How To Start Affiliate Marketing…The Right Way!

August 4, 2008 | By Ben In What is Internet Marketing? |

A lot of people struggle when trying to learn how to start affiliate marketing. Once we come understand how the system works, we can then set about seeking to manipulate it to best serve our own purpose. However, bridging the divide between being an internet marketing newbie and an affiliate marketing success story can sometimes feel like a quantum leap.

The problem is to a large degree perpetuated by the ‘get rich quick’ mentality that many would be affiliate marketers adopt as their approach to learning the ropes. This is the very attitude that already successful marketers hone in on with practiced proficiency to squeeze as many dollars as they can from we ‘wanna-be’ marketers. No doubt you’ve already stumbled upon those sites that guarantee untold riches on autopilot. They suggest that you don’t even need to learn how to start affiliate marketing, just purchase their product for a measly $97 bucks and you’ll have cash dropping out of the sky in 24 hours even if you are a complete marketing noob. They offer a turnkey business and stock standard website template, and seal the deal with testimonials from people who assert to having made $13,874 in 48 hours. Of course, what they don’t tell you is that they have a list of 42,076 people, all of who regularly make purchases on their say so. Do these sorts of arrangements make money? For sure…the guy selling them makes a packet!

Let’s damp down our cynicism for a moment though. It’s not that these sorts of arrangements are all scams, some affiliate marketing methods are genuinely designed to assist people by providing them with a system to make money online. The two big problems with many such systems though are:

They fail to address the fundamental knowledge that we need to really be successful at marketing.
They create unrealistic expectations in the mind of the purchaser as to what can be achieved in a short space of time.

The effect of the first problem is that without core knowledge, experience and ability new marketers can’t grasp the reasons why the things they are doing aren’t working, and equally they lack an appreciation of what they are doing right and so can’t capitalize on them. The effect of the second problem is that when failure almost invariably raises its ugly head, the new marketer becomes demoralized and despondent, passes the whole ‘make money online’ gig as a scam, and tells everyone how crap the product they purchased was (or more frequently, just keeps the whole sorry experience to themselves due to embarrassment).

When I first started looking into making money online I did my Google search like we all did, and got smacked in the face with a couple of thousand sites telling me how easy it was to make money online. If you’re anything like me, even though I was excited by the prospect, alarm bells started to go off and something started to smell a little south of cheese. I figured it had to be bollocks…and saw the sales hype for what it is, a thinly veiled curtain designed to convince me to make a purchase. But that’s not what I was there for. I wanted to go behind the curtain and figure out how to sell stuff to others! Problem was I wasn’t sure how to ‘get on the stage’ much less pull the curtains aside.

When I first started out with affiliate marketing the hardest part was understanding how affiliate marketing really works. The basic premise is simple, but there’s so much we can do wrong that I just wanted someone to take me by the hand and show me, step by step, just once so I could make it ‘click’. It seemed like everyone was prepared to show me a little piece of it but I just couldn’t get the clear picture I needed to start putting the pieces together.

That used to drive me nuts. I’d be told ‘All you need is adwords for instant traffic’ or ‘pick a keyword and write an article’, or ‘choose a hungry niche to create your own product’.

That’s all well and good buddy, but how do I know what my niche is hungry for, and how do I get my article off page 793 of Google, and why is my freaken adwords campaign costing me a fortune when I haven’t made a single sale?

Actually setting about learning something, like proper affiliate marketing, can feel boring. It’s not glamorous to think of ourselves wading through pages and pages of info in a bid to understand. It smacks of self education…that was what Uni was for and I spent 8 years getting a 5 year degree. It’s much more fun to be attracted to the lure of fast money and minimal effort, to think of spending our time jetting along some sanded shoreline with a pina-colada in one hand and a sexy siren in the other. The problem is, it’s just not going to happen that way.

Learning how to start affiliate marketing is the first step on a path that leads to a very important place…leveraged and passive income. A place where we can use the ongoing efforts of others for unadulterated self gain. This should be the true lure and our ultimate goal if we are to embark on the journey at all. It takes some effort on our part however, so it’s better just to get savvy with that and understand it’s the price we pay now to keep making money in the future…even if we are on a holiday. But trust me, the journey can feel almost as good as the destination. If you haven’t already, when you make your first sale through affiliate marketing and money appears in your bank account almost as if by magic…you’ll feel the elation, and that my friend, is what will keep you treading down the path to success.

Take the time to make an investment in yourself. Learn how affiliate marketing works. Avoid the hyped up get rich quick schemes. Be smart, and treat affiliate marketing like the business that it is. You wouldn’t open a restaurant without knowing how to manage it. If embarking upon a campaign of affiliate marketing, just be sure those guiding the way don’t have some self interest in misleading you.

In a subsequent post I’m going to give you a little over view of the fundamental type of affiliate marketing to get started. If you want to fast track the process, then I can recommend a resource designed specifically to cater to giving new marketers current and practical information. You can use it to learn how to start affiliate marketing.

Or simply stick around and I’ll do my best to take you there with me.