Getting Down To The Basics – the Affiliate Marketing For Dummies book that will get you started down the road of extra income.
How do you earn money online? – a reasonable question – with hundreds of possible answers… but I’m going to deal with only one. When dealing with the topic of making money online – it’s easy to get tripped up… and not just dummies…
Trading time for money is what most people do – day in and day out… I’ve done it most of my life, and I’m still doing it. I go to work, I work 8 hours, and my boss pays me a portion of what I’ve earned for the company. It’s a simple and understandable process.
But other possibilities exist… the one I want to talk about is doing the work ONCE, then getting paid over and over again for that same work.
If you’re not familiar with this concept – you might at first scoff – but you’re already familiar with it – books. An author writes a book, he may spend months or even years writing it, but then he’s going to keep getting paid royalties for the rest of his life every time someone new buys his book.
This is what you are going to do – you’re going to start a blogging website, you’re going to write the posts just once, then you’re going to spend years raking in the financial benefits of those posts. Sound good? I think so. You’re going to become an author!
And when you become an author – you’ll attract eyes to your content – you’ll have a platform where you can speak to people… this is all you need to earn a full-time income. Affiliate Marketing for Dummies is really just a shortcut past the common misunderstandings that plague people who want to earn extra money online.
Getting Tripped Up…
This is where many people get tripped up – they see a Youtube video showing some young lady posting short videos to Tik Tok, and in just two months, having single days where she earned $400. Wonderful, right? And the moment that she took a day off, and stopped posting videos, she started earning $0 a day.
What’s her mistake? She’s creating content – AND GIVING IT TO SOMEONE ELSE! Tik Tok doesn’t care about you. YOU are the person who’s best motivated to care about you – spend time & sweat to research & write good content – then put it on YOUR website. Nothing else can work as well, and be as financially profitable as having your own website.
There are only four places you can get traffic to make money – you can buy social media site ads, you can buy Google ads, you can write posts on social media – or you can let organic traffic flow from Google by writing good content, and placing it on your website.
Let’s look a little closer:
- Buying Ads On Social Media (Facebook, TicTok, etc)- results can be fast, but you’ll almost certainly have to create a landing page (yep, a website). And your results may or may not end up in the black. You could easily spend more money on the ads than the commission’s you’re getting paid.
- Buying Ads On Google (or Bing, etc) – Simply read the above, it’s the same – with the proviso that you can lose A LOT OF MONEY really quick if you don’t know what you’re doing! If you’re dead set on trying this – find one of the $500 coupons for Google, and lose their money rather than yours…
- Writing Posts On Social Media – Again, this is the same as with buying ads, without the cost. You’ll need a landing page, and although results can be fast, it will depend on many SEO factors. The “lifetime” of your posts is also a factor – when you stop posting, your traffic will come to an end.
- Write Good Content On Your Website – Organic Search Traffic – This costs nothing, and you retain all rights to your hard earned content. It’s slow, in that it can take 8-12 months for your content to rank high enough to be bringing in traffic. But once that traffic is coming in – it dies a VERY slow death… you can stop all content creation – and still have traffic flowing in for months & years later.
It seems quite clear to me what the best method is going to be – I’ve tried paying for traffic, and as I stated, you can lose a lot of money that way. I’ve never been a fan of providing my content to others for them to use… think about it, where would Facebook be without user provided content?
Every time I see a money making method being advertised – two things jump out at me:
- Are they putting their own created content on their own site? Or giving it away to some other website they have no control over?
- Where’s the traffic coming from?
Any method for making money online that doesn’t get these two things right will either not work, or it will be far more work than necessary.
Pay careful attention to where the traffic is coming from – I’ve seen many info ‘products’ that consist of a great looking landing page – and the ‘hook’ is that you just buy this ‘done for you’ method, and send traffic to the page to make money.
Trust me, the traffic is by FAR the most difficult thing to get! If you learn how to attract traffic, virtually anything will work to earn money – but without the traffic – the prettiest of websites will sit idle.
What’s The Basic Process?
Find someone who wants to spend money – and point ’em in the direction of someone who will pay you a percentage of that sale in order for you to send customers that way.
This is the simple basic way to do affiliate marketing – find buyers, and send ’em to the seller’s of your choice. Seller’s who will pay YOU a percentage.
How do you find someone who wants to spend money? This is easier than you think – just consider what YOU did the last time you wanted to buy an MP3 player – you did a Google search for “What is the best MP3 Player?” or searched for “ipod shuffle vs sandisk clip sport,” or you searched for “MP3 reviews.”
These are all questions that show high buyer intent – they are generally only asked by people who have their wallet or purse open, and are about ready to spend money. You simply need to get between their money, and the product.
This process can be difficult when talking about specific products – how do you find all people looking for MP3 players? They may use specific brand names, such as ‘Sandisk instead of “MP3” – and you’ll lose ’em… It can be done, and some very successful online marketers search for new products, and put up a review website just to capitalize on people looking for this new product.
So if you want to promote products, it’s best if you drill down to specific products. This way you catch buyers with money in hand just wanting to justify buying what they want to buy anyway…
But in the two niches I recommend – Finance/Make Money Online & Health/Fitness – buying intent is not nearly as important to worry about. Don’t get me wrong, buyer intent is still important – but not nearly AS important as when you’re speaking about a hard physical product.
Think of it this way – walk down the street and ask people to buy your watch – it may be a very nice watch, and the price you ask might be a fraction of what it’s worth – but you won’t find any buyers – they have no buying intent at that moment.
Now walk down the street with a $20 bill in your hand, offering to sell it for a dollar – I reckon the interest will be quite a bit higher than when you were trying to sell your watch. You don’t need to worry quite as much about ‘buyer intent’ when it comes to the two niches that I recommend – virtually EVERYONE wants more money, even millionaires… and most people have health concerns of one sort or another. (and if they don’t right now, they will… they will…)
No-one who is financially strapped is going to procrastinate when they’re looking at a way to ease their troubles… at least, no-one who isn’t a moron. All they need is convincing.
Likewise, when I’d gained too much weight after getting out of the Marine Corps – I woke up one day and said “This is unacceptable – I need to do something.” I didn’t procrastinate once I’d decided I needed to do something. So ANY mention of diet or weight as a search term is a potential customer for your niche health website.
When you sell affiliate products in these two niches – virtually EVERYONE is in a buying mood… you simply need to convince them that your advice is the method they should follow. This is not to say that if you absolutely love a particular hobby, you can’t make a website and make money, I averaged a few hundred dollars a month with a martial arts website when it was active. But if every single Judoka in the United States bought something that earned me a commission – it still would pale in comparison to the numbers of Americans that want to earn more money.
As I wrote that – I thought that it’s not quite accurate – my potential website visitors who can earn me a commission are not just Americans – but ANYONE world wide who speaks English. This reminds me – there’s virtually a direct correlation between how much money you make, and how many people you entertain or help. You help a single employer, you get a set amount, you entertain a stadium of people, you get a much larger chunk of change.
By building a website and helping people realize their financial or health goals – you have the opportunity to help far more people than just one employer – and the money you can conceivably earn is significantly larger.
Stop Signs In The Way…
There are three major stop signs along the way… These will prevent you from earning affiliate income with a website:
- Information Overload. I cover this in more depth in a post you can find here. You cannot let the tremendous floods of information stifle your action – only taking action results in money, no amount of “thinking about it” will replace action. You must settle on a known working process, and take action to carry it out. In this case, putting together a website, and posting at least 100 posts over the period of a year or two.
- Lack Of Patience. This is as much a fundamental misunderstanding of the process as anything else… many people get the idea that making extra money online is a fast thing… and it can be, if you’re willing to pay for traffic. Unfortunately, without knowing your “conversion rate” – how many website visitors will buy – and make you a commission – means that most often you will overpay for traffic, and lose money. Google can take 8-12 months to “rank” a post – bringing in traffic to your website. Understand this and be prepared to wait.
- Bum Information. (And for my UK readers, let me rephrase that… BAD Information). There are many “methods” of making money online that are simply failures right out of the box. If you don’t learn to recognize them, you’ll waste valuable time trying, and failing. And it only takes one failure for many people to decide that making money online isn’t something they can do.
If you fall under the spell of any of these three stop signs, you’ll not have the financial resources you could have had when you retire. There’s lots of things bad about growing old, but knowledge isn’t one of them. I would look on myself in my 20’s or 30’s, and say: “What a moron that guy is!” It’s not really that I was a moron so much as I simply didn’t have the knowledge I do now…
You’re in the same boat, right? Ready to retire, or possibly already retired, and not having the financial resources you wish you had. Reading this Affiliate Marketing For Dummies 101 post is a start… The basic method of affiliate sales is not a get rich quick scheme, you can count on at least 6 months seeing no money at all for your efforts. But if you do everything right – you can be smiling indeed two years from now. 😃
What do you say? Are you willing to get to work?
