Here’s my affiliate marketing handbook: what I wish I knew as a newbie affiliate marketer. As a brand new affiliate marketer, I was full of enthusiasm and hope. Little did I know the journey I had ahead of me. In this short article I’m going to share some of the things which would have shaved years off my affiliate journey. Although I think a bit of struggle is necessary to learn affiliate marketing, there’s definitely some hurdles you can avoid.
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Getting Started
I first found out about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s. I was trying to sell my own ebook but struggled getting traffic to my website. So I put myself on a course with the intention of learning some traffic generation methods. Instead, I discovered affiliate marketing. I could sell someone else’s products and make ten times what I could sell my own ebook for! So I ditched the ebook idea and went full tilt ahead with affiliate marketing.
It was tough though and at first I started using the free blog sites such as Hubpages, Blogger.com and Squidoo, (now acquired by Hubpages). My first sale came from a review I wrote on Hubpages.com. I was over the moon at my first sale and knew I would make many more. Sadly though it didn’t happen like that at first. My account got shut down for spamming and I was starting again. I joined many courses and tried many tactics.
The next course I took taught paid marketing and just as things were about to work for me, my Adwords account got shut down. I seemed doomed to fail with affiliate marketing, I thought. This is where most people will quit forever, and I did quit several times. However, something kept nagging me to keep going. This I believe is the key for success as an affiliate marketer. Keep going and never quit. If you quit, failure is assured. If you never quit, success, or death is assured!
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Shiny Object Syndrome
The thing which stood in the way of my success for a long time was shiny object syndrome. I believed affiliate marketing should be easy as I had bought into the idea that to make millions online would only be a matter of a few simple steps. This is false! It’s far more difficult than that, although in principle it should only take a few steps:
- Find a scalable strategy for selling products continually,
- Scale up by turning up the volume
Shiny object syndrome is the idea that anything else is always something better and than finding a new magic bullet to online success was the answer. I jumped from course to course looking for an “easier” way, which of course didn’t exist!
Don’t make this same mistake. Find a course and stick with it for at least 6 months. You can access one on this website.
Depending on your marketing strategy, affiliate marketing can take months or years to gain traction. It doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t believe the “quick fixes” the magic bullets and the push button claims. Technology has made affiliate marketing easier in some ways such as building websites and sales funnels, but it’s still a challenge to get traffic in large numbers; especially if you’re starting from scratch.
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Don’t Quit Too Easily
95% of affiliates will quit so this means you’ll need to be in the 5% who stick with it for long enough to see some tangible results. When you break through this barrier you’ve proved to yourself that it works. This is a massive psychological achievement and you should celebrate the small wins. Small wins are actually big wins because once you have belief in your path, you will want to double down on your efforts. When you’re new, you doubt everything! If your mind is full of doubt about a particular strategy, how hard will you work at it?
When you know for a fact that a particular strategy is working for you, you’ll have much more belief in yourself and your ability to make it work.
Belief is therefore the biggest challenge for beginners in affiliate marketing. When you’re struggling, doubting and worrying, you’ll easily be swayed by a well meaning friend or relative who tells you “it’s a scam”!
To fuel belief in the beginning is super important because it’s what will carry you forward and keep you going. Without it, you’ve already quit!
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Get A List
An email list is a requirement for affiliate marketing if you’re serious about making your living from it. Why make things harder than they already are by not getting an email autoresponder. You can get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing too. Use the image below.
An autoresponder is something it took me a long time to get because I didn’t understand how powerful building an email list of subscribers could be. Once you build a list of your own, you can control your traffic much better. You can communicate with your email list and build trust over time. This is very difficult to do from a website where most visitors will be gone in a few minutes.
I’ve had people on my email list make purchases even years after they joined!
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Time Management
As an affiliate marketer you’ll need to get very good at managing your own time. There’s only a few hours in the day and if you’re working a job for most of it, you’ll need to prioritise your business outside of your work hours. This can be tough but you should commit to your affiliate business if you’re serious about making money from affiliate marketing. If you can only work an hour each day, you’ll need to be even more focused on the right kind of actions which can make the most difference to your business.
I wasted time when I started out doing affiliate marketing. I spent too much time on pointless activities which didn’t move my business forward. Affiliates only earn commissions when they sell something. It’s a performance based business model. So if you don’t get traction in your business you could earn nothing! So getting traction is key. That means focusing your time on money producing activities.
Don’t waste time being a “busy fool”. A busy fool fills their time with pointless activities, rather than the most important ones.
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Marketing
Affiliate marketing doesn’t work unless you’re actively marketing. The clue is in the name. Having a nice website, won’t make you sales. Designing a logo won’t make you sales. What makes sales in affiliate marketing is getting good at marketing. Marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and potential customers. This can be done is several ways such as blogging, paid advertising (PPC – pay per click), video, social media, SEO, link building, email marketing and so on.
You need only one way of marketing that works to be successful as an affiliate. I jumped around from one strategy to another, looking for the “easy way”. Jumping from one strategy to another wastes time; time you don’t have! It can take months or even years for a strategy to start working. For blogging, for example, it will take much longer than if you’re running a paid marketing campaign using pay per click advertising.
Decide on your marketing strategy according to your budget and available time for your business. If you’re short on money, hustle, if you’re short on time, buy traffic.
Products
Not all affiliate products are alike and not all pay the same either. The products you choose to promote can mean the difference between success and failure as an affiliate. Physical products you might find from Amazon pay very little – between 1% and 10% in most cases.
Digital products pay much more – 30-40% commissions typically. There’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate programs you can choose too! With subscriptions you can earn a whole lot more than with a stand alone one off sale. Subscription products and software and membership products which pay out recurring commissions to affiliates.
A low value product on Amazon will pay only a small commission of say $2. But a high ticket product can pay out thousands of dollars in commission. You might think that more people will buy the low value product and therefore it will be easier to sell in bulk. However, you still need to get enough sales to make your affiliate business pay. Selling a few high value products is therefore much easier than selling the thousands of low value products you would need to make the same amount of money from.
Mindset
Your mindset is particularly important if you want to be successful as an affiliate marketer. See affiliate marketing mindset. Knowing that around 5% of affiliates go on to make a living from it, and 95% drop out goes to show that not everyone will make affiliate marketing work for them.
Affiliate marketing is a business and like any business you need customers to survive. Without making sales you won’t build a lucrative affiliate business. To do so takes more than most people can achieve. To keep going when others quit will require a particular approach to learning and implementing your skillset.
Being able to set goals, create a vision for your future and stick to a marketing plan over the long term is vital for success. How you deal with setbacks and adversity will require a strong desire to succeed. If you’re just “giving it a go” without a strong purpose and desire, you’re more likely to quit when things are tough. See also affiliate marketing psychology.
A “never say die” approach needless to say will have a much better outcome than a “I’ll give it a try” approach.
Get Help
This of course isn’t easy, particularly if you’re trying to do it all alone without any help. I started affiliate marketing and tried to do everything from watching videos. I struggled and struggled, for years! I eventually found an online community where I could connect with other like minded individuals on the same journey as I was. This is vital if you want to take affiliate marketing seriously and make a serious income from it.
Everything changed for me when I started taking it seriously and got help.
You can access a free video resource and learn more about the community I joined here.