So what’s the easiest way to start affiliate marketing? Before I had much success as an affiliate, I wrote many pieces of content, built many websites and ran a lot of adverts. But there were a few things I didn’t do at first. When I started doing them, they made a massive difference to my affiliate marketing business.
Want to know what they are? Sure, I’ll tell you. But first I’m going to tell you what I did wrong and what to avoid doing. What NOT to do is just as important if not more than doing the right things.
When you’re starting out as an affiliate, you’ve got lots of enthusiasm and motivation. You’re fired up and going to win. Wouldn’t it be a great if you also had all the knowledge of someone who has failed many times and learned a whole lot too? That’s the main problem when you start out. You don’t know what the “experts” know. Because of this, you’re likely to make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of time doing the wrong things.
Easiest Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – What NOT To Do
So what shouldn’t you do when starting out? Sadly there’s a bunch of programs out there selling you on how easy affiliate marketing is. Let me tell you that affiliate marketing is not easy. So if you’re not ready to hear this, click away now! Look for the “easy” programs which promise the moon and always underdeliver!
But if you’re serious about success with affiliate marketing, this knowledge will arm you for greater prosperity.
After joining my first “earn money online” program I wrote and wrote, determined to make money through the adsense program. I made peanuts. I joined another program and was told to build websites to sell affiliate products. I built hundreds of websites, most of which failed.
The problem wasn’t the program or the strategy. Rather it was my mindset. I was jumping from course to course looking for the quick win. I wanted the magic bullet and with this mindset you’re always going to fail. There is no magic bullet, but there’s a few things which will give you an advantage.
Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Stick With A Strategy
Sticking with a strategy for a while is tough, especially when you’re unsure whether it will work. You really only have your “mentor’s” word for it that a particular course of action actually works. The rest is on trust and faith. So when this break down and you decide it’s a scam, you’ll stop working because you don’t believe in what you’re doing.
“Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right” – Henry Ford
So your course of action needs to have some faith and belief behind it. Doubt will kill your faith, motivation and desire. So choose a course with heart and work really hard when you understand what to do.
Don’t give up too easily and don’t jump from one shiny object to another. You’ll lose momentum every time.
Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Subscriptions & High Ticket Products
Ok, so it’s easy for me to say this makes affiliate marketing easier, because I stuck it out. That’s why the previous paragraph is so important. No amount of “hacks” and “fixes” will make up for a lack of hard work and you can still fail even taking my advice on this. But things dramatically changed for me when I started to use subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products.
A subscription product pays you again and again for each sale. So even with only a few sales, you start to see the potential of affiliate marketing. This gives you more faith and motivation, which is why it’s important to make the first sale to give you confidence in what you’re doing.
A high ticket product pays you many times the commission you would obtain from a standard product. With a low value item from Amazon, you can even make as little as 1% commission! It’s almost a waste of time promoting these kinds of products unless you’ve got a strategy which gives you thousands of sales very cheaply, which is tough.
Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Build A List
This was something else I didn’t understand when I started out as an affiliate. So I wasted a huge amount of time trying to sell directly from a website. My traffic generation was pretty poor too (more on this in the next section).
From a website, it’s much harder to make affiliate sales. Most of your website visitors only land on your website for a few minutes. But get them on to your email list and your chance of selling is dramatically increased. That’s because you can build rapport with your subscribers, offer them value and build trust. On an email list you can make a sale even months or years after someone becomes a subscriber. Plus an email list puts you in control of your traffic, whereas you either rely on paid or organic traffic from the search engines otherwise.
Paid Ads Vs Content
The two main strategies to obtain traffic to your affiliate offers are content creation and paid advertising. The “easiest” one will depend on your own circumstances.
If you’re on a budget, paying for advertising might be more difficult. But if you have no time, creating endless amounts of content doesn’t look like a good fit either! Content creation is much slower whichever way you look at it, so I’d have to say that the “easiest” route is to use paid advertising and send qualified website traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers. Then, sell a high ticket product “suite” with multiple products in it.
With a suite, you can earn from multiple sales from each customer, plus subscriptions. Whereas with a one-off affiliate product, you’re stuck trying to sell that one product again and again to make the commissions. So a product suite which contains subscriptions is the best option.
Summary
So that’s my rundown of the easiest way to start affiliate marketing. If you’re skipped to this section, shame on you! Here’s the run down of what I believe to be the easiest route for affiliates. That of course doesn’t mean that it’s “easy”. Affiliate marketing is still a challenge whatever way you look at it. So you’re going to need to pull out the big guns to make it work for you, and take full responsibility for it. But doing these things is recommended and knowing this years ago would have saved me a bunch of time and effort:
- Use high ticket products and subscription affiliate products. This makes your journey easier by far
- Build an email list and learn how to send emails out which build trust and help your subscribers
- Use paid advertising, which is faster and scalable. I’m a content marketer, but it can take months or even years to get traction this way. So unless you have a passion and desire to create tonnes of content, paid ads is best!
- Finally, join an online business coaching and mentoring course which gives you access to a community. With the right people around you, you’ll have a much greater chance of success. Join one here.