Starting your Affiliate Marketing Engine

This post is a follow on from a previous one entitled Building a Lasting Affiliate Network. Whilst many of us may find it easy to starting building an Affiliate Network, I sometimes forget that there’s still those of you who are eager to get started & know the basics. Before going into more detail I thought I’d prepare a post to put the entire scale of Affiliate Marketing into perspective.

A question I often get emailed is

How can I get started in Affiliate Marketing?

Unfortunately there’s no easy answer to this question. It takes hard work, patience & learning A LOT from your mistakes. This post is aimed at those wanting to get started but really, don’t know where to start.

Think of Affiliate Marketing like trying to save money. It’s hard to start, but once you start things seem to get easier. Once you accumulate more money, it’s easier to invest & get better returns. Then eventually your savings are growing at a much larger rate than when you started (think compound interest etc). Affiliate Marketing is fairly similar. One of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to face in this game is competition, but once you learn to embrace your competition & learn from them then you’re already half way there.

I’ve been serious about Affiliate Marketing for about 3 years, sometimes I wonder why I didn’t get into it sooner, sometimes I also think about doing it full time, however as I stated in a previous post I still love the security & challenges of my day job therefore Affiliate Marketing is still very much a passive income for me.

When I first started out I was working my day job & working on my own products & ideas in the evenings & weekends. Probably pulling in 16 hour days & pretty much seeing little to no return. It was pretty demoralising to be honest.

3 years down the track & I’m pulling in a high $x,xxx+ per month maybe working 4 hours in the evenings 2-3 times per week. Life is much better.

So what does it take to get from point A, to point B?

Point A is the beginning, starting with nothing. Point B could be anything, your own milestone of $x,xxx / month or even making enough to quit your day job.

Point A - The beginning

1. You have 0 Websites
2. A Few Ideas
3. No Knowledge
4. No Web Hosting
5. No friends in the Industry
6. No Capital
7. Time is limited
8. Limited SEO/SEM Experience

Point B - The Comfort Zone

1. You have between 1 - x amount of websites
2. Plenty of ongoing projects
3. Knowledge of how Affiliate Marketing works
4. Decent Web Hosting or at least a Dedicated Server
5. You’ve made friends who you can ask for favours (Programmers, Bloggers etc)
6. You have capital to invest in PPC, Links & exisiting Websites
7. You have money to outsource & devote more time to the things that matter
8. You’ll probably be fairly proficient at PPC & SEO

Now that I’ve put things into perspective you’ll see that Affiliate Marketing isn’t something that you master overnight, all these get rich quick books make it sound ‘too easy’ (but then that’s the point right?). Affiliate Marketing is about much more than firing up a few websites & waiting for people to buy stuff, it’s about:

1. Thinking outside the Box
2. Try not to copy everyone else, offer something unique
3. Building sites that LAST, make it STICK
4. Don’t give up until you succeed

Affiliate Marketing is a Business Model, so start treating it like one.

Start out small. Then build & keep building, soon things will start to snowball for you. One thing I see all too often is people start out by building websites on “how to make money.” I’m very guilty of this myself, I indeed made one of these sites many years ago & possibly made $750 from it. It was only when I started reacting to the market & getting outside that “make money online” bubble that I started to see returns.

Do not be afraid to go mainstream with your ideas. Do not be afraid to try every niche out there, if you don’t try something then how will you know its potential? Take the Sex Toys industry for example, I currently do a huge amount of promotion online for a client in that industry. It’s HUGE, really huge & somewhat untapped in certain markets.

So here’s what you need to do, the Earners Blog Start your Engine Checklist:

1. Subscribe to my RSS Feed
2. Come up with an idea, write it down. Instead of acting on it, start researching your competition
3. Join an Affiliate Network & master it before moving onto the next. I’d rather be making $5k through one network & get it in one lump sum than 50 small networks. Then you’ll have the money to diversify.
4. Try to make a site that provides value, shopping comparison websites work well.
5. Cloak your Affiliate Links from the Search Engines
6. Read Affiliate Forums & take it all in (don’t waste valuable time though)
7. Build links to your sites under the radar

Once you have a solid foundation that’s giving you a steady income you can start reinvesting your money in PPC, typically an ROI of 200% is good, but you can get lucky with offers that’ll pull 1000% ROI. More on this later I guess

Let’s have some quick fire questions in the comments. What are you struggling with?