So you want to try your hand at affiliate marketing? Or do you want to try and figure it out?
Well, you’ve come to the right place, I speak from a more, in my opinion, a realistic approach, while I may not have the success story many would like to hear I try and set a realistic expectation, through my failures and in hopes, listeners can learn from my experience. This isn’t to discourage anyone from taking the leap into affiliate marketing but to learn from my mistakes and victories.
While I am sure most of you had got interested in or started in affiliate marketing with some sort of grandiose plan of making it big at the comfort of your own home in a short amount of time, the reality is, it’s just not that simple, sure it is easy to create a website, Youtube channel, sales funnel, or social media page and promote affiliate links, most of those ways are like putting a lemonade stand out in the Sahara desert waiting for customers to show up who want exactly what you are promoting.
While for me I received the idea from a Youtuber back in 2016 explaining that all you need to do is find a niche, like “plumbers in Lubbock, TX” and then find an affiliate offer for plumbers in that region, and violà! Everyone searching for plumbers will click on your affiliate link, and purchase services from those plumbers, and you will get a slice of the action residually. Of course, I was skeptical but it opened my eyes to opportunities.
I would later study more about affiliate offers and run across more “experts” and they all gave good advice and made it sound so easy, just put an arrow here, a few keywords there and nobody could resist clicking on your offers. Sadly I tried this with a real estate company’s affiliate offer for several months with zero returns, I think the only person visiting my site was me.
Later I would find out the importance of SEO (Site Engine Optimization) and think; “of course! I need to make sure my website is ranking on the first page in order to gain traction and visitors!” So with the little funds I had, I spoke with several SEO agencies, and the best one that fit my budget cost me $900 (which was and still is a lot of money for me) a month. With guarantees of ranking in the top 10 spots on page number 1! After 2 to 3 months’ time, how could I lose, indeed real estate has millions of searches each month.
Sadly after draining my bank account and recruiting the use of my credit card, the SEO service did not help drive traffic to my site. however, they did deliver on their guarantee of placing my website on page number one with certain keywords.
The Desperate Journey continues…
With the whole affiliate marketing venture now landing me heavily in the red, I let it go by the wayside for a couple of months, until I started listening to more “experts” and I gained enough courage to try again. I decided to start a webpage dedicated to mentorship, where I spent many hours creating websites comprised of 33 pages worth of content, which is more or less a blog. For this webpage, I focused heavily on quality content, tried some SEO myself with plugins and backlinks, and even created a Youtube channel and Facebook page dedicated to the website. I even paid for Facebook ads and Google and Bing ads… However while my Facebook ads responded well hardly anyone clicked on my website’s landing page, let alone any affiliate link. And while the Google and Bing ads drove traffic to my site, nobody was interested in the affiliate offers, and would quickly jump off my website.
Puzzled I hired the help of one of my Youtuber “mentors” for some insight, by purchasing their 30-minute question and answer session for the sweet deal of 50% off their original price with the total being$450 more out of pocket… When I showed the Youtuber my website, they more or less told me to completely change direction, and that what I was doing was too complicated. Of course, from a consumer standpoint, I had to agree, and of course, I later got hit with some costly upsells that I had to turn down for financial reasons.
Later I lost hope in affiliate marketing as a whole and moved on with my normal 9-5 job and family life, all while deep down wishing I could find a way to may supplemental income to help mine and my family’s situation…
Freelancer Run Around
After about a years time, I once again gave up on affiliate marketing and figured it to be a waste of time, except when I noticed freelancer were offering their ability to help create successful affiliate websites, having switched jobs where I made a little more money, and me being a sucker I took them up on their offer, I had a call with the freelancer and we discussed what kind of topic I wanted to promote and gave them a go-ahead. Why they weren’t the best in the business: I could tell they knew what they were doing better than I ever did. after about 2 weeks, they completed the task and created a very functional, sales-oriented website. With all the pieces in place I tried running native ads which are a little more costly but a little more effective in my experience. At first, I was spending about $250 a week with nothing to show for it, except “hops” I even asked the freelancer to look at my parameters and got them tweaked a bit to be better, but still nothing… I then hired two more freelancers who were more prestigious to evaluate my website, and they both critiqued it pretty harshly and of course, told me to hire them for actual results. I had hit another roadblock…
I then tried different methods through paid traffic like just using the affiliate link to no avail and later hired someone to help be my mentor, but they only persisted in getting sales funnels with no help on getting started, or how to correct my mistakes or where to point me, they said all would be better if I would just pay them $1,000 to create a sales funnel for me.
After all, these losses the one thing I had going for me was persistence.
The happy ending.
Thanks for staying with me on my boring sad sack story. The moral of the story is if any of this sounds familiar or sounds like things you want t to avoid, here are my tips. And how I was able to find success after a slow and painful ride.
The way I found success:
Number 1:
Really take the time to find a niche that you can support, as far as having the product being ethical, as well as something you know about or something you are interested in. THEN look at the analytics to that niche or offer. Is there a decent size market for the offer? How competitive is its keywords, is the market over-saturated with that topic?
Check its statistics and payout, is it substantial? these are just some of the things you should look at before you narrow down your affiliate offer. It’s easy to see an offer that pays $300 an opt-in and model your whole strategy around it, when it might be impossible to promote or not many people can afford the service. Some of those offers are for the experts and the “big dogs” for just stepping in the ring and looking at high dollar returns can be flashy, but hard to get right, it might be easier to get an offer that just pays $12 commissions, and replicate more frequently?
Remember your niche has a lot to do with your success when you first start out, think of it as your foundation to build upon.
Some heavy hitters with decent affiliate offer listings you can check out:
- Clickbank.com
- Rakutenadvertising.com
- Offervault.com
- MaxBounty.com
Number 2
Once you find out what niche you’re interested in, look at some of the leading competitors pushing that product or service, examine their monthly traffic numbers through Neil Patel’s or SEM Rush’s site Auditor for example to get the analytics, get a feel of what method they use for their check out or sales process, for example, is it just an explanatory video, an opt-in page, add to cart button, sign up for an email list, maybe even pursue it like you want to buy from them, is there a retention pop up window? Things along those lines, are not necessary to copy but see how they promote their goods or services, for example, if you click on a link to get a free ebook, and once you click on it, it says buy our product for $12.99 you’re going to be turned off, instead think about adding them to an email list through like Constant Contact, or Get Response and do a “slow drip” approach on them with weekly emails on what’s going on, or helpful info or resources. Once they see the value of your offer they can put two and two together on how they can benefit from buying your offer.
When you analyze to see your competitor’s traffic you can also see if they are getting most of their traffic organically (being sought after) or are they coming by paid ads. and see what you are up against.
Number 3
Once you get everything narrowed down, and you have your niche and ready to get started, my recommendation is to you is start on what you think would be the most effective way of promoting your product, here are some common ones; create a Facebook, or Instagram page, or a Tik-Tok account, these are often overlooked but can be an untapped gold mine if done correctly. Another route is to create a website, this can take many directions, but this is not as easy as people make it sound by creating a website and it will just do all the work, unfortunately, this will need still a lot of attention like content creation, create backlinks, by either creating some social platforms to coincide with your site or join forums to recommend your site when appropriate. Why many more experienced affiliate marketers will say SEO is a waste of time if you find the right niche, I wholeheartedly disagree, while I also agree that buying an expensive SEO service to boost your search results usually isn’t necessary either, I say find the sweet spot by putting in your own little SEO where possible, like just adding a plug-in from your domain provider will even help a tad.
Better Equipped
Ultimately whatever option you choose, there are many great Youtubers, mentors, programs, websites, and forums that provide tremendous help, insight, and experience, many offer programs to purchase to help fast track your success. None of which I am affiliated with but think are worth checking out, some you can siphon through and see which ones resonate with you. At the end offer what program worked best for me, thanks for reading this, and no matter what stay persistent on your own journey to success!
Great Youtbers for additional insight:
Buildapreneur – Spencer Mecham
Affiliatemarketingmc – Marcus Campbell
Freedom Influencer – Nathan Lucas
| Great Youtubers for real advice: | Websites | Forums | |
| Buildapreneur – Spencer Mecham Affiliatemarketingmc – Marcus Campbell Freedom Influencer – Nathan Lucas | |||