.
OK, Bad Choice #2.
It’ll cost you a fortune, again. And again, that’s even though it starts by looking like a very inexpensive way to start making some money.
Again it wastes a LOT of effort-time, and it wastes a lot of calendar-time because it drags out over months by continually giving you false hope. Even, over years.
And at the end of it you’ll realize you haven’t one moved inch forward towards your Goal.
What’s the Bad Choice this time? It’s getting caught-up in a whirlpool.
Look, no offence intended here but one of the biggest and most frantic Niches in Internet Marketing is selling inexpensive products to “Newbies.” To newcomers; beginners who have a Dream of making money online.
There are hundreds of marketers out there who will see you as fresh meat. And scores of them are really, really expert at holding your Dream out in front of you and offering you an inexpensive product with a sales pitch so finely-tuned that even experienced marketers get sucked in, sometimes.
The last time I checked, there were 18 new product launches being scheduled over the next 4 days. And 72 new launches over a 16-day period. Mind-boggling.
There are 100’s of Affiliates lining up to promote these to people like you.
The sales pages from the vendors are extraordinary … often costing 5-figures to have written. The vendor will offer big Bonus packages. The Affiliates are all promoting the exact same thing so THEY try to separate themselves from the crowd by offering huge Bonus Packages.
(I got an email in the past 2 weeks offering a Bonus Package of 58 products if I bought a $20 product through that Affiliate’s link!)
I am on a lot of marketers’ email lists because I like to see what they are doing. I ROUTINELY get emails from 20+ marketers promoting the same new launch. And the so-called “launch series” of emails is often 5 – 8 emails. So that can be 100 – 160 emails associated with a single launch! All offering Bonuses …. THIS is the Feeding Frenzy, or The Whirlpool, you choose the analogy!
If you get sucked into buying these inexpensive launch products, typically $7 to $17 for the Front End … it’s game over for you.
The Upsells and Downsells suck you in and weeks or months later you can find that you spent $100’s, even $1000+ on what the marketers refer to as “Shiny New Toys.”
And do you know how they regard the Feeding Frenzy they create?
They call it “Operation Money-Suck.”
Here’s the reality: not quite all but many of these products are almost useless, or are even absolute garbage. These vendors churn out new product after new product and their entire justification is, money in THEIR bank. There is NO consideration of value to the buyer.
And you can forget about support; 60 days later they’ve released 3 new products and can’t even remember the one you bought.
SOME vendors who still join in this whirlpool are different. A few. Their products can be decent quality, even very good. But these people are rare, and you have to know who they are, to appreciate them and evaluate their products.
But getting back to the main point: you can be swept into the whirlpool and spend a lot of money on these Shiny New Toys and you’re not even treading water (3rd analogy, I’m on a roll) – you’re going backwards because of the money wasted, the effort wasted, the elapsed time wasted and the loss of the commission you could have been earning.
The other side of this is if you decide the shortest path to making money as an Affiliate is to be one of the Affiliates PROMOTING these launches.
Don’t. Maybe later this could be interesting; when you are better armed. But not now.
First of all, you are entering a fight with 100+ well-armed people who have better Bonus packages than you, and a bigger email list so they can make money easily and quickly. They get the cream of the buyers.
They have a stronger YouTube Channel, so their Video’d reviews of products they promote will out-rank yours. Their websites have had time to grow “Authority” with Google so their websites or Blogs where they review new products and invite people to check their bonuses then click on their Affiliate Link, will outrank yours.
As a newcomer, you’re walking into a gunfight carrying a pair of kiddies blunt plastic scissors. (OK, that’s the 3rd analogy, I can’t resist, sorry.)
But even this isn’t the worst part.
If you want a $10K a month income from commissions and you’re promoting $7 products with Upsells that perhaps earn you $20 on average … you have to send enough people to the offers to generate 500 sales. That probably means getting that offer in front of maybe 5,000 – 10,000 pairs of eyeballs because not everyone you send, will actually buy.
So you’d better have a big list to email to pretty much every day; or be prepared to do a lot of Traffic generation.
➨ Contrast that with promoting higher-end products.
When your commission is $200, $500, even $1,000 (and $2,500 isn’t impossible) … the goal of $10K per month seems a heck of a lot closer. 10 sales = 10 commissions = $10K!
So … all the above, the 2 Very Bad Choices and the baggage that comes with them, are why I recommend what I do.
This is Choice #3: the Very Good Choice!
And the ONLY one I recommend.
That you find a very special type of Expert. And start following the Proven Path that has made him a fortune, is STILL making him a fortune, and where his students have followed it, and THEY too are making great money.
These are the characteristics I suggest — as you read them, see if they make sense and by all means add any that YOU think are important, too:
MUST be an Expert in Affiliate marketing, able to point to and PROVE they walk the talk, every day, and make GREAT money from doing it — not just from teaching it and selling courses.
MUST have Students who go public (Testimonials, maybe even in Facebook Groups or in Forums) about making good money, about starting to make money relatively quickly, AND who make it clear that they did EXACTLY what the Expert told them to do.
MUST have Courses for sale that are LONG PROVEN to be effective at teaching Students to make money through Affiliate Marketing
MUST be a good Instructor! (Many experts are awful instructors and communicators).
MUST be DETAIL-ORIENTED — too many experts won’t teach the details, they just teach the “big-picture” and leave you to sort out the details — this can burn a LOT of time and be very frustrating.
MUST provide support, or coaching, or both! You will have questions to ask, and you do want to know that someone — the Expert or a trained Support person or specialist coach — will be helpful and prompt in their response.
MUST teach how to make High-Ticket sales!
IDEALLY there’s a community of people who can help you and from whom you can learn a great deal. These folk moften respond faster than a coach would. And they’re out there on the same battlefield as you, of course; just perhaps further along.
IDEALLY an Expert who doesn’t “talk down” to you.
IDEALLY an Expert who has High-Ticket products that YOU can promote as an Affiliate! No-one can teach you better how to sell THEIR High-Ticket Products than they can! And no-one knows those products better than you!
IDEALLY an Expert who has a range of products to promote, and a range of tools to help you (as an Affiliate) promote them.
IDEALLY an Expert where you can get a taste of them, their personality, their teaching style, for a low cost or even for free. This positions you to make an informed decision whether you want to get serious about the opportunity, with absolute confidence by then that the Expert and his/her team will help you succeed.
Do you agree with these? Do these make sense to you?
If so, then Continue on to meet someone who meets ALL those criteria. He’s called Sean.
You can Jump to his information now, or carry on reading some details of what he offers to help you make money by the shortest, fastest, most assured route.
Don’t let his young appearance and informal, casual style deceive you! He’s not a slick smooth-talking salesman, he’s laid-back and friendly but he also earns 6 figures most months as an Affiliate. He specializes in products with Big-Ticket commissions but he also promotes a lot of other products and makes 5 figures monthly just from recurring income commissions.
His courses are recognized as being superb. His students make money and they love him because of it! The “tone” of the testimonials is telling — students feeling very comfortable telling their stories, explaining where they are and asking questions.
If you want the shortest direction between where you are right now and an income from Affiliate Marketing, with detailed training in low-risk methods that will prepare you to promote anything through the most effective proven path with the least wasted time and effort … this guy, his company and his products are definitely worth assessing. I rate him #1.