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Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone benefit financially by using other people’s products on the internet. It’s a kind of referral based marketing in which affiliates are rewarded for sending website traffic to various products and services online.
Amazon is probably the best known website for selling products on the internet. They have a program which allows anyone to refer customers to them, for a commission on the sales.
Anyone can become an affiliate marketer. However, the truth is that affiliate marketing is no quick fix. It does work yes, but depending on which direction you choose to set sail with your affiliate marketing business, you can be very disappointed, as I was, many times!
But, if you stick with it, and find a path which both works you and your working style, the rewards can be fantastic. It’s taken me a while to get to the point of the light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m definitely sold on affiliate marketing now!
Before I found a community and direction which I could trust in and believe in, I jumped from one strategy to another. Having a mentor helped immensely because not knowing whether what you’re doing will work is incredibly difficult.
A lot of what I did when I started simply got me nowhere. I build various websites and my initial tactic was to get my content ranked on Google. This is incredibly difficult, even if your content is unique and offers huge value. You need to keep plugging away and sharing your content. You simply can’t rely on Google to rank your content to get it seen.
Then I faced an AdWords account shut down shortly after one of my biggest breakthroughs. This hit me hard and I gave up for a while. What kept me going was the idea of affiliate marketing which I never let go of. My ‘why’ was that affiliate marketing was a way out of low paid work and grumpy bosses! It also offered a potential income which far outweighed what I could possibly earn by trading my time for money.
Granted, I wasn’t earning anything for a number of years. But it was the thought of escaping my difficult circumstances which kept me going.
I eventually discovered subscription products which paid ongoing commissions for previous sales. When I noticed that the subscriptions were coming in, month after month, my eyes really lit up! It wasn’t a huge amount at first, just a few $20 commissions which were steadily coming in regardless of the sales I made that month.
Over time this adds up. Combined with high commission affiliate programs which offer up-sells and in-house sales teams who close sales for you, I thought I had finally found the holy grail of affiliate marketing success!
I wouldn’t say my affiliate business is a “living” just yet. But I’m now confident that I’m on the right path and taking the right action steps towards that as a real possibility. That for me was the goal; to find my way. For years I struggled for a number of reasons. Scepticism keeps you from making decisions. I got burned with a number of systems and spend months on building content and websites which got me nowhere.
Even in the business community I now belong to, I was full of scepticism at first. It was very difficult for me to take the necessary steps to get myself into the position I am now in. Lack of money is usually a reason which people have when they come to learn about affiliate marketing. This is a double edged sword. All the years I had no money, I couldn’t afford the more costly business ideas. I only focused on the cheaper ones. It cost me dearly in the time that I wasted.
It’s still no piece of cake building a profitable internet business. Even with a good strategy, a mentor and a community behind you. People will still drop out. But if you keep going, your chances of success are far greater! It took me a long time because I focused on content generation to build my income up. If you can, I would definitely recommend using paid marketing over content generation, but only with the right products.
With high ticket items, subscription products, up-sells and a built in sales team, your return on investment is far greater than with many of the affiliate products you’ll be told to sell.
This was something I didn’t understand at first. I tried to sell digital and physical products without thinking about how much I would actually earn; selling books off Amazon for pennies worth of commission!
Getting the right knowledge from the start is a massive bonus. Without it, you can work really hard in the wrong direction for a number of years, as I did. It’s hard to reconcile affiliate marketing as a legitimate business model if you’ve failed at it for years. But then, giving up after all the work I had put in was worse still!
I’m glad I continued to the point I actually started seeing some results. It’s a place I wanted to be for a long time, and one which I held myself back from because I continued to hang on to my comfort zones while seeking new outcomes.
One of these comfort zones was holding on to the idea of what I wanted to do on a daily basis. I wanted to keep doing what I had always done – blogging! Here I am writing more content. It fitted with my comfort zones but didn’t achieve the result I wanted fast enough. Eventually I started using more paid marketing strategies and this gave me a much faster result. However, it was only after reassessing that my blogging wasn’t getting me anywhere and taking some uncomfortable action steps.
I’ve noticed many affiliates make much faster progress than me by taking the necessary steps I was too fearful to take. Once I started doing what they did, results came much faster. You can make a great living with affiliate marketing. Just don’t expect it to fall in line with your comfortable parameters. Sometimes to get to somewhere where you’ve never been, you need to do things you’ve never done!
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Source by Tim Halloran
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