Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make income to come out of the digital era. Hundreds of people have forgone working regular jobs, and started to use social media, YouTube, and Google to generate 6 figure, and even 7 figure incomes.
Often, the most successful and established affiliate marketers barely even need to work to keep the money coming in. Like owning real estate investments, or dividend paying stocks, having an established presence online (whether on a blog, or on social media) can keep a passive flow of money consistently entering your bank. It’s a great feeling having a cup of tea, and curling up for bed with my wife and cats, only to wake up and find that I had made more money overnight.
So if it’s such an amazing opportunity, why isn’t everyone doing it? You would expect everyone to be trying to learn affiliate marketing, right? Well, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
5 Reasons Why There Aren’t More People Doing Affiliate Marketing
1. People aren’t asking how to learn affiliate marketing. They’re going in blind, and creating spam, with none of the necessary education.
2. They have a lack of the right motivation. Successful affiliate marketers treat it like a business. 90% of people trying affiliate marketing fail because they expect something easier, faster, simpler, than what they find. And when it turns out to be more challenging, they give up.
3. They can’t get over their skepticism. Millions of people that have all the skills necessary to become 6-figure internet entrepreneurs live their whole lives working pitiful desk jobs because they can’t stop being skeptical of the opportunities that exist. It’s a lack of belief.
4. They start out with no other source of income, or quit their jobs, and starve while they wait for success. Affiliate marketing can easily take over a year to start paying off, with consistent effort. It’s the long game. It takes patience. Don’t quit your day job BEFORE you’re making money and paying your bills. It’s meant to start as a side hustle.
5. They don’t have the right tools. Slow, sloppy websites. Websites that aren’t mobile friendly. No marketing tools. Messy social media posts that look tacky or untrustworthy. No branding. There are right tools, and wrong tools – your success depends on using the right tools.
If you’re looking into the world of affiliate marketing for the first time, don’t get scared off! It’s intimidating at first, it genuinely is. I was there too, and felt the same thing. Heck, the first time I opened a Pinterest account to start promoting my blog I started stress eating ice cream at the sight of my competition. It’s natural to be a little daunted at first. But the people who get what they want are the ones who persevere through the bumpy beginning.
Every beginner needs to start with the right first task: How to learn affiliate marketing.
Step #1: Costs, Courses, and Crying
If you’re serious about making a full time income online, you’ve got to figure out how it works first. There are tons of clever gurus out there, who have made some money online, and will sell you a course to teach you how to do the same. If you’ve ever typed the words – make money online – into a search box, you’ve probably already seen the Facebook ads.
An extremely caffeinated person bursts onto the screen in front of an exotic location, or a Lamborghini, and animatedly explains why you should try their TOTALLY FREE E-book, and attend their TOTALLY FREE webinar, to learn all the secrets of affiliate marketing and their success.
Eager young Jordan (that’s me), desperate to find some alternate income sources, attended a few of these webinars himself. And at the end of every. single. one. of these webinars, what do you think happened? They offered the real access to their secret formulas for only $1,000 (but assure you that they’ve done the math, and it really has a $10,000 value). Or maybe you can get access for only $500, but they eventually force you to add the $750 plan, and then the $1,000 plan, and then if you REALLY care about your success, you’ll get the $10,000 plan because after that money will be no object.
Those Tantalizing Guru Courses ☹️
I sound a little bitter and irritated here, but I’m not actually saying these gurus can’t teach you how to make a really profitable business. In fact, many people who buy these courses (and also work really hard) become extremely successful too. They just charge too much money, and you don’t get any tools out of the deal… just knowledge. When you make a business investment, getting knowledge without the tools, or vice versa, is like buying a car… and then finding the car is cut in half, and can’t actually function in of itself.
Luckily, after a few missteps, I found something called Wealthy Affiliate, where I learned what I needed to know about affiliate marketing. Instead of a guru selling me a course, and then overloading me with upsells, Wealthy Affiliate was straightforward with me from the start.
This Is How Wealthy Affiliate Works
Social media is great. Essential even. But if you want a long-term, sustainable business the best place to do affiliate marketing is through a blog. I know, I know, if you’re not much of a writer, the idea of starting a blog might make your hair stand on end. It worried me too, at first.
Luckily, helping people start a blog is what Wealthy Affiliate does.
The hardest part for me launching a business online was that I didn’t know how to build a website. Wealthy Affiliate actually built a website FOR me, and then allowed me to easily customize it and make it look how I wanted with a few clicks of a button. Whenever I have tech trouble, I also have immediate access to Customer Support through Wealthy Affiliate. They always respond to me within about 10 minutes, and they fix any tech problem I ever have.
With the technology challenges out of the way, the only things I had to really focus on was how to create and promote a brand online, and make it rank high up in Google. If you can’t rank on the 1st page of Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, or anywhere else that you’re posting, you’ll never even get your business off the ground. No one will ever find you! So this was hugely important.
The Teaching:
Wealthy Affiliate gave me a coarse that simplified everything for me, and taught me how to create content on a blog that could rank on page 1. Within a few months I had a post that ranked at number 7, page 1 in Yahoo. A couple weeks later it was at spot 4. Then I had my first page 1 ranking in Bing. My Pinterest account reached 11k monthly viewers. So did my Quora postings. Not long after that I had over a dozen sign ups to Shopify through my referral links ($60 per referral).
Wealthy Affiliate is also an online community of over 100,000 affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs. By having full access to these people, I was able to find dozens of experienced mentors who were willing to share their knowledge and experiencewith me without pay. Every time I found a blind spot, I was able to find someone to shed light on it. Every time I had a question, I was able to find an answer in the Wealthy Affiliate community. Many of these mentors were already making $10,000 per month or more, but still made the time to give me some tips.
This community of support was the greatest asset that I had in learning affiliate marketing.
These are the things that you need to learn, that Wealthy Affiliate will
teach you:
1. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how to keep your website approved by Google (and all the other search engines).
2. How to write blog content – length, content, images, topics, and keywords. All of it is covered.
3. How to promote your blog. They teach you how to drive traffic, through places like Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook, and then the community will support your brand’s social media by liking, following, and sharing.
The Tools:
Besides the website building capabilities, Wealthy Affiliate also gave me all of the other tools that I needed to succeed with affiliate marketing. Check it out!
1. They gave me a keyword research tool, called Jaaxy. This saved me hours of work trying to find good keywords for my posts (which are like the life’s blood of your blog content). Jaaxy helped me to find keywords with a high number of searches, and a low number of competing pages.
2. They hosted my website for me. Every website requires a host to function. While there are plenty of good, affordable hosts out there, like Bluehost, and HostGator, Wealthy Affiliate provided hosting for me that made life easy. The host is fast, and has kept my website running without problems.
3. A website manager. Wealthy Affiliate has a backdoor where you can monitor the health of your website, and watch it improve more and more over time.
These tools are some things that you absolutely need when starting up your affiliate marketing blog. This helped me to keep them consolidated, and cheap (all for the price of one).
The Cost Of Wealthy Affiliate
If you’re going to be starting a new business, costs need to be one of your main concerns. But you also can’t be afraid of making an investment in your business. Hundreds of people have been able to grow million dollar businesses with only the smallest costs, but investments are inevitable.
Investing WISELY is the key.
This is how Wealthy Affiliate’s options work:
No upsells. No obnoxious hidden costs. Wealthy Affiliate actually has a non-expiring free option! Instead of a limited time free trial, Wealthy Affiliate lets you use several of their resources without a paid membership. You can build a basic version of your website, take the first couple of training sessions, and get limited access to the keyword research tool and hosting all within the paid membership.
I used the paid membership for about 2 months, before upgrading.
The paid membership costs about $360 for a whole year of the service. There’s no gold plan, platinum plan, or other up-charge. Full access is $360 for the year. This gets you:
– The full training
– full access to the community, and Site Support
– The hosting
– Unlimited access to the keyword research tool
– The ability to create over a dozen websites if you want to.
You can also purchase Wealthy Affiliate on a month to month basis, though at $49 per month, it’s less cost efficient in the long run, if you’re committed.
The good news is, you don’t necessarily have to keep renewing your membership every year to keep succeeding in affiliate marketing. Many bloggers and affiliate marketers will stay long after they’ve created a profitable blog, but you can also cut costs and fly on your own wings after the first year if you choose to.
The Solidarity Of Like Minded People
Thinking about trying it out?
There’s no better way to learn affiliate marketing than from other like-minded entrepreneurs who have already done it. The most valuable thing that Wealthy Affiliate gave me, bar none, is access to a community of other affiliate marketers who wanted to help my business succeed. You have a passionate fan base the minute you join, and they carry you on their shoulders over and over again until you’re totally independent.
And then you can become a mentor for someone else.
Affiliate marketing is challenging, but anyone can do it, and make it an extremely successful venture. Writing ability may vary. It might take some longer than others. But with the proper learning, the digital nomad lifestyle – working from anywhere in the world, for yourself, on your own terms – is totally possible.
If You’re Interested In Wealthy Affiliate, Join The Community Here For Free, And Shoot Me A Message In There! I’ll Give You Tips!