You’ve probably heard a million times that affiliate marketing is the fastest and easiest way to make money online. And to a certain extent, that’s true. Starting out as an affiliate allows you to make money promoting other people’s products without the time, expense and expertise required for creating a product of your own.
But most likely, the way you’ve been taught is completely wrong…
If you’ve read a few books on affiliate marketing, they’ll tell you go to ClickBank and pick a popular product to promote. Then go create a Fan Page, submit articles to directories and post them on your blog, bookmark your pages, post on Twitter, etc. It sounds good when the gurus tell you how easy it is. After all, it’s free and there’s no risk (except your time).
But you only have so much time in the day and if you use all that time trying to get folks to look at your offer, then the amount of money you can make is directly correlated to the amount of work you can do…
Let’s say you follow that advice and work two hours per day distributing content on various sites and at the end of the week, you make two sales on a $47 product. Even if you make 60%, your commission is not going to be more than $50. So you put in 10 hours to make $50. That’s only $5 an hour and that’s before taxes. You could make more than that working at McDonald’s!
[box type="tick" style="rounded" border="full"]The biggest mistake you can make as an affiliate marketer is to drive traffic straight to a merchant’s website instead of building a list first. [/box]
But if what I just said is true, why do merchants encourage you to market like that? You’d think they’d want you to succeed so you can send them more traffic and sell more of their products, right?
Listen, you can work your fingers to the bone sending them traffic and building their lists and yes, you might make a sale. And if you work harder, you might make a lot of sales. But eventually you’ll realize that the output of cash isn’t worth the input of your time and you’ll eventually give up. But the merchants who operate this way don’t care because there are thousands of people coming online every month looking to make money.
I don’t mean to dramatic, but it’s the truth. You’re on the losing end of the stick. And the merchant makes out like a bandit because he doesn’t have to pay unless you make a sale and in most cases, you don’t get paid on all the other products he sells to his customers.
Generating free traffic online takes a LOT of time. You have to distribute a ton of content before you see much traffic. So a merchant either has to outsource it (and pay up front) or get affiliates to do it for free. Why not build a list first so you can market multiple products and services to the same people?
[box type="tick" style="rounded" border="full"]You need to build a list of qualified prospects instead of working like a horse and hoping for an occasional sale.[/box]
Now I’m NOT saying that affiliate marketing isn’t a great way to start making money online. But if you want to maximize your output and minimize your input, then you need to build a list of qualified prospects instead of working like a horse and hoping for an occasional sale.
If you want to make big money online then you need to leverage your efforts and focus on building a list instead of selling products directly…even if you have to sacrifice short-term profits for long-term residual income.
Think about this…
If you spend time and/or money to drive traffic to a merchant’s website, fewer than 5% will buy. So what happens to the 95% who don’t buy? If you aren’t capturing your visitor’s email addresses and building a list, you’re throwing money right down the drain. Why drive traffic to a merchant’s website and hope for a sale, when you can get them on your list first and have more control over the conversion process?
[box type="tick" style="rounded" border="full"]If you get people to join your list first, that gives you a chance to build a rapport with your subscribers and they’ll be much more likely to buy the products that you recommend. [/box]
The long-term profit potential of your business will rely on repeat sales from the same customers. If you build a list of subscribers who trust you and believe the products you recommend will truly help them succeed, then you can sell multiple products to the same people and maximize your income.
Listbuilding is the most critical skills in affiliate marketing, and many people neglect it entirely. If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you simply have to capture leads and build a responsive list of raving fans and repeat buyers.
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is there a way to download this audio so i can listen on my mp3 player? it’s motivational and makes me wanna get off my ass and put more work into getting things going
Well said, Derrick very professional display of intellect on the subject of internet marketing. Was sheer pleasure to listen with your words easy to understand and just makes good sense. Sure is a competitive world out there with so many people from all walks of life breaking into the online business idea. Well I say good luck to them, but I do know this if anyone of them is not watching how they rank with their keywords then it is going to take a lot of facebook likes and twitter shouts to make a difference. You are a product developer I buy your products have done over the past three years, very rare that I have asked for refunds, never the less you are correct in that sense, don’t confuse the visitors with what I am selling them on. Keep it simple.
Thank You Derrick
Excellent advice
Respectfully
David Jackson
Absolutely fantastic advice. Normally, I can listen to something like that and think, “Well yeah, but I don’t agree with this part.” This audio is pure gold and should be required listening for every existing affiliate and those starting out. Now I am reminded why you haven’t been unsubscribed
Score 10/10.
Hi Derrick
Great advice in this Audio and I can certainly see that you practice exactly what you are talking about here
I guess as somebody who has been online for some time I have become very frustrated at the stream of utter crap being pumped out but you are right the product is not aimed at the established person it’s aimed at people who are buying a dream
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us
Tony
It took me a long time before I finally understood the importance of building a list. Just two days ago a commenter told me he has never done it and this sparked an extremely passionate response from me which I recently posted about…
We cannot underestimate the power of list building. Derrick, I would love to be able to repost this audio if you wouldn’t mind giving out the piece of code to it
Wow. This is realy an eye opening information. It sims that I already knew everything you said, but I didn’t want to accept these facts. I was allways looking for the quick button online, and in two years I made 10 bucks
It is very hard to accept these things, because when you do, you don’t have any idea what should you do next. I don’t know what should I do.
And it feels like a part of the online world has just crashed. Is there really only five percent of the people online making money, and of that five percent did they really all started some kind of businesses and great websites?
When you start a website or a business you have to know something or be an expert in the niche you want to do. And you have to belive in it, like you said, to give great content.
I guess everyone should find something that suits them.
Thanks for being real about all the hype that gurus put out there. They take advantage of newbies and the newbie becomes discouraged and they had already blew some money. I have found that it is just plain blood, sweat and tears to be successful online. I am working on making authority sites that will be respected by Google.
Thanks
Arlene
100% Agreed! Even i was a blogger of more than 3 years of time,i never i tried to build a list from my blog to utilize my traffic. very well, i am going to apply this from today.Thanks to you.
Most people would overlook this step in search of immediate profit. That’s why network marketing or multi-level marketing is the better option in my opinion. But because most people don’t know the marketing process and they put the cart before the horse in both business models they give up and quit.
Marketing is like dating. You have to build relationships with people and build trust before the customer wants to do business with you. Some people because this process does not show immediate cash in pocket either give up or just simply don’t want to put in the work.