What you thought would be daily tidbits of affiliate marketing wisdom are really this..
Every day, you get these chummy little emails from Eric, Chris and Ben telling you about a great new product. (Funny how these emails become more and more frequent and rarely are nothing more than a pitch for yet ANOTHER GREAT PRODUCT?).
And every product pitched is basically the same?
- Fast way to big sales/traffic!
- Fool proof, step-by-step system!
- Proven way to make xxxx$ in sales/increase traffic in 30 Days or Less!
- Super secret methods! Destroy the competition! Dominate the market!
- Make lots of dough, imagine the good life!
If it were all true, why are more people not making more money (or any money)?
Because most of these affiliate marketing course, e-books and videos are a scam.
Period.
Here are the pitfalls they never seem to mention in the sales pitch letters.
- The product you are purchasing is going to be bought by thousands of others who will also be trying the same techniques/plan you are which means the market will become diluted and the BIG SECRET STRATEGY will no longer be a secret.
- All require an upfront costs besides the e-book, video or course.
All products or plans require customers to have domain names, a web hosting account, an email auto responder product, Internet access, PPC marketing (like AdWords)budget and more software tools.
- All require time devoted to correctly using the product. Not the maintaining, but building. This can be 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. Even the easy stuff, like key word research, PPC ad creation, and building web forms takes time. A lot of time.
- The ability to build a web site. Not a "Site Sell" or "Website Tonight" page, but a real Web 2.0 pitch page, landing page and other sales related pages. No HTML, CSS or PHP skills? Plan on hiring someone if you want to take full advantage of your nifty new, money making e-advice
All of this is left out of the pitch page.
Take building a web site for instance.
What a total pain in the butt. But it is required to have a pitch page and landing page for your affiliate marketing efforts (each one by the way - so one page for Day Job Killer, another for Affiliate Project X, and so on and so on..).
Firing up the JAVA-based web site creation tool won't work and will only serve to frustrate you even further.
So you check with e-lance, rent-a-coder or some other site online and find that the pitch page can be built by an "expert" but it will cost $150.00! And you still have not made a dime online yet.
And even if the site is built, how will you get traffic? If trying to resell a popular product, better be ready to compete against the big boys who already have the higher page rank for natural traffic searches.
How about a PPC campaign (like AdWords) to build traffic?
Don't worry. The big boys have 100,200 and 1000.00 daily AdWords budgets and will force your measly little .05 per click/10.00 a day budget to the ground floor fifteen minutes after you start your big release.
And if your PPC ad does make it through to first page on Google, your competition will click thru your budget limited ads a few hundred times, run out your daily budget and run you off the net faster than you can say John Reese.
Here is my advice for making money online.
- Skip buying the e-products. Most are recycled junk. Focus on the end products you really want to market.
- Don't look for niche products, look for niche markets and potential buyers. Follow the money.
- Use PPC sparingly. Instead go to where your customer is and organically grow your web site and products. Some ideas..
* Join lots of web forums which have your interest and promote products with lots of good content posts featuring your product link in your signature and posts. Consider offering free products to generate click thrus.
* Use Squidoo. Build a lens for the products you are promoting. Include links back to your site. Visit lots of other lenses and leave comments.
* Use StumbleUpon and del.icio.us to generate a few more clicks.
* Use MyBlogLog, visit other sites and promote yours.
All of these tools "could" possibly generate a hundred of so site visits a day or more over time. No, it's not "thousands of clicks a day" but if one or two visitors buy the promoted product, you are making money - maybe for the first time.
- Pay someone to build your site. Use a SEO snob search engine friendly platform like Wordpress. Focus on one product at a time to keep your budget and time constraints at a minimum. Make your site somewhat unique and less "sale focused" and more information intense.
- Speaking of time, set aside a fixed amount of time a day for your efforts. One hour for page building. One hour for keyword and product research. One hour for marketing and traffic building research. One hour for maintaining/updating sites. Don't do all work on one day at one time - just one or two tasks a day with a fixed goal in mind.
- Write. Write good quality content. This is more important than design, platform or product. If you cannot or will not write, get out of the business and take a second job at Walmart.
That's it. That is the real secret to making money online. There are plenty of other things you can do to increase traffic and sales, but start with the basics and make it a goal to get that first order on ClickBank or Commission Junction. Than work on order number two and so on.
3 comments:
You have some good points.
Jesie
Thanks for your comment and for visiting.
Its nice and interesting and good to visit and reading your blog. I agree that some of your points are really good in affiliated marketing.
But i must say that many of the people are unaware toward this business and they think that its impossible to earn money from internet or what we say "online".
affiliated marketing i s a way to earn money online without going anywhere and without dealing with sponsers or enterprenuer. You just need the internet and a direction to go.Many of people are earning a high income and living a luxury life in this business.
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