As simple as Affiliate Marketing For Dummies sounds, it’s not as simple as reading a book. Besides, the internet is in constant flux. This is why a book is soon out of date when it comes to the internet and especially affiliate marketing. When I first found out about affiliate marketing I was very excited. I was going to take the affiliate marketing business by storm. I’m sure this is a lot of people’s experience of it. I took every course I could get my hands on. I even bought a book on it. And no, it wasn’t ‘Affiliate Marketing For Dummies’.
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies – Getting Started
Affiliate marketing is a huge topic. On the surface it looks like a simple way to earn money from the internet. “Simply send website traffic to affiliate products”. Since this article is titled ‘affiliate marketing for dummies’, let’s just break that sentence down:
‘Simply send website traffic’
It’s not that simple! There are various ways of generating traffic and it’s definitely one of the most important parts (if not the most important part) of being an affiliate marketer. !. You can buy instant traffic and send targeted (potential) customers to affiliate offers. 2. You can also create content and attempt to rank your website or blog on the search engines for free. 3. You can also create video content for YouTube and generate traffic that way.
Each method has its own issues:
- Buying traffic costs money and means you take all the risk. You must test various adverts, landing pages, sales pages and emails to learn which ones work best and sell products. This takes time and money.
- Attempting to rank content takes time and effort. Even after you have created your articles and videos, they may not be ranked free on the search engines. After all, there is huge competition.
So let’s have a look at the rest of that sentence “Simply send traffic to affiliate products“.
“To Affiliate Products”Â
Choosing the right affiliate products is not all that easy either. Some simply won’t sell. You need to choose products which offer the right business model. Ideally they will offer:
- Monthly commissions – Selling single purchase products will only give you a single commission from a sale. Monthly memberships which offer monthly commissions give you the best change for survival with your online business.
- Up-selling – Promoting products which offer up-sell which you benefit from lets you make further commissions after your initial sale. This is another ‘tip’ to make an affiliate business much more viable.
- High Ticket Commissions – Selling higher than average valued products means more income for each sale. This makes earning the higher levels of income online much more attainable. Think of selling 1000 products priced at $1 or 1 product at $1000. Which do you think will be easier? It’s the $1000 product. When it comes to scaling up the higher value item is the obvious choice.
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies – Mindset
Now, don’t think I’m being a hippy or anything but a huge amount of success online is determined by the affiliate’s mindset. Since this article is titled “Affiliate Marketing For Dummies” it would be remiss of me not to mention this in my article. Mindset is such an important topic in affiliate marketing.
Unless you can get some early success, it is likely that you won’t continue down the path towards eventually becoming an affiliate marketer. And that’s a shame because there are a lot of benefits for those who stick it out. Here are just some of the main reasons why people choose to become affiliate marketers:
- An independent income means no boss, no job, no commute, for as long as you choose.
- You can scale up a profitable income into the 6 figure income brackets.
- You can work from anywhere globally with a laptop and internet connection.
- Build up your online business around existing commitments, job family and lifestyle.
Just reading these perks motivates me, I don’t know about you! However, you need to keep that motivation up throughout the difficult times too. What will help most in this regard is having some early successes. Once you have seen some online sales come in, your belief in affiliate marketing will soar. Keeping this belief up will motivate you to keep doing the things required to make a success of your affiliate marketing business.
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies – Getting Started On The Right Path
The basics of affiliate marketing are simple. You sell other people’s products online. For that you earn a commission. More sales equals more commissions. The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you can make multiple sales again and again online, without doing much more work, once these systems are in place. Instead of trading your time for money, like in a job, you can use the affiliate marketing mode, and automated systems, to sell products over and over.
Once you have systems in place which find appropriate customers for the right products you have done half the job. Scaling up your advertising can mean multiple sales every day. This can all happen on virtual autopilot. However, you still need to learn the basics in order to get all these systems set up and working:
- A platform to generate leads – website, landing page or advert.
- An email capture system and an email follow up series.
- A series of products which you can promote to your visitors/customers
Getting the right training and an early success with your internet business is vital. You can access a full month of training and get all these tools and systems:
- Your own website (plus simple set up modules)
- A series of products including high ticket products
- A built in sales team with a range of up-selling products which you earn from
- An automated email series and quick set-up modules
- All the other tools you will need
- A community of people on hand for advice and help
This course offers step by step modules and introductory training to affiliate marketing. An ‘affiliate marketing for dummies‘ beginners course, if you like. In it you will access an online platform which will take you through various modules and teach you the quickest way to build a profitable internet business. Access here.
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies – List Building
One of the best things you can do as an affiliate marketer is to build your own list of subscribers. Of course you need a certain type of subscriber, and this will depend on which particular niche you are going into. Let’s say you go into the golf enthusiast niche. You find a golf training video series and an affiliate products and decide to promote it on your website. Rather than simply driving traffic to your website, where your visitors decide whether or not to buy, drive them to an offer page, which gives them something for free in exchange for their email address.
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing is known as the ‘killer app’ of online marketing. Here’s why. Â Only 1% of people will buy from a website they have never visited before. That’s a very small percentage. You would need to drive a huge amount of traffic to a website in order to make enough sales to give up the day job.
Sales
If someone lands on your website they only have a few minutes to decide whether or not they will buy from you. If, however you manage to capture your visitors email, you can put your products in front of them for months, years and even decades to come. You can build a relationship with your subscribers and generate sales through your emails which would never have happened from their first visit to your site.
Control Of Your Traffic
Trying to get traffic from Google’s free ‘organic’ search engines takes time and is very tentative. They can change the rules and alter the search algorithms at any time. This could mean you don’t rank at all on the free searches. Even if your content is good, it takes time and a lot of effort to create this content. Buying traffic is expensive and sending people directly to your website doesn’t guarantee a sale, even with targeted traffic.
Trust
By having a growing list of subscribers who you can build a relationship with, you increase your opportunities for making sales massively. You can build trust over time and people are much more likely to buy from people they trust, especially on the internet.
Affiliate Marketing For Dummies
To sum up this affiliate marketing for dummies blog these are the main things you should take away from this article:
- Start with a logical well laid out course like this one.
- Keep up your enthusiasm – early success will drive you forward
- Build the list – Join a program which gives you everything else and just build the list. This one thing can make you hugely successful online if you just do that. Start here.
Remember also that learning isn’t the same as doing. Don’t get caught up in education mode and not implement the things you are learning. Focus on doing one thing every day and keep adding productive activities to your list of activities. Avoid distractions and work hard.
I hope you have enjoyed this article ‘affiliate marketing for dummies’. If you have any more to add I would be grateful for any comments.