Affiliate marketing is a business model that allows anyone to benefit financially from using other people’s products on the Internet. It is a type of referral based marketing where affiliates are rewarded for sending website traffic to various online products and services.
Amazon is probably the best known website for selling products on the internet. They have a program that allows anyone to refer customers to them, for a commission on sales.
Anyone can become an affiliate marketer. However, the truth is that affiliate marketing is not a quick fix. It works, yes, but depending on the direction you choose to set sail with your affiliate marketing business, you can be very disappointed, like me, many times!
But if you stick it out and find a path that works for you and your work style, the rewards can be great. It took me a while to get to the point of light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m definitely sold on affiliate marketing now!
Before finding a community and direction that I could trust and believe in, I jumped from one strategy to another. Having a mentor helped tremendously because not knowing if what you’re doing will work is incredibly difficult.
A lot of what I did when I started out just got me nowhere. I build multiple websites and my initial tactic was to rank my content on Google. This is incredibly difficult, even if your content is unique and offers great value. You should keep connecting and sharing your content. You just can’t trust Google to rank your content for viewing.
Then I faced the closure of an AdWords account 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 that I never gave up. My ‘why’ was that affiliate marketing was a way out of low-paid work and grumpy bosses! It also offered a potential income that far exceeded what I could earn by trading my time for money.
Of course, I didn’t win anything for several years. But it was the idea of escaping my difficult circumstances that kept me going.
I finally discovered subscription products that 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 that were coming in consistently regardless of the sales I made that month.
Over time, this adds up. Combined with high commission affiliate programs offering upsells and in-house sales teams closing sales for you, I thought I had finally found the holy grail of affiliate marketing success!
I would not say that my affiliate business is “alive” yet. But now I am sure that I am on the right track and that I am taking the right steps to achieve it as a real possibility. That for me was the goal; To find my way For years I fought for various reasons. Skepticism prevents you from making decisions. I got burned out with various systems and spent months creating content and websites that got me nowhere.
Even in the business community I now belong to, I was initially full of skepticism. It was very difficult for me to take the necessary steps to get to the position I am in now. Lack of money is usually one of the reasons people have when they go to learn about affiliate marketing. This is a double edged sword. All the years that I didn’t have money, I couldn’t afford the most expensive business ideas. I only focused on the cheapest ones. It cost me dearly in the time I wasted.
It is still not a piece of cake to build a profitable Internet business. Even with a good strategy, a mentor, and a community behind you. People will continue to drop out. But if you continue, your chances of success are much higher! It took me a long time because I focused on generating content to increase my income. If you can, I would definitely recommend using paid marketing instead of content generation, but only with the right products.
With high-priced items, subscription products, upsells, and an integrated sales team, your return on investment is much higher than with many of the affiliate products that will ask you to sell.
This was something that I did not understand at first. I tried to sell digital and physical products without thinking about how much I would actually earn; sell books on Amazon for a few cents of commission.
Getting the right knowledge early on is a huge plus. Without it, you can work very hard in the wrong direction for several years, as I did. Affiliate marketing is difficult to reconcile as a legitimate business model if you haven’t succeeded for years. But then quitting after all the work he had done was even worse!
Glad I continued to the point where I started to see some results. It is a place that I wanted to be in for a long time, and one that I held back from because I was still holding on to my comfort zones while looking for new results.
One of these comfort zones was holding onto 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 adapted to my comfort zones, but it didn’t get 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 re-evaluating that my blog was getting me nowhere and taking some awkward action steps.
I have noticed that many affiliates progress much faster than I do by taking the necessary steps that I was too afraid to take. Once I started doing what they did, the results came a lot faster. You can make a very good living with affiliate marketing. Just don’t expect it to fit your comfortable parameters. Sometimes, to get to a place you’ve never been, you need to do things you’ve never done!