In this article I’m going to share some newbie affiliate marketing tips! I wish I would have known when I started out. As a newbie affiliate marketer, when I started learning affiliate marketing in early 2000’s, I made a lot of mistakes. Hopefully this article will help you avoid making those same mistakes and you can make larger leaps forward in your affiliate business much more quickly than I did!
For a “newbie”, affiliate marketing is an exciting way to make money online. You’ve probably already signed up for a bunch of stuff and your email inbox is crammed full! But beware of information overload and shiny object syndrome!
Conflicting ideas and too much information at once can put a stop to your enthusiasm when it all gets too much. Once you’re in this state, you’ll jump from course to course, absorbing all the information you can get hold of. Just learning feels like accomplishment, but of course you also need to implement those ideas for them to generate any cash!
In learning mode, 90+% of your time will be spent in absorbing and watching information. Once you understand what you need to do, it should be 20%!
Newbie Affiliate Marketing – Shiny Object Syndrome
Shiny object syndrome reminds me of a quote from Douglas Coglan (Bryan Brown). If you’re not a movie buff Douglas Coglan was a character in the movie Cocktail who said “anything else is always something better”. With affiliate marketing, if you’re not making progress, it’s easy to blame the course or “system” you’re using.
When another course pops into your inbox, you jump on the next shiny object, and this takes all your time. You replace your existing strategy with a new one and the whole process starts again.
Only you’ve just lost another 2-3 months in learning mode again, absorbing new information and watching videos. I fell for shiny object syndrome too and bought several courses, jumping from one to another looking for the “easy and fast” route, (not the arduous and lengthy route)! Here’s some of the courses I took.
There’s nothing wrong with trying new things and seeing what works for you. But just realise that you could get stuck in this mindset and achieve nothing. Better to spend some dedicated time implementing what you have learned than jump ship too early and learn nothing. The shiny object is always something which over promises and under delivers! Ultimately it’s you who will be responsible for the outcomes of your efforts with your online business.
Newbie Affiliate Marketing – Being A Busy Fool
A “busy fool” fills their time with lots of activities which makes them “feel” busy, while accomplishing nothing. When I was a newbie to affiliate marketing I can definitely say I fell for this trap too. I spend huge amounts of time on the wrong actions. I built many websites, which can now be done with press button software. I spent far too much time making things look good, such as designing my websites, which got no traffic!
If you’re new to affiliate marketing you need to get good at managing your time and your activities. Focus on money producing activities. Those aren’t always those actions which you want to do, but they are those which make money and often they are those activities which are outside your comfort zone.
Spending time on social media, chatting with friends, or anything which doesn’t drive your affiliate business forwards should be considered distractions. Eliminate them quickly and focus on money producing activities. Otherwise months can pass by without having made progress.
Subscription Products & Digital Products
As a new affiliate, I spent a huge amount of time promoting low value products which only made me tiny commissions when they sold. Don’t make this mistake! In terms of products, I’d say I made a huge mistake by choosing products I would buy myself, but that didn’t earn much in the way of commissions.
Books from Amazon, for example, will pay you only 6% commission. So if you sold a book for $20 you would only make $1.20 in commission. Hardly a fortune. You would need to sell thousands of these kinds of products to make even a modest income online from your marketing efforts. (See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission).
Subscription affiliate programs, on the other hand are much more lucrative. With a subscription product you can make recurring commissions, potentially for a lifetime with the right products. Even a small recurring commission is far better than a one off commission, especially if the customer maintains their subscription over several years!
Digital products too pay much more in terms of commissions than physical products. Once I stopped selling low value physical products, and switched to selling recurring income digital products, things changed massively for me.
Newbie Affiliate Marketing – High Ticket Products
High ticket products too were a game changer for me. Once I discovered high ticket products, I was able to make far larger commissions for individual sales. Before this I was struggling making a pittance from low value items.
A high ticket product is a product with a much larger value than the standard product you might find online. With high ticket products you are able to make upwards of $500 per sale. This also means you are able to use paid marketing and recoup advertising costs more effectively than with lower valued goods and services.
Paid marketing gives you more speed with an online business, and the ability to scale up once profitable. With low value products, you are stuck with cheap of free marketing strategies which can take ages to get going with, and require a huge amount of patience and dedication.
See also affiliate marketing business models.
Marketing Strategies
There’s various marketing strategies affiliate marketers use. If there’s one piece of advice I could give my younger self it would be to use an autoresponder and build an email list of subscribers. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing. Before I got an autoresponder, I was trying to get people to affiliate products just from a website. However, there’s a huge problem with this. Most people don’t buy from people (or websites) they don’t know! On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a purchase. After that they are gone forever.
But once you can get someone to opt into your email list, you can continue sending them information and building trust. Over the longer term, more people will purchase from you if you have given them value, and a reason to trust them. This can be done through email marketing much more effectively than it can be done from a website alone. See also the power of email marketing.
Get Help
Affiliate marketing is a tough business. It’s a performance based business model and there’s a tonne of competition. Even with a a steely composition and die hard mentality, even the toughest affiliate can succumb to periods of disillusionment and despair!
It’s those who get past this and carry on who succeed and this is much easier when you have support and a network of other people who are on the same journey. Most people have the opposite: (mostly) well meaning friends and relatives who try and talk them out of building their own business!
Summary
As a newbie affiliate marketer it’s easy to rush in and get started with whatever program you happen to find first! I did this too! But as you can see there are many pitfalls with affiliate marketing. You can get distracted by new “shiny” courses (shiny object syndrome).
You can become overloaded with information and lose your way. Being a busy fool and wasting time is an easy trap too. So you need to build some habits around working on your online business and get consistent with them. This isn’t easy, especially if you’re working alone. Get the help and support of an online community here.
Becoming profitable as an affiliate isn’t easy and it does take some dedication and perseverance. But it’s definitely worth the journey if you’re up for it! Affiliate marketing can completely change your life and give you complete autonomy from a job or a boss. It can give you a passive income and allow you to live wherever you choose! Are you up for it?
