A Closer Look at Affiliate Marketing: What to Expect – Checkout the 3 Day Challenge at 3DayAccess.com
So go down to the Categories sidebar menu and click the arrow next to E Business and then select SEM and SEO.
From the drop down, we’re going to talk about what affiliate marketing really looks like.
So up until now, you’ve probably seen the hype out on the internet telling you how rich you are going to be.
You might have seen all the screenshots that other super affiliates have made and all that.
But the key here is not to put those expectations as reality before it actually happens, right?
Or else you won’t really go anywhere.
It’s kind of like going to a movie and expecting it’s going to be the greatest movie ever.
And then when you watch it, you realize that it’s really hyped up, the trailer was hyped up and all that, and then you become discouraged, right?
So what ends up happening is you become discouraged and that seeps into your mindset and that actually unfortunately sets you up for failure.
And I don’t want that.
I want you to be starting with reality first.
And that’s the reason why a lot of affiliates, when they go into affiliate marketing, they don’t do real well.
It’s because they have that mindset.
And like I said in the previous video, sometimes you’ll test five or even ten products and you might make a couple hundred dollars here and there, but it’s not really what you expected it to be, right?
So that’s why it’s better to go into this expecting nothing.
I mean, expect that you will react how it goes, what happens, and you’ll just move forward, right?
So I will say that while some of the hype is true, some of it’s not.
Affiliate marketing is just like any other business and you might be thinking, yeah, I know, but I really want to harp on this because most people don’t realize that it actually affects their mindset.
Not now, as you’re beginning to start, but 75% through when the going gets rough and things get tough.
So the point I’m trying to make here is that businesses take time to build.
So don’t worry if you’re learning things and you’re not getting it right the first time.
Affiliate marketing obviously compared to creating your own product as a vendor, there’s a faster rate of you actually making a profit than starting your own product.
Product creation takes time.
Not only that, you have to do customer support.
You have to do a lot more than affiliate marketing.
With that said, affiliate marketing is a little bit riskier in that sense, primarily because at the end of the day, you do not own the product.
Now, how is that riskier?
Well, in other words, what happens is the vendor could take down the product and then if you’ve invested all this time and money into promoting their product and you haven’t found other products that are similar, then that campaign is done.
So that’s why it’s a little bit more riskier because you are in certain respects relying on the vendor.
So in other words, you need to find good vendors, vendors that will actually be there, vendors that are long term, vendors that do not really have a short term mindset.
And in addition to that, you need to find good products as well, right?
You need to make sure that the people selling these products are ethical as well.
Are they going to be in business for along, long time or are they doing a lot of things under the table or all that?
And maybe they’re building their business on Quicksand, essentially.
So if that’s the case, by you promoting their product, you’re also building your business on Quicksand as well.
So you need to make sure you either have good vendors or you do affiliate marketing in such a way that it will be long term.
So you need to make sure that they also have good customer support for their customers.
One thing that we found over the years is that some vendors, they have a really good product, but they don’t have good customer service.
So what ended up happening was we would send 100 sales, and out of those hundred sales, 50% of the people would refund.
And that was not good, right?
Because they did not have good customer support.
And once we figured that out,we didn’t promote them again.
So that’s why as a vendor, you need to make sure you have everything lined up so that you have affiliates constantly promoting it for you.
You need to take care of your affiliates.
On the flip side, as an affiliate, you need to look for vendors like that.
Because like I said, as you can imagine, the refund rate is high when you don’t have good customer support and all that.
And you might spend money as an affiliate to acquire that customer, right?
And if they refund and they have a higher refund rate, you have lost a good amount of money or a good amount of time.
So that’s why in my first video, I talked about how you should not become attached to one product.
Because if the vendor were to take it down, or you find out that it has a higher refund rate, and you’ve become attached to that one product and you love it and everything like that, then you’ll feel like, wow, I spent all this time and money, all this, and the vendor took it down.
And you start feeling remorseful, you start feeling angry, and then it seeps into your business.
Now I’m going to show you later down the road in the other videos in this course, I’m going to show you how to protect yourself as far as that goes.
What do you do when a product goes away?
What do you do if there are not really multiple products that are similar?
So we’ll talk about that and how you can find profitable products and make sure that it is a long term venture or not.
Now, in terms of what happens if the vendor decides to totally take the product down, what you could do to combat the loss of potential traffic, if you have traffic going to that offer, is you want to definitely create links, links that can be redirected elsewhere.
So obviously you don’t want to direct people directly to your affiliate link.
You want to cloak it using something like clickmeter.com or something similar like bitly and use that to direct the traffic to your affiliate link so that if anything happens, you can always change that link to something else.
So that’s one little tip that I’m talking about now, but we’ll talk more about it later down the road.
Now keep in mind that affiliate marketing is very profitable and I love every bit of it.
However, it definitely takes a certain type of person to be successful and that person must be able to persevere no matter what.
If you have the thinking, I want to win, I want to get the winning product out of the gate, that’s not going to happen.
That might happen one out of 100, but very rarely does that ever happen.
But if you go into this thinking, okay, I got to test ten different products and that’s fine, I’m going to learn something new as I test these ten different products along the way, I’m going to find golden nuggets.
If you have that kind of mindset, you’re going to be more likely to be the person that succeeds.
That said, the beauty of affiliate marketing is that of course you don’t have to do as much as the vendor does.
So therefore, as you begin to earn money, you can take more vacations, you don’t have to worry about checking customer support or doing everything that a vendor would have to do.
So in other words, there’s a little bit more freedom.
However, there’s a lot of risk because at the end of the day, you’re relying on the vendor and you’re not the vendor.
But when it comes to affiliate marketing, I will say that it is very rewarding if you know what to look for.
And that’s the goal of this video course, to help prep you for that.
So with that said, let’s jump in and talk about the advantages of affiliate marketing so that by the end of the middle of the video course, you will have a better realistic idea of how things work so that you can be better prepared and can make a better informed decision.