- What is Affiliate Marketing?
- Why Affiliate Marketing?
- How to Start Affiliate Marketing with Little Investment
- How to Know What Affiliate Program to Join
- What Becoming a Partner Can Really Mean
- What Most Affiliate Marketers Do
- What Advanced Affiliate Marketers Do
- Why You Need to Brand Yourself
- Affiliate Marketing with PPC
- Maximizing Your Marketing Campaigns
- Importance of Learning Copywriting
- Dominate Affiliate Marketing with Bonuses
- High-Ticket Affiliate Programs (Top-Tier)
- Affiliate Marketing vs. Creating Your Own Products
If you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for some time, or even if you’re a newbie read this ultimate guide to affiliate marketing all the way through. I’ve put months of research into this guide and want it to be an all-inclusive resource for all affiliate marketers.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a relationship between three individuals: the advertiser, publisher and consumer.
The advertiser is usually the one who owns the product or service being sold. The publisher is the person actually promoting and bringing in sales for the advertiser. The consumer is the person who is completing the transaction of paying for the product or service.
Similar to referral marketing, affiliate marketing involves a third-party. Instead of the advertiser selling directly to the consumer, there’s a third party who’s the publisher. The way affiliate marketing is different from referral marketing is that it’s commission-based.
In 2011 alone, Commission Junction tracked a total of over 3 billion website visits, 175 million transactions and over $6 billion in online sales.”
Basically affiliate marketing is this. Let’s say you create a product and, then you get affiliates to promote it. For each sale an affiliate sends you, they make a commission.
It’s a fairly easy marketing model. The advertiser is the one willing to pay someone (the publisher) to promote their product or service.
When something is rather easy to do, especially in our era, why not make software do it? Well whoever thinks like that about affiliate marketing is totally missing the point.
There’s just so much spam created on a daily basis around affiliate marketing. These are people using automated targeting software to generate thousands of posts on a daily basis to get a cut of the pie.
“According to eMarketer’s latest forecasts, worldwide business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales will increase by 20.1% this year [2015] to reach $1.672 trillion. By 2019, it will more than double to $3.551 trillion.”
I’m writing this guide to create a resource for people that want to start affiliate marketing the right way: building relationships. It will also serve more advanced marketers as a way to polish their skills and crush 2016.
Why Another Affiliate Marketing Guide?
Because a lot of the information I’ve found online is either too broad and does not provide actionable information. More importantly, it does not speak to the main reason one becomes an affiliate marketer: Your Why. I talk about this in the next section.
Most guides don’t show you how to do it right and profit from the beginning. I’ve found very little information online about this.
The majority of affiliate marketing training programs just paint pretty pictures and try to get you to imagine yourself on the beach with your laptop. They say it’s easy and anyone can do it. They also say it won’t take as much hard work and you just need to work smarter.
If this were all true, wouldn’t everyone be wildly successful with affiliate marketing? Of course they would but, the truth is they’re not. This is because successful affiliate marketing takes a lot of hard work.
This guide will have a focus on building relationships and how important this is for online marketing success in a general sense. I’m assuming that you’re the publisher looking to make money online with affiliate marketing.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
Too many people want to start out with affiliate marketing because they see the success others have. Does seeing a doctor pull up in a Ferrari make you want to become a doctor? It’s fine if it inspires you but this should never be the reason to become a doctor.
You’d want to be a doctor so you can help people get and stay healthy. The Ferrari might come with the lifestyle but there are no guarantees, especially with the average annual income of a doctor in the United States being around $160-200K. If you factor in living expenses and an average family you should have a Ferrari (if you plan correctly) in about 10 years.
So you graduate high school, go to university and then medical school. By the time you become a doctor you’re very close to your thirties. Which means at 40 you should have a Ferrari if you plan financially. So you now have your Ferrari, now what?
Do you really want to be an affiliate marketer? Why?
The answer can’t be because you want to make a lot of money. Believe me, once you start out with affiliate marketing you’ll realize that it can take up to several years to see good money coming in.
Most people give up after just a few months with no results. Of course we need money to survive in this world so, you can’t do something full-time that pays you zero money.
Let’s say you recently graduated high school and are considering university but one day you come across a “make money online” opportunity with affiliate marketing. The only thing is you have to pay a few thousand dollars “only” to start. The truth is you don’t but I’ll talk more about that later.
So you decide to give-up on school and pursue your dreams of becoming an online success. This is a personal decision that a lot of people have made but very few have succeeded.
The truth is, it’s not easy to make money online and don’t believe it if someone tells you it is. If you’re willing to put in the hard work then you’ll succeed but it will take some time.
Overnight Success? How’s that Piano Class?
When learning how to play an instrument for example, can you really learn how to play the piano overnight? The answer is no. The same with anything that is closely related with success. It takes perseverance and consistent effort.
What I do recommend is that you keep a part-time job at least when starting out because you won’t make a full-time living right away. If you were planning on going to school like in the example above, then at least go part-time instead of not going at all.
Unless you’re going to totally live off of your parents for a while then I wouldn’t recommend going “all-in”. It’s not for everyone.
But, only when there are real consequences do people take real action. If you have to something to fallback on in your mind then you won’t put forth the effort needed to succeed online.
A Short Story About Creating Consequences
Create consequences for yourself. I learned this idea from Matt Lloyd, Founder of MOBE.
He gives the example of having trouble waking up early in the morning. A lot of people have trouble it with it, including himself. He says what consequences can he create to make sure he’ll wake up early?
One way for example, is he could make a bet with someone to meet up every morning at 7AM to go running. If he doesn’t show up or he’s late he has to pay that person $20. That might work but he says not for him. He knows he’ll need more then that because he’ll probably still sleep in.
So he goes on to say what if someone put a gun to his head every morning to wake him up, he would sure wake up. But, let’s not go that far or that extreme he says.
“How about if I install a sprinkler system in my room that goes off if I don’t get up and leave the room before 7AM. Would that work? Probably.”
So you get the idea. Sometimes we have to create these consequences for ourselves to make sure we get things done.
A way of doing this could be posting on social media that you’re going to do something like write your first book by next month or post a video everyday.
You would ask your following to hold you accountable. Every time they see that you’re not reaching your goal they would call you out. Believe me this works.
So once you’ve figured out your why be sure it’s something you’re passionate about. Create or setup consequences for your self, enough to ensure a consistent path towards to success.
Now all you have to do start! “But, I don’t have any money”, you say? You can setup a blog for just a few dollars per year and get started today.
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