How YOU Can Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
Considering how well affiliate marketing can be automated and how passive the income could be, it’s very easy to get excited. It’s very easy for people with no background on affiliate marketing to think that they can make money this way. Boy, are they in for a surprise.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of people who try their hand with affiliate marketing have very little to show for the time, effort and energy they put in. Where did they go wrong? More importantly, how can you avoid the mistakes that they typically make?
It all boils down to nailing your niche
If you want to crush it with affiliate marketing, you need to start from the beginning. If you lay the foundations of your affiliate marketing business on the wrong niche or product category, you are just wasting your time. This crucial. You have to pick the right niche.
Next, Make it Easy on Yourself.
After selecting your niche, you have to build the right conversion platform targeting your niche. This is very hard to do on your own.
If you are just to invent stuff or come up with your own ideas, it’s anybody’s guess whether your website or traffic system will actually convert visitors into cold hard cash.
Thankfully, there is a simple trick you can use called “reverse engineering” that would enable you to make your competitors do your homework for you.
They do the heavy lifting. They do the necessary research. They make the painful mistakes so you don’t have to.
Get That Free Traffic
After you’ve set up the right conversion platform or website or mailing list targeting the right niche, the next step is to get that free traffic.
Here is a quick tip: traffic is everywhere. Seriously. No joke. Any website or platform that allows you to post a link that goes to any other place on the internet outside of the platform you’re on is a potential source of traffic.
Wrap your mind around this. Understand that free traffic is everywhere, but that does not automatically mean you should spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and energy getting that free traffic.
Free traffic is not equal. Learn how to qualify your traffic. Focus on making sure that only people who are interested in whatever affiliate product it is you are pushing would click on your link. This is how you qualify your traffic.
The old idea of “the more the merrier” doesn’t work when it comes to online traffic. You can get a ton of traffic and fail to convert them. You have to get the right free traffic.
Learn How to Optimize Like a Pro
If you want to crush it with affiliate marketing, you cannot be satisfied with what you have set up. Whatever conversion platform, blog, website or resource site you have put up is just version one.
You have to look at your business that way. This is just the first version. You’re going to go through several versions until it converts at a high enough level for you to scale it up by building other websites. That’s the name of the game.
But there is a secret to this. Most people optimize in the worst way and they end up making things worse for themselves. There is a trick to this that enables you to enjoy increasing levels of conversion.
The Bottom Line: Conversions Put Food on the Table, Not Traffic
If you’re excited about affiliate marketing, you are probably really pumped up about driving traffic to your website. Believe me, I understand where you’re coming from. I totally get you.
But here’s the problem. If you don’t know what you’re doing, chances are, you are just going to put in all this time, effort and emotional energy, plus some money, only to end up with very little.
One of the most common mistakes newbie affiliate marketers make is that they assume that huge traffic means huge income. This is not true.
There are many blogs, sales pages, squeeze pages, and other online traffic conversion platforms out there that get fairly low levels of traffic, but they make money hand over fist. You have to understand that you must qualify your traffic.
Free traffic is not created equal.
Just because you get a lot of traffic, it doesn’t mean you’re going to make a lot of money. Focus instead on conversions.
To nail this down, you have to optimize everything you do online with conversions in mind. You have to optimize your ads, you have to optimize your content, and you have to fine tune your landing pages.
You have to apply conversion optimization across the board. Otherwise, you’re not going to make much money. Once again, conversions put food on the table, not traffic.