The Affiliate Minefield – Revisited
Some time ago I wrote an article for EzineArticles called The Affiliate Minefield which took a rather cynical view of the whole Internet affiliate business. Well two years on and I thought I would revisit the subject with fresh and maybe better informed opinions.
I recently received a free Ebook from Jim Edwards; one of your typical rags to riches guys, which was all about mindsets. Now normally I would dismiss this, as I just turn off when any form of mental sales therapy crops up. But I did actually read this and to my surprise found myself agreeing with what was written, albeit rather reluctantly.
The gist of it was that you are where you are today because of decisions you have made in your past. If you’re rich or poor, destitute or affluent, it is you, and nobody else, who is responsible and only you can change it. Everybody gets tough breaks but some people get over it and rise above it and others don’t.
Enough of the preaching, so how does this relate to the Internet world? Well succeeding in the on-line world is no different to succeeding in the off-line world; you simply have to have the discipline, tenacity and right work ethic to succeed. Above all you must maintain FOCUS and not become a butterfly, flitting from one tasty looking morsel to another.
Everyday your email gets flooded with the latest offers and simple ways to get rich and by now you are probably well aware that this just aint the case. There is lots of free help and advice on the net, most of which is genuinely useful and a fair amount of work has gone into some of the free goodies that are currently around. Ok there is an ulterior motive whereby the authors of these freebies hope to gain your trust in order to get you buying their products. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, we do after all live in a capitalist society.
Only one thing matters when trying to make money online and that is CONVERSIONS. Copywriters earn fortunes writing long, really long, sales letters persuading you to take action and buy now. Personally I find them extremely tedious and I shouldn’t think anybody reads a whole letter without skimming. There again, general opinion seems to say that they actually work so who am I to criticise.
In order to get conversions you need TRAFFIC and this is the key element in any marketing campaign. It’s a percentage game where you can generally expect a 1-3% conversion rate so lots of traffic is essential – targeted traffic that is. It’s a complete waste of time having thousands of visitors to your offer who have no interest in it at all. Traffic can be bought, most commonly by Pay Per Click (PPC) or gained organically by means of getting lots of back links to a well optimised website. Needless to say if you’re paying for traffic, untargeted traffic is an expensive disaster.
Both these traffic methods are real stumbling blocks to most people; they are not rocket science but not far off, particularly PPC. The learning curve is often tough but if PPC is implemented correctly it is the fastest way to get traffic. Organic traffic is much slower to take effect and is also hard, tedious work with no guarantees at the end of it. All this work is to appease the mighty King Google who rules the airwaves with an iron fist that takes no prisoners and whose reign shows no sign of abating.
It’s easy to think that everyone’s a con merchant on the net and all these screenshots of healthy looking Clickbank/Paypal accounts are just not true. Well they probably are true but it doesn’t do much for anyone struggling online. There is no simple answer to internet success and people have got rich by capitalising on other peoples failures, so find a method you are comfortable with and focus on it, shrug off dud products and find others and the law of averages will tell you that one of them will work.
