To Be Or Not To Be An Affiliate Marketer

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To Be An Affiliate Marketer

Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. Best to presume they all are. This means that if you click on a link and purchase the item, I will receive a commission. There is no additional cost to you.

In the world of digital product marketing, there are lots of ways to make money and numerous business models that you could consider. But it’s generally agreed that one of the best ways to start is with affiliate marketing. While it is considered the “easiest” way by many people, that does not mean it’s easy to be an affiliate marketer. Certainly not when you are starting out.

It can become easy once you start replicating your successes and setting up business systems that will work for you long term. But first, you have to have some successes, and setting up business systems can be trying for a lot of people.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage you from pursuing affiliate marketing, but it’s important that you realize even affiliate marketing takes work, persistence, and in most cases learning. I think by knowing this you will be more likely to succeed. So I want you to know this. And even though work is required, starting out with affiliate marketing is still much simpler than starting out with your own products.

The premise is simple – someone (usually an experienced marketer) creates a product that they list on JVZoo or Warrior Plus or Clickbank, and you just have to send customers to that product and POW! you are making commissions. But where do you find those customers? How do you get them to the product’s sales page?

Testing and tracking have shown that if you just put a link to a sales page on a forum or send it out in an email and just say “Go here and buy this!”, very few if any, people will respond positively. That’s like trying to sell encyclopedias to random people in the grocery store. That’s not the way to be an affiliate marketer.

There is a belief among some people that affiliate products will sell themselves. Well, to a certain extent that is true. But you have to “pre-sell” the product, not sell the product. Yes, the sales page is there to close the sale, but your job is to warm up your visitors and prospects so they have some interest or curiosity about the product before arriving at the sales page. Then that long as heck sales page with all the graphs and Paypal screen grabs will take over and close the sale.

Some people promote affiliate products on their blog, some people post videos on YouTube.
Others post graphics or text messages on social media to draw people to the sales page. Some people even create a “bridge page”. Some people do all of those, and more.

It’s up to you to figure out where you will find these prospects, how you will create interest or curiosity about the product, and how to convince them to take a look at the product you are promoting. So it’s not as simple as some people claim when they are trying to make a sale.

A good place to start your quest is Facebook. You do have a Facebook account, don’t you? If you don’t, you should. It’s pretty much the biggest “gathering place” on the internet. So learning to leverage a Facebook account for marketing is a good idea. Just don’t be too blatant in your posting. Don’t be too salesman-like. Remember, people love to buy, but they hate to be sold. So, I suggest you use a gentle, but not too subtle of an approach to your ad posts on Facebook.

Then again, if that doesn’t work, you can try the super salesman approach, just be sure you are tracking your results so you know which your readers like more. Tracking is vitally important in affiliate marketing as it is in most forms of internet marketing.

In any case, it is up to you to find people interested in the affiliate product(s) you are promoting and you have to figure out the best LEGITIMATE way to get them to click your link. No tricks or quick switches, unless you don’t want to build an internet business.

This also touches on something about internet and affiliate marketing that some people love and some people hate. That is the fact that only you can determine your results. I repeat – you are responsible for your results if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer.

So get educated!

Then start building!

Then test and track everything!

‘Til next time,

Dave Hodges with shades

Dave

Dave Hodges
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