Has Affiliate Marketing Run Its Course?
With all the information you see regarding affiliate marketing these days, you'd think it's run its course and is over saturated. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Over 6 Billion People on the Planet
I am probably giving an underestimate as to the number of people. I think it may even be closer to 7 billion. Nonetheless, many of these people have not yet connected to the internet. That means that you can go through a lifetime and still not even get close to the number of people.
And you don't really need a lot of people to make a decent income. Suppose you found a continuity program that pays you $20 per month. If you got 10 people to sign up that is $200 per month. Now most of us can't live on $200 but the point here is if you can get 10 people than you can get 100 or even more. At 100 people that figure goes to $2000. That's a pretty decent take home.
But you don't have to stop there. Once your sales funnel is in place and you are getting traffic to your website, the process is practically a passive one. You just sit back and keep getting more people to join.
No Guarantees
The above is just an example and it shows you the potential that affiliate marketing has. But just to be clear, there is no way I can guarantee that you will hit those numbers or even generate any income at all. It depends on a lot of factors and how much you are willing to put into any affiliate program that you join.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Perhaps I should have opened with this 🙂 but affiliate marketing is a means whereby vendors that you are familiar with, i.e., WalMart, Amazon, etc., allow you to profit by driving traffic to their website then those customers choose to purchase something. You receive a commission. It's all done through a code that is given to from the vendors. There is a bit more to it than this but it is the main idea of how it works.
​The great part about this type of set up is that you don't have to handle any of the transaction. You just drive traffic to the vendors' sales pages. And with the ever growing list of vendors participating in affiliate marketing, it's almost impossible for you not to find something that fits within your market.
Physical Products Are Not The Only Game in Town
People crave information and are often willing to pay good money. This is especially true for hard-to-find information that is in demand. If you have knowledge that people seek and can get it into digital format, ​you could be sitting on a goldmine. There are companies such Clickbank and others, that will sell your digital products for you. There is also platforms such as Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook where you can sell fairly easily.
Is Affiliate Marketing the Perfect Business Model?
Affiliate marketing is a great business model but alas, it is not perfect. One of the biggest drawbacks is with the mechanism that is used to track how vendors know the customers were sent from your website. If you have never heard of cookies before, these are files that get stored onto your web browser. The vendor takes care of that for you when users click on the affiliate links or banners.
The problem stems from the fact that we live in a multi device world these days. Consider the following scenario:
Suppose you are commuting to work and you do so by train. For a while, you have been researching a television because you have been wanting to buy a new one. You whip out your IPad and enter into your favorite search engine, the make and model that your research has led you to. My website pops up in the search results because I wrote a review on that very make/model. You read through my review and click on the affiliate link that takes you to the vendor's sales page. You could buy this beautiful TV right now and have delivered to your home in a couple of days.
But you stop yourself. You don't feel comfortable buying this on the train with a whole bunch of eyes that could pick up your credit card number. So you wait until you get to the office. When you finally arrive at the office, you think you are ready to buy. So do you go back to my website? Probably not. You remember from the train ride that the vendor was Best Buy. You go directly to BestBuy.com and make your purchase. Guess what happens to my affiliate link and the cookie that was associated with it? It's still stuck inside your IPad so I do not get any credit for the sale.
How To Fix This
The best way to get around this problem is to try to capture the person's email address during her IPad session on the train. You still won't get credit for the initial television sale, which really stinks. But you now have this person on your list and you can sell accessories for the TV or anything else for that matter. Of course you don't want to bombard that customer with sales emails after sales emails. You want to give a lot of value and free information on how to get the most out of the purchase that was made, even if you didn't get the initial credit for the sale. It's not perfect but it is certainly better than getting nothing.
You Will Need To Get Training​
Many people make the mistake of trying this out on their own and because they don't know what they are doing, the end up doing all the wrong things. My advice to you, if you want to do affiliate marketing the right way, is to learn it correctly right from the beginning. The link below describes a program that has helped many learn the methods.
http://GetPaidBootCamp.com/wealthy-affiliate-evaluation
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