Affiliate Marketing Almost Killed Me! If Only I'd Known These Four Things...

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Affiliate marketing wasn’t fun for me at first.

For the first six months, I made nothing.

Then I had a $500 month, then a $1,200 month.

Finally, I worked up to $100 a day and then over $10k a month.

But like I said, it almost killed me.

Thousands and thousands of hours of trial and error, dumping money into WSOs and “How to make money online” courses that did me no good.

Finally, when I started creating and marketing my own products, I wasted even more time and more money trying out different eCommerce platforms, membership site platforms.

I could have saved myself all of this and started making money the first month if I’d just known four things that all online marketers should know…

#1: You Need to Know How to Get Traffic

PPC, SEO, link building, article syndication, Social Media, ad buying, ezine marketing, Joint Ventures, you can forget about them.

The only kind of traffic generation you need to get started is content marketing. I never touch PPC, I don’t waste time with back links, I never post to article syndication sites anymore and I rarely do joint ventures.

The bottom line is, if you know how to create engaging, valuable content, that’s all you need to get started. If you can write for your niche, you can make money online without messing around with fancy, expensive traffic strategies.

#2: You Need to Know How to Build a RESPONSIVE List

Forget everything you’ve heard about list building.

When I first started, I hit 5,000 subscribers within a few months following popular advice from other Internet Marketers.

Only one small problem…no freakin’ sales.

Theoretically, my list was supposed to be worth $5,000 a month, but it was all just a theory…kind of like my gross income back in the corporate world.

Building a list is worthless unless the list is responsive to offers.

I learned to do this the hard way, lots of trial and error…finally I learned how to build responsive lists for three key niches: the men’s dating niche, the trading niche (forex, options etc.) and the fat loss/muscle building niche.

My open rate went up and so did my sales.

That changed my life.

You need three things to make this work: you need to start the relationship off right from the first 10 emails, you need to know how to pace your offers and you need to be REALLY good at writing email headlines.

#3: You Need to Know How to Write for Your Niche

If you’re not a writer, you’re going to have a really, really hard time finding a good one without going broke. Plenty of writers will work for $5 per article, but if you don’t have good content, your entire plan will go belly up fast (I learned that from writing for Mark Ling BTW).

Good writers will cost you at least $20 an article, so if you want great content you’d better learn to do it yourself for the first year.

Believe me, I manage a team of writers, I’ve hired and fired a lot of writers. If you want quality, you have to pay for it or you have to produce it.

No shortcuts there.

There’s an ocean of difference between writing words that sell and writing words that read nice. I learned how to write words that sell, and I’m convinced I can teach anyone how to do it. But you have to pick a few select niches and master them.

This is also why you should start out in the affiliate marketing realm instead of trying to start with your own products - that’s another lesson I learned the hard way.

#4: You Need to Know What Technology to Use

Once you start building and selling your own products, you need to know what technology to use to sell them on your site. It took me nearly three years to find the right combination of autoresponder, membership site software, affiliate management software, ecommerce software, business management software and tools for creating video tutorials.

I got all of these for a total fee of $160. That's installation and all.

I only pay $50 a month for hosting over a dozen sites and 8 email lists. My total overhead is now less than $400 a month.

Sadly, I only discovered all this after blowing several thousand dollars on crap that gave me nothing but white hairs.

Like I said, it almost killed me to get here, but if I could go back and talk to my younger self about these four things ^, I could have saved thousands of hours and thousands of dollars.

No one should have to go through that. If you’d like to save yourself this heartache, I’ll show you what I wish I’d known when I got started in affiliate marketing...
#affiliate #i’d #killed #marketing #things…

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