Paid Advertising: Start With Your Own Projects
The world of affiliate marketing and paid advertising is like a snake pit. You can make a ton of money. Stories abound of affiliate marketers who make five figures a day with push-button campaigns that make a ton of money.
A lot of those things are elaborate schemes designed to get you on the guru treadmill.
Can you make a ton of money? Absolutely.
Is it easier than any other avenue of business? Maybe, I don’t know enough about it.
However, what I can suggest – with my couple of weeks of experience – is that you should probably do the opposite of what every other would-be affiliate marketer does.
What Does the Normal Affiliate Marketer Start With?
From my research, the average affiliate marketer jumps on the internet, searches, “How to make a ton of money online” and then finds himself on a forum dedicated to affiliate marketing.
He then proceeds to treat it like a treasure trove. There are millions of different ideas on any given internet marketing forum. Of particular interest are the “Beginner forums” and the “personal journeys” forums.
They tend to have titles like, “My journey from $0 to $2k per day!” and “How any old n00b can make $50 a day with absolutely NO SKILL WHATSOEVER.”
Let’s assume for a minute that these threads aren’t bunk. Our affiliate marketing example goes a step further.
Chances are, these sorts of threads will be about short-term trends. It might be about raspberry ketones. It might be a sweepstake for the new Samsung Galaxy phone. Either way, it’s great; the whole method is laid out, and our affiliate marketer gets a whole “system” to replicate.
Chances are, he’ll get in on a deal that’s pay-per-lead, i.e. you don’t even have to convince the reader to buy anything! You just need to get them to sign up and let the company do the rest. Sure, pay outs are low. But it sure is easier to get someone to give out their email than it is for them to buy something for $100.
Pay-outs are $1 per email lead. That’s cool! It’ll only take 10 leads a day and our affiliate marketer will be able to live like a king in Cambodia or something.
Now it’s time to create our campaign. Let’s just assume our would-be affiliate marketer is still on track here. He creates his campaign in the exact way that the forum thread tells him too. Maybe he even google searches some other affiliates who are doing the same thing and copies them word-for-word.
Now it’s time to get that traffic!
He sees the Cost-per-click on adwords is slightly higher than the thread says… so for every $1 he spends, he’ll only be getting $1.20. That’s ok! He just needs to spend $100 a day, and eventually it’ll accumulate and he’ll be making $10k a day.
His campaign doesn’t bite.
Maybe he makes a loss. Fair enough. He puts more money in. Unfortunately, he’s competing with all the other guys that are doing the exact same thing, and the $1 pay out doesn’t give him much room to work with when it comes to buying ads.
Inevitably, he quits this idea. But the fact he made some money means that he’s in with a chance. He just needs to find a better idea. So he goes back to the forum, and clicks on the “make $100 a day with Facebook ads” thread…
Mathematics of Starting Affiliate Marketing and Paid Advertising
Most guys who get into affiliate marketing will want to find out what the best affiliate offer to promote is.
It’s a fair question.
The problem is that if you’re just starting out with no idea about an industry, no idea how to do affiliate marketing and no real concept of sales, web design, or advertising in general, then there’s no way you’re going to pick the right offer. It’s like picking a random horse at the races – there’s a high probability that you’re losing money.
Even if you pick the right offer, if you don’t have any of the above skills, you’re probably not going to make money. If you’re just starting to get into making money online, then paid advertising is not the place to start.
“Alright Jamie, so why is that and what if I have got the skills?”
Affiliate marketing comes down to a simple equation at its heart: You are spending money to drive traffic to a product or service.
Your product or service needs to be good enough that people will buy it.
You need to have a good sales funnel (i.e. your sales copy and ad need to sell the product.)
You need to buy the right traffic at the right price.
However the key determinant of whether your project is a success will be the simple formula of whether or not you spend more or less on buying traffic than you make in profit from doing so.
If it costs you $100 to send enough traffic to a page to get a $50 sale, then your campaign is losing money.
If it costs you $100 to get $200 in sales, then it’s doing great.
The Difficulty in Learning About Paid Advertising
I’m not going to go into the mechanics of making hugely profitable campaigns. I’m not nearly qualified enough to do so.
The problem I’ve found in trying to become qualified – and you’ll see it immediately in the list above – is that if you’re going in blind, you’re going to have to learn too many things at once to be successful.
All of the skilful copy in the world is useless if you’re selling a terrible product.
You can send a million visitors to a page, but if it’s rubbish traffic or a useless product, then you’ve wasted your time and money.
This is a reason why paid advertising is not the place to start, sure, but it also shows one thing:
You Should Start Your Own Projects
I’m not a scientist, but if I was, I’d know that the best way to test something out properly is to make it the only variable in play.
If you want to learn how paid advertising works, you should control every variable other than the paid advertising itself.
This means that you shouldn’t start with being an affiliate for another product.
Instead, you should start learning paid advertising methods by using them for a product or service that you own or are in control of.
If you control the product or service, you’re in a much better position in terms of budget and quality control than you are if you’re pushing someone else’s product.
For instance, you could start something simple like a lawn-mowing business in your city. The cost per click might be $1. So you can spend $100 and get a hundred clicks that’ll be hyper-targeted, and you can charge $10 for each lawn. If you get a ten percent conversion rate, then you’ll break-even.
Or, you can try the same but push traffic to someone else’s lawn-mowing business. You’ll get paid $1 for every $10 customer you send. Not only do you have to send ten times as many customers, but you’re then relying on a) that company paying you, b) them being able to get the sale and c) them providing a decent service.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t sell for anyone else ever but if your goal is to learn how paid advertising works, then you want to control as many of those things as possible. Your own projects and services are the best way to ensure you can do that.
Also… if you provide your own product or service and it takes off, you might never have to sell another person’s stuff again. This truth doesn’t work the other way around.
P.S. The best book I’ve found on paid advertising so far is Finch’s A Complete Guide To Affiliate Marketing. I’ve written a review of it here.