Is Affiliate Marketing for You?
Affiliate marketing is not for everyone. Let’s just face it, there are more than 50 ways to make money online and affiliate marketing is just one of them. There are a lot of misconceptions and buzz around that make affiliate marketing seems easy.
Most people jumped onto the affiliate marketing bandwagon after learning about affiliate marketing through blogs, information products and claims by people earning a fortune from it.
Affiliate marketing or becoming an affiliate marketer is not just about joining affiliate programs. Hard work and persistence must be there as well. Rather than being vague, why don’t we jump straight into what are the Top Things to Consider Before Learning Affiliate Marketing.
Not Get Rich Quick Scheme
Every element of promotion will either take up your time, money or both of them. Affiliate marketing involves tonnes of optimization for ad copy, presell copy and landing page design. One might not even see any results one month after time and money have been devoted. Trust me, the frustration is not easy to bear.
Information Overload
Even if you have decided to make money online via affiliate marketing, you will get a brain freeze due to information overload. You have 100 ways for traffic generation, 100 ways to build links and 1000 methods to promote your merchant products or services. It will become worse when everybody is claiming their method works.
Constant Need for Knowledge
Promotion methods that make millions back then may become a blackhat method today. The medium you use for your promotions might change their rules all the time and one good example will be Google AdWords. You need to keep yourself abreast with the latest affiliate marketing news and information.
They will help you in discovering new opportunities instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. Also, learning the latest tricks will give you an edge over your competitors. I am sure you want to know every affiliate’s best performing promotion tactics, right?
Subject to Merchant Changes
There are still merchants out there who doesn’t care about their affiliates even though you are working like a mad dog generating income for them. They can come up with terms changes and some might be nonsense but you must abide to it without complaints. Going against them will only get yourself robbed of your income source.
Ethics and Authority
If you have the thoughts that affiliates have merchants to cover their asses, you are WRONG! With the Internet focusing more on user interaction, affiliate marketers need to put their names out there when promoting something in order to add credibility to the promotions that they are running.
Recent developments and news in the world of affiliate marketing also shows that ethics is being taken much seriously. It has evolved into a business model itself rather than a past time activity to make money online.
Network or Not to Network
Affiliate marketing, just like any other fields of Internet marketing, requires you to work alone to get started. For most of the time, you would want to avoid sharing information with regards to what niches are you in and what merchants you are promoting because you don’t want unnecessary competition.
For introverts, this is neither a good news for you. You do need to network with other people in order to gain new joint venture opportunities, better payouts and insights in the form of knowledge. This is the reason why there are a lot of forums for affiliates and Affiliate Summit for affiliate marketers.
Should You Be Learning Affiliate Marketing?
I am listing a few alternatives to make money online so that you can make a better decision:
- Info products creation and marketing
- eBay physical goods trading or dropshipping
- Site flipping
- Blogging
- Google AdSense - Yes, people still earn a lot from it
I won’t force you into affiliate marketing so that you can subscribe or read Aff Boom because I don’t want people to waste their time trying out things that they have no idea of.
If you are interested in knowing more about affiliate marketing, you are more than welcomed to subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed to get the latest affiliate marketing tips. Do take note that the first issue of Aff Boom No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, which is on niche research will be up by next Monday.
Comments
4 Responses to “Is Affiliate Marketing for You?”
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I blog, I’m and affiliate and I have adsense sites.
The biggest problem I have is lack of knowlede and information overload! I know I have the solutions to my problems in front of me but I do not know enough to know which of those solutions is the best.
Take link building for example. I spend ages submitting to directories, blog posts, comments and social bookmarking but I don’t know which ones I do are the most effective. It leads to a lot of time wasting.
I am interested in siteflipping as it’s something I think I could do.
John
The key here is to focus and literally shut down every other things that you do. How to make money online materials and courses come out every other day. If you try every one of them, you are going to drain yourself.
Focus, my friend…
Wayne
I do affiliate marketing, but I am not very active. I suppose affiliate marketing is only for people who can easily persuade people into pursuing an offer.
Definitely not. Look, big sites like cNet and other tech review sites have tonnes of people visiting them everyday to read the reviews. Are they doing affiliate marketing by letting you compare and buy from various stores? You bet!