Affiliate Marketing Is NOTHING Like The Lifestyle Gurus Say It Is
I’ve recently started learning about paid advertising.
It’s an important skill to learn if you’re writing online for money. I’ll tell you why later.
Before that though, I’m going to rant talk about some of things you’ve probably read bout online and why they’re not exactly the whole, truthful story.
I’m learning about paid advertising and affiliate marketing for a few reasons.
Firstly, I create my own products. Learning how to advertise them properly – or in different ways – will make me more money.
Secondly, as a copywriter, I’m already creating sales pages and adverts for businesses to use in their sales and marketing funnels. In order to be a better copywriter, I should understand how these businesses take my work and turn it into a profitable venture.
More on this later. Back to the gurus.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Nothing Like What You’ve Probably Read About It
Most lifestyle gurus talk about affiliate marketing. I’ve avoided affiliate marketing, paid advertising and various other sites for years because they tend to be “scammy,” for want of a better word.
You know what I’m talking about. “You can have a blog and make $10k a month and work on the beach!” types.
When they refer to affiliate marketing, they’re referring to building a blog, guest posting, SEO and other tips and tricks that’ll make you money selling e-books and the like.
I don’t want to judge, because a lot of people do very well and leave a positive impact on the world by doing this.
I will kind of judge the Black hat affiliate marketers who spam blog comments and stuff though, because every day I have to delete twenty+ “I see you don’t monetize your site” and “You could use some web design tips” emails and that’s annoying.
I was pretty surprised when I started delving into the world of paid advertising and actual affiliate marketing though. It’s nothing like what lifestyle bloggers will teach you. It’s nothing like you read about on Blackhatworld, digital point or any of the other “Make money online forums.”
It’s completely different!
Real affiliate marketing is about picking a lucrative affiliate offer, creating sales funnels for that offer, buying up a ton of traffic and sending it to said offer, and then optimising it further using a whole range of data, analytics and other nerd stuff to make a ton of money in a short amount of time.
Unlike the lifestyle gurus who are a bit vague and creative in their terminology, paid advertising is all about solid mathematics and extremely logical progressions.
If you’re a writer, chances are you’re into the former, more creative side of things. However, you should try and get into the latter, more analytical approach as well. I’ll explain why now.
Why Do I, A Writer, Even Care About Affiliate Marketing And Pay-Per-Click Advertising Anyway?
Most writers don’t care about business. It’s a fault that I’ve written about numerous times before.
If you want to make money as a writer, the best way to do it is to leverage all of the business skills that most of your contemporaries don’t have (or even want in a lot of cases).
If you work as a copywriter like I do, then most of the work you’ll do is as a small cog in a marketing machine. This might be for online affiliate marketing companies, or it might be for offline clients.
Essentially though, if you’re writing copy, then it’s landing pages, sales pages and other parts of various marketing funnels.
If you want to increase your earnings, then you need to understand the role you play and how that fits in to the bigger picture.
That’s why I’ve started learning about pay-per-click, and it’s why you should look into it. (Or at least begrudgingly read my daily articles as I do it.)
Of course, that’s one reason.
Another reason is that if you’re going to write copy, you might as well put yourself on a career path where you move from getting paid to write copy for someone else to a place where you’re writing copy for your own projects… and taking the responsibilities and rewards of that for yourself.
Pay-per-click advertising is the quickest way to test ideas for products and services because you get immediate feedback.
Also, when you learn about how top affiliate marketing people (not the lifestyle bloggers) do business, you’ll realise that there are a ton of different optimisations you can make to whatever it is you’re doing for money right now.
What Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising and How Can I Learn About It?
Like all online business things, there are a ton of bad resources out there for people who want to get into pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing and other related ventures.
To go over the basics, pay-per-click advertising is a sub-category of paid advertising, in which you set up an advert and then literally pay when somebody clicks on your links.
Affiliate marketing is where you are paid by a product creator to advertise their product, sell their product or otherwise drive leads to their product. Your profit comes when the cost of you providing that service is less than the amount of money they pay you to do it.
Paid advertising encompasses a lot more than pay-per-click advertising. You can be paid based on clicks, but you can also be paid based on how many views an advert gets.
It’s a lot to take in in one go.
Luckily, I found a book which explains it all in great detail. I’ll review it within the next few days.
I’ll also devote some of my daily topics to my pursuit of success in learning about it all.
Final Thoughts
I don’t know when or how much I’ll write about this little journey, because I’m just starting. I try to refrain from talking about stuff that I don’t at least have some clue about.
That said, I’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time. I hope to start putting things into practice very soon, and then I’ll start sharing what I’ve learned.
Enough about me.
You’ve probably got a ton of ideas about affiliate marketing that, if you’re like me, probably aren’t that great. There’s a lot of lifestyle guru, four-hour-work-week stuff to wade through.
However, there’s also a ton of useful business information that’s helpful to writers and would-be entrepreneurs alike.
It’s definitely worth looking into paid advertising, affiliate marketing and whatnot to generate new business ideas but also to increase the value of your existing business/career/etc.
More on this to come!