For years I looked for an affiliate marketing loophole; that one “trick” which would set me free! While I spent time looking for black hat affiliate marketing “secrets“, I got more and more lost down the rabbit hole of the affiliate marketing “shiny object syndrome” trap!
You know what I mean. Each “shiny object” course you buy promises more than the last one. Each one claims you can be rich by clicking buttons and checking out your cart! I bought these kinds of courses for years striving to make a living online. But mostly I was disappointed; which is what I expect the vast majority of newbie affiliate marketers find too.
Affiliate Marketing Loophole
The problem with the idea of an affiliate marketing loophole somehow suggests that affiliate marketing is easy; that it’s somehow easy to “trick” the system and earn easy money. I bought into this idea back in the early 2000’s and went from course to course. I had some small successes too, selling my first affiliate product through a free blogging strategy I had learned. See my article get paid for advertising without a website for the strategy.
But, I thought, maybe there is something to an affiliate marketing loophole? Perhaps there’s a legitimate ‘loophole’ I could capitalise on.
Before I found affiliate marketing I knew there had to be a better strategy than the one I was attempting at the time. I was buying and selling on eBay using a little strategy I had found from an eBook purchase I had made on the auction site itself. You can read about this strategy in my article “How To Start A Profitable Ebay Business“. Click the image below to read about it.
Affiliate Marketing Loophole
Despite working hard at my eBay buying and selling strategy for several months, I realised there was a limit to it. I was constantly on the computer, tied to my laptop and my house. I had a room full of stock and was spending hours searching for products, listing them and answering questions from people. Despite all this, I was only making a small amount of money. It was effectively a job that I owned and I didn’t have a proper business as it wasn’t scalable.
There had to be something different, I thought, something better which had more automation and which could be scalable globally. I thought back to my original purchase of the ebook I had bought in the first place. This struck me as a far better business model – selling a digital product online.
So I abandoned the eBay business and looked into creating my own ebooks – with a view to selling them online.
Affiliate Marketing Loophole – Finding Affiliate Marketing
When I first found affiliate marketing, it was in a bid to sell my own ebooks. I had spent some time writing my ebooks, creating covers and building a website around them in order to sell them. But I knew nothing of how to market a website. So I put myself on a marketing course and this led me to affiliate marketing. I knew then that I had wasted so much time in creating my own products.
There were far better products which already existed which I couldn’t compete with. So I started selling other people’s products using the affiliate marketing model.
I looked for the “affiliate marketing loophole” which would mean I could relax and sit back, watching the money pouring in! But time and again it all went wrong!
Free Marketing – Blogging
One strategy I started using was building niche websites and flouting them to the top of Google. This had a limited success back in the early 2000’s but is much more difficult now. Having a keyword targeted domain name can help you rank on Google for certain keywords. But mostly it’s a difficult strategy with very limited results, especially now with all the competition out there and with Google having updated its algorithm constantly to reduce the appearance of the “spammers” in the search results.
You can create a free website and earn money using the niche website strategy. But it’s a tough one and I had many more failures using this idea than successes. But it can work and give you free traffic.
Affiliate Marketing Loophole – PPC
I struggled with the niche website building strategy for a long time and after purchasing another course from a guy called Peter Lexis (see my digital profit course review), I changed direction.
He suggested using PPC – pay per click direct response marketing. See I set up a landing page and email marketing campaign and sent targeted visitors to it through Google’s Adwords program using specific keyword searches typed into Google.
It worked too and I started getting leads and sales every day. Trouble was, Google shut me down about a day later. Back then (around 15 years ago), if you got shut down you didn’t get your account back. So, when I finished crying, it was back to the drawing board.
Back To Organic
So, without my Adwords account I went back to organic marketing after purchasing yet another course from what was called The Keyword Academy. You are probably seeing a trend here – from course to course. This is the fatal affiliate marketing trap to be avoided. It’s called “shiny object syndrome”. It’s easy to get stuck in learning mode because it feels like progress. But it isn’t progress unless you apply what you learn and start getting somewhere.
So I spent another 6 months to a year churning out content and doing keyword research in a bid to rank content on Google and earn money through Google’s Adsense program. Adsense lets you place adverts on your content and earn small amounts of advertising revenue from the people who place the adverts. If you look for the keyword academy now, you won’t find them.
The trouble with using only Adsense is that you need a huge amount of traffic to make any money. I made tiny amounts from Adsense but looked back to my best online wins and it was through selling affiliate products. So I decided to focus on that.
Affiliate Marketing Loopholes
Up to this point I had done loads of work on various strategies but made little progress. I had earned tiny amounts from Google’s Adsense program and some larger amounts through affiliate marketing.
My best win was through paid marketing, so really I should have stuck with that and affiliate marketing. But I had lost my Adwords account and didn’t know how else to do it. In hindsight, I could have used Bing which is a similar platform. But you don’t know what you don’t know.
And this is what it boils down to – knowledge. But knowledge online was hard to grasp when I began online. There were lots of scams doing the rounds and it was difficult to know who to trust.
High Ticket Items
I later discovered high ticket affiliate programs and also recurring commission affiliate programs.
I wish I could’ve gone back and told my younger self about these. Promoting an affiliate product which is “geared” is a whole lot easier than trying loads of methods and strategies when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Before discovering high ticket items I was spending huge amounts of time doing the wrong activities. I also was promoting products from Amazon which paid only tiny commissions.
High ticket items and recurring income commissions were definitely the “affiliate marketing loophole” I had been looking for. I just needed to learn how to sell them, over and over again.
Invest In Your Knowledge
I never thought investing in my own knowledge was so important either. I was just looking for the quick ways to fortune online. The “affiliate marketing loopholes” which I could capitalise on easily and quickly. I suspect this is a mistake made by many affiliates.
But investing in your knowledge can serve you many times over because everything you do as an affiliate is based on your knowledge and understanding of it.
I’ll say that again. Everything you do, (every action you take) as an affiliate is based on your understanding of it.
So it makes sense to invest in your knowledge using this thinking.
So before you purchase another course or start down a particular line of activity, think about what outcome you want first. It should save you all the years I’ve spent!
