I started affiliate marketing somewhere between 2015 and 2016. I thought the business model sounded so easy that no one could fail at it. Due to my optimistic nature it took nearly a year before I accepted the fact that affiliate marketing is far from a cake walk. I made less than $500 that year after working well over 1,000 hours.
Luckily I stuck with it and somewhere around 2017 I started to finally understand how the industry worked and how I could succeed and provide value to the world all at the same time. These are three lessons I learned along that journey.
Promote high-ticket products
My first affiliate website promoted books on Amazon. It took me months of hard work to rank a single page review of a book, and once I actually started getting sales I realized that I need to sell a lot of $7 books at a 6% commission rate to actually make money.
After doing some research I switched over to promoting high-ticket and recurring affiliate products. So instead of making $.50 on a sale, I now made about $500 for a sale.
Sure, it was obviously harder to get a $500 sale. But not nearly as hard as getting 1,000 low-ticket sales. This is especially true when you are doing search-based marketing. If someone is searching for the best mattress to buy, they are looking for a mattress with a credit card in hand! They are not that much harder than someone looking for a good book to buy. So why target the books?
Focus on growing your audience
One of my first YouTube videos I made somehow managed to rank and go slightly viral. I got hundreds of thousands of views from it.
Unfortunately for me I didn’t tell them to subscribe, I didn’t get them to join my email list, I just made the video, explained how to do something, and closed. Now, 300,000 views later I am punching myself for not trying to capture an email address from those 300,000 people.
In my current business I can send an email to a list of 20,000 subscribers and often pull in $20,000 if the product and offer are right. This means I am missing out on a major revenue stream that I could have built had I turned those 300,000 people into YouTube or email list subscribers.
Create content
I used to not understand the phrase, “Content is King”. Now I live by it. Content is how an affiliate marketer provides value to an audience.
It doesn’t matter if you want to do Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook groups, or whatever your method of making affiliate income is going to be. Content will always be the key to growing.
Once I realized this and started to systemize my content creating to be sure I was putting out content every single day things started to happen. My YouTube videos ranked better, my Facebook group organic growth exploded, my blog started to pick up, and it became easier to sell to my audience.
Pick a platform, create a plan, and then create content. Do it every day for a year. Amazing things will eventually start to happen.
Honestly if I had to pick one piece of advice for new affiliate marketers, this would be it. The affiliate marketing world is full of consumers, but it’s the producers that make the money.
