Is Amazon Affiliate Marketing Best for Beginners? — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com. 

Amazon has what’s known as an affiliate program. That means you can sign up as an Amazon affiliate. You get a special link, then you take your traffic and send them to that link. Amazon handles the rest. You sell products through your website, and you get paid. You don’t even have to ship anything – people just go to Amazon and buy what they want, and they handle shipping by themselves.

Can you make money with Amazon affiliate marketing? We’re talking about how to make money with the Amazon affiliate program. We’ll talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are a lot of affiliate programs out there, and there are a lot of affiliate offers on Amazon. So, it’s very important to look at them.

 

Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Good

Everyone knows about Amazon. Everyone has probably gotten a shipment from them at some point. People know it’s a trusted source, and they know they’ll get their delivery on time.

It’s also a big program. It has tons of different products. It has both low-cost and high-priced stuff. Amazon is making millions of dollars a day, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and the guy who started Amazon is now the richest person on the planet. There’s lots of money here.

It’s easy to get traffic with Amazon. This works well if you are just starting out, and you have a very refined niche, and you don’t know how to monetize your traffic.

 

Example: Calico Critter Market

When my kids were little, my wife wanted to get them these toys called Calico Critters. She went and spent a fortune on these.

For an affiliate marketer, the Calico Critters’ keywords are very inexpensive, and you can get a lot of free traffic really, really cheap. There probably aren’t other affiliate programs in the world that have Calico Critters. Amazon is the best choice here.

If you have a niche that is very refined, Amazon is your way to go.

 

Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Bad

The Amazon Affiliate program has a really low payout. Your commissions are usually 4 -8 percent of what you sell. So if you sell something that’s $1,000 dollars, you’ll probably get between 40 and 80 dollars. You also want to think about the CPM – how much money are you making per 1,000 visitors?

Let’s say you are selling a laptop, and it costs $1,000 dollars. If you send 1,000 people to your Amazon affiliate link for your laptop, you might get a 1% conversion rate – so you make 10 sales. If you make $10,000 in sales, you get paid around 400 dollars, or you have a 400 CPM. In that case, each click is worth 40 cents.

If you are using paid traffic, the results can be even worse. If you went and bid on Google for keywords with “laptop” (“big laptops”, “small laptops”, “cheap laptops”, etc.) it would probably cost you 80 cents to $1.20 per click. That means you’d be spending $800 to $1,200 to get that traffic. If it costs you $1,200 to get 1,000 clicks, and you only make $400 at the end, that is bad business.

 

Example: Calico Critter Market

As mentioned before, a refined niche like Calico Critters could work for Amazon. But you’d still have a very low CPM. It would be a very low earnings-per-click because these toys are very cheap, and you’d only be making 4 – 8 percent commission on something cheap.

If you sell $100 in calico critters a day, and you get 4 to 8 percent commission, you’d make 8 dollars on a good day. That would take a lot of traffic to get those 8 dollars, because not everyone is going to buy.

 

Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Ugly

We know the payout for Amazon is very low, but when you starting making a whole lot of sales, the rates are even worse.

I recently went and looked at some of the top Amazon affiliates who make a lot of money. I took a look at how much they’re making per click.

One top Amazon affiliate sold over $8 million in Amazon stock from his traffic. The amount of traffic that came to his site was 2.8 million visitors. (That’s a lot of traffic – some people struggle to get 1,000 visitors per month.)

The money he made was between 4 to 8 percent of his sales. Let’s say he made approximately $400,000 – $500,000. You might think that’s pretty cool. But this is very important to realize, because people don’t pay attention to this.

In order to get 2.8 million people to Amazon, he probably needed 20 million people or more to come to his website. That’s a 10% click through rate, which is still pretty high. But in order to generate that, his effective CPM is less than 10 cents a click.

If this affiliate has 20 million visitors, and he’s only making $500,000, the amount he’s earning per click is so low that it’s not even funny.

A lot of people will not be able to generate 20 million visitors. It’s very difficult to do—one in a million are able to do it. In order to do this, you either have to have a lot of money, or you have to do a lot of work. And for all that work, this is a very little amount of money.

Remember that this is a targeted market – the amount should be way higher. You would do better if you were to make a site on Calico Critters, and you got a bunch of visitors to actually buy the toys wholesale, or dropship them. You would do way better than this.

Let’s look at another example: Another top Amazon affiliate got 15,000 clicks, which generated $3,809 dollars. For the amount of traffic he sent to Amazon, he was making pennies per click. That sucks.

Another Amazon affiliate got 27,097 clicks to Amazon, and he only made $790 dollars. How many visitors did he have to get for those many people to go to Amazon? 270,000 visitors? If I were making those kinds of numbers, I’d quit and go do something else for a living.

This is the kind of stuff that make people quit affiliate marketing. It’s the stuff that makes people think affiliate marketing doesn’t work, because these kinds of programs pay so low.

 

Final Thoughts

So, what’s the verdict? Is Amazon the best way to go? If you have no other options, Amazon is probably the best way to go. If you’re in a niche where you can be more creative and make it work, then I’d like you to look at some other options. You can make a lot more money doing different things.

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

How To Use FREE Social Media Traffic From Instagram And Facebook To Make Money  : Influencer Tips – affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com

 

1. Create a plan for each social media channel

What’s your plan? Your plan consists of who you’re going to talk to. Who do you want to reach? Who do you want your followers to be? If you refine your market, who do you want to come to you and see what you’re doing well? You might think you want every follower you can get, but some people don’t want what you have to offer.

Do research on what other people in your market are doing. What do people respond to? If you see a marketer with a bunch of people following him, look at what he’s doing. How is he interacting with his audience? What is he posting? What gets the most engagement?

Find your market based on what you want. Just like doing keyword research, you’re doing the same thing here. You can go to Google and search for Facebook groups. Search your niche on Facebook and see if there are groups out there. Get involved and start talking.

 

2. Post consistently

Be consistent. People need to anticipate what’s going on. Sometimes you can do your content all in a couple days and then roll it out over time. Some people say to post four or five times a day. No matter what it may be, figure out what your market wants. Give something that’s going to be engaging. Look at what’s going on in your market—what kind of hashtags people are using, what kind of search terms, etc.

A lot of people start and quit too early. They’ll post some things and people won’t seem to care. But realize that marketing is an experiment—you put something out there, you test it, you see if it’s going to work. You never really know until the market speaks, until people you like engage with your content. Consistency is going to make you grow.

 

3. Don’t be spammy

This is a huge mistake that people make everywhere. People just put content out there for content’s sake. Don’t post a bunch of junk. You want to make valuable stuff that people are going to like or interact with, content that people are interested in.

There are people I follow on Facebook and Instagram, and all they do is post offers. They may make a few dollars a week, but they are alienating their audience, and it’s not really what they want. You have to prime the pump and get people interested in your stuff and get them ready to buy. Focus on your market and give them what they want. Ask yourself, “would I value that post?”

 

4. Use good images and text

This is another one that so many people get wrong. Many people post things that you can’t read. It’s really hard to look at the text, or it’s something that only makes sense to them. Create posts that people will respond to, that people will get value from, that people are going to engage with. The good posts are really easy to look at, and you can tell right away what they are about. Make sure that your posts stand out (for the right reasons).

 

5. Measure and analyze

Look at what you’re doing. When you create posts on social media, you can usually see what’s going on. You can see how many likes, how many people looked at it, even where they came from. With these insights, you’re able to see what’s working and what’s not working. That’s really important. What’s giving you the engagement? Look at your stats.

 

6. Don’t be afraid to jumpstart with paid ads

If you’re new and don’t have a lot of engagement yet, you may be afraid to get into paid ads. But if you want to jumpstart your social media business, or social media group, or whatever it may be, you can do it with paid traffic.

The goal with paid ads isn’t to make money back right away, although you can still do that. You want to get targeted followers that will now watch everything you do. You can do paid ads through Instagram or Facebook itself, or you can go to other people who don’t know the value of their traffic, and you can do something on their channel as well.

Be careful with paid ads where you don’t own traffic. If you spend money to advertise on someone’s page with a lot of followers, don’t tell those people to sign up for something, or send them an affiliate offer, or try to sell to them right off the bat. These people don’t know who you are, and you don’t know who they are or what they’re really interested in. You don’t know what they want to buy. Instead, first go through that advertiser’s feed and see what gets engagement on their page. Then, post something of value.

 

7. Get in on the community

This is by far one of the most profitable things that I’ve found with social media. How do you get in on the community? On Facebook and Instagram, you have groups of people that are interested in certain topics. You can join Facebook groups and reverse-engineer them to see what the leaders are doing. Their goal is to get engagement, too.

You don’t even have to create your own community. You can just go provide value in others. Now, it’s very good to create your own community. When you have your own following, it leads to exponential growth. But if you’re new, get involved in what’s already going on. Be helpful. Get into groups and start interacting. Communities are already happening. There are big ones, small ones, communities on everything.

 

8. Start your own community

If you’re wanting to get in on community, you might as well start your own community. Social media groups can be very, very effective. There are millions of people on social media just waiting to engage with your content. A lot of people don’t realize the value of their Facebook groups.

Getting 1,000 people in a Facebook group isn’t a big deal at all. Anyone can get 1,000 people in their group if they do it right. You could trigger it with paid ads, and you can actually get your group to rank in the search engines. Name your group a search keyword—it’s not that hard to do, and it’ll start to get picked up pretty easily. This is a lot like forum marketing, only it’s faster and more interactive. You can branch out and have audiences everywhere, and you’ll own your market.

 

9. Interact

Interact with your market. If you have a community, interact with them. Make them feel special. Welcome them and say hello. Make them want to contribute. Because when they do, they contribute to your society, and that makes you money. You get value and your followers get value. If you interact with your audience and get involved, you can figure out what they’re interested in. People will literally tell you what they want to buy, and you can go and sell it to them. You can find the right people that can say yes to your offer.

 

10. Collaborate

Collaborate with other people. You could say to someone, “Hey, I want to feature you on my channel,” or, “I want you to feature me on your channel,” and maybe pay them for it, or do it for free once you get a bigger following. Nothing is as powerful as an endorsement from someone that other people like. If you tell people to go follow you, it’s not as powerful. But if someone endorses you and tells their audience to go follow you, that is very powerful.

 

11. Use keywords and hashtags

Keywords and hashtags tell you what people are searching for. What are people hashtagging? What are they looking up? What do they want? Be careful with how many hashtags you use in your content. Some people frown upon using a whole bunch in a single post. Also be careful with how many words you use per single hashtag. Your words have to be something that is searched for, and there are search tools you can use to help with that.

Don’t use hashtags that aren’t related to your market—make sure they match what you’re doing. Some people use hashtags to try and show their audience things that they don’t necessarily like. Just stick to your market, and you’ll get a die-hard fan base that is totally into your stuff, and you can sell like crazy.

 

12. Syndicate your content

Make some content, and then make it different for different platforms. You might make a video, then write an article about it. That article can go on your blog and get you traffic. Then you can take that article and break it up into a little image quote for Instagram. These things can take you literally only minutes to do. You can use one piece of content, like a webinar, and have people watch it, then read it, and have people look at tips on your social media channel.

Right here, I have 18 tips that I’m showing you. These can be turned into 18 different posts helping people with social media marketing. If you don’t want to repurpose your content yourself, you can have someone else do it for you. They can transcribe your content or make a PDF. They can make notes for you, and do a blog post, and make images about different quotes that you use in the content. You’ll have content everywhere.

 

13. Sell while providing value

If you make content and sell while you’re doing it, you can do it casually and be authentic, because you know that it only benefits the user. In my webinars, I sell to you guys all the time. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if people get the Simple Sites course, they can learn to do this and they can make it work. People do it all the time. People tell me that they bought my course and they found a lot of success in it. I know that if you use it, it’ll work for you too. If you want to learn this stuff and learn how to do affiliate marketing and social media marketing, go to SimpleSitesBonus.com and get it.

Remember, the results are not guaranteed. I don’t know how the results are for most people. Most people actually do nothing with my course, and they don’t make any money. I don’t know what you’ll make, but if you want to learn, this is where you want to go. So just as I’ve done here, sell to your audience while you’re providing value to them.

 

14. Create a purpose for each post

This is very important. What are you posting? Why are you posting? Before you create a post, or make a video, or build a website, figure out what you want to do with it. Maybe with one post, you want people to engage. With another post, you want to get more followers. With another, you want to sell. There should be a purpose for everything you do.

You’ll want to mix it up to give some real value. Give some tips, give some cool stuff, focus on getting more followers, and then sell. Don’t try to do it all in one post.

 

15. Make fun contests and challenges

I did a contest recently on my Instagram that was really fun, and I also put it on my Facebook and it worked really well. The idea was to show my audience two mobile ad pages, and to see if people could guess which page would get the most clicks. Now, I knew what most people were going to choose. It was pretty obvious which one was going to get more clicks.

But when people answer, they feel good. They feel like a marketing expert. People love this kind of stuff. Then, you can go and reward those people who participated. You can give some money away, and it’s well worth it. Or, if you don’t have money to give away, you can give away other stuff. You can do a shout out in a video, or recognize people some other way. People love to be recognized.

 

16. Watch what others do 

Look at other influencers’ engagement. Look at how many followers they have, and how many people view their videos, and how many people interact. These are important things to know. You might see that people are usually certain kinds of ads, so instead of doing that, you’ll do something else that will work for you.

 

17. Research good and helpful content for your market

Do good research. You don’t have to know a lot about anything up front. There is a guy I collaborate with who has over a million subscribers. All he goes is research what other people says and posts it. You want to be careful, because you don’t want to get into legal trouble with copyright issues. But you can do research and share with your audience, and you can bring your own value to it.

 

18. Build momentum

Go for momentum. Go out there and figure out what people want. Get right in front of them and get them into your stuff. Get them to interact and build some momentum. If you do that, it will spiral, and you’ll start to grow. You’ll get engagement. When you post, people will look at your content, and you’ll get followers. Then the next time, you’ll get a little more. And the next time, you’ll get more. You’ll still be getting some traffic from the old followers, and it will start to spiral and work really well.

To learn more, go to www.SocialProfitTools.com.

 
Can You Make Money with Dropshipping? Here’s What You Wish You Knew

Today, we’re talking about how to make money dropshipping. I’m going to show you how I’ve made as much as $18,000 in one month with dropshipping, with one product and one website page.

What is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is the idea of setting up your own sales system online. On your sales system, or website, you have links to purchase things. You are the seller, and someone else is shipping the product, sort of “on demand.”

That someone else is your supplier, and they usually sell stuff on wholesale. They might have a big shipping warehouse with all kinds of products, and you sell the products for them. Instead of being a major store like Target or Walmart, companies that purchase thousands and thousands of different things and put them in a store, and have people there to sell them, you are setting up your own sales system.

The product doesn’t really exist for you until that sale is made, so there’s really no risk until the sale is made. You only pay when you sell a certain item.

 

My Dropshipping Story

Now for me, when I made that $18,000 in one month, I was selling gas-powered scooters. You remember those scooters back in the early 2000s that were all the rage? Every kid had to have one. So I set up a simple one-page website selling these scooters.

I didn’t have a merchant account for this specific business, so I took PayPal. I had someone come on my site and say they wanted a specific scooter in a specific color. They would buy the scooter, and it would send $379 to my PayPal account instantly. There were some PayPal fees, so I actually ended up getting around $360 or something like that (they take around $30 or something).

Then I had $360 sitting in my PayPal, which was great. The problem was that I had to get the scooter to the person. So, I went to this wholesale guy and I sent him $220 through PayPal, and I sent him the address to ship to. The wholesale person would then send the scooter to the guy who bought it. I never even had to touch the product (I actually never even rode a gas-powered scooter until long after I made this website). We made about $360 and lost about $220, so we had about $140 in net profit.

We sold $18,000 worth of scooters in December of 2003. Now of course, there was probably about a 40% profit, so that was probably around $8,000 or so in my pocket.

Start with Your Keyword

So that’s how it works. It’s really easy and really simple. You just set it up, you find some keywords that people are searching for, and you find a product based on the keywords.

In this example, I went for the keyword “gas-powered scooters for cheap”. My guess is that it was probably some kids typing that in, “gas-powered scooters for cheap”, and they were looking for scooters for their parents to buy them. The keywords “gas-powered scooters for cheap” was worth $18,000 a month in sales to me.

 

Downsides to Dropshipping

Now, one downside to dropshipping is that you are responsible. So if I’m collecting the $379, and I’m paying the $220 to have it shipped, and this customer wants to do any funny business, I’m on the hook for $379. So, I’m kind of in charge of everything here.

If you have $18,000 in scooters out there, and your supplier decides not to ship them, or the shipments are late, that’s on you.

The second drawback is customer support. This is something that you have to do. I had to take phone calls on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2003 if there was some delay in shipping, and I had to do a lot of work to get those scooters out.

Since then, I retired the site. I sold it to someone and they handle it now, because I didn’t want to deal with all the calls.

I could have built a huge business out of it. The guy who dropshipped it was just a guy who had a huge warehouse, and he got these things from China, and he paid like $90 for them, because he got thousands of them. He was making a lot of money with it, and he had a lot of affiliates that help him. I think he’s still in business today.

 

Do Your Research

If you’re new, and you just found out about dropshipping, this is something you could do. But I recommend starting with affiliate marketing first and seeing what the traffic wants. The last thing I would want you to do is set up a site and not know if people are going to buy your stuff.

We don’t want to do guess marketing. We actually want to know that we can get the rankings, that we can buy traffic, that we could do video marketing or whatever it may be, in order to actually sell this stuff.

This can be a good method. You can make a lot of money, and lots of people are doing it. But I would rather see you get started with something a little bit easier, and a little less heavy on the risk.

Find your keyword, see what’s out there, and see what makes sense. Don’t jump into dropshipping just because you heard it was cool. Actually search it out for yourself. Find out what you want to sell based on what the demand is, and then figure out what the route is that best suits your needs.

There are a lot of different dropshipping methods you can do. My advice would be to build a site based on each individual product. We had a page for the gas scooters, the electric scooters, the different kinds of scooters, and because of that, we were able to rank in the search engines really, really well. And when you find a dropshiping product, make sure that seller is reputable. Make sure they’re not out there just to take your money.

You might find out that dropshipping isn’t the best, or you might find out that it is the best for you. There are people that make millions of dollars with dropshipping, and if you work really hard, perhaps you can, too.

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

Affiliate Landing Pages, Squeeze Pages, And Marketing Funnels For Profit — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com 

Today, we’re going to be talking about landing pages, squeeze pages, and funnels. What are they? What’s the difference? And which one do you need to use to make the most money with your website?

Landing Pages
First and foremost, let’s talk about landing pages. A landing page is quite simply the page that someone lands on. If you’re taking people from Instagram, or you’re taking people from paid traffic, or you’re doing banner traffic, or you’re sending an email, or whatever, the landing page is simply the page you send them to. It’s usually the first interaction that you have with your audience.

The landing page for Google is Google.com. You go to Google and that’s their landing page. They have a search box on there, because they want you to search. With YouTube, you go to YouTube.com and they have videos on the page. That’s their landing page.

If you go to www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com, you could see the landing page for my site. On my landing page, I want people to put their name and email in, so I have a squeeze page as a landing page. (More on that in a moment.)

Now, you can use this landing page in many different ways. For example, I’ve made millions of dollars with simple one-to-five page landing pages or page sites, where I simply promote affiliate offers. One of my more famous ones was a website for the lottery. The whole idea was to get people to download a toolbar that showed them all the different lottery numbers. I didn’t have to have a mailing list or anything, I simply promoted the product on the page.

Squeeze Pages
So in order to get all the confusion out of the way, a squeeze page could be a landing page. The idea of a squeeze page is to “squeeze” your traffic and get the people that are really interested to put their name and email in the box. Another example of a squeeze page could be asking for more information–maybe a free shipping address or something like that. But basically, what you’re doing with your squeeze page is getting people to fill out the form and generate a lead.

You see this a lot with Clickbank, with various CPA affiliate offers where the advertiser is simply going through you to make a landing page. The whole idea of the landing page is to kind of pre-sell whatever the offer is. You can also have a landing page which says, “Hey, put your name and email in the box, and you’ll get XYZ.” This would be considered a squeeze page. Again, remember that a landing page and squeeze page are the same thing. A squeeze page can be a landing page, and a landing page could be a squeeze page.

The idea is to get as many people on your mailing list as possible, because then you can follow up, market with them, and make a lot of money. I’ve done this in some markets where I’ve generated as many as 500,000 people on my mailing list in about 90 days. I did that with paid traffic, but it was actually kind of cheap because of the fact that I was buying traffic for about two cents a click.

You can do this really easily. All you have to do is funnel them over. Right now, we’re running ads on Instagram, and sending people to lead pages, and making all kinds of money. We’re doing pay-per-click ads, Facebook ads, doing all kinds of stuff to our squeeze pages. Because once we get this mailing list, then I could email these people and make a lot of money.

 

Funnels
Now, let’s go on to the marketing funnel. The funnel is designed to get people to funnel through your marketing system. It’s more of a sales process in an integrated way to graduate people through the things that they’re buying. Marketing funnels are extremely powerful when it comes to taking visitors from just cold traffic (like pay-per-click traffic, or video traffic, or something like that) and getting them into your list. You learn what they want, and you bring them into different levels of your paid products and paid services. You graduate them, and you can make a lot of money.

Let’s say that your end goal is to sell something that’s like $1,200. In your funnel, you would have stages. You’d start with a landing and squeeze page, and you’d get your traffic to come in at the top of the funnel. You’d have people put their name and email in the box. They would be your leads. Then you would take people from that and go and sell them something cheap, or give them something for free, such as a free E-book with $5 shipping or something.

Then you’d get a bunch of people that would get the book, and they would be on your mailing list. After they get the book, you could offer them something for $50 that they would be interested in. A lot of people would take you up on the $50 offer. They would consume the content, and then hopefully later buy your product that is $1,200.

For another example, on my site, I have an entire funnel on the back end, designed to get customers to buy different things as they go along in the buying process. I could get people to come to my offer and say, “Hey, check this out. Put your name and email name email, and you’ll get XYZ.” Right now, you could go to www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com, you can put your name and email in the box, and you can get my free internet marketing affiliate toolbar. It’s really cool—5,000 people a month are actively using it.

So people will put their name and email in there, then I’ll say, “Hey, by the way, if you like this toolbar, why don’t you buy this thing? And
the thing could be just $47 or $297,” or something like that. Of course, the goal is to say, “Well, if you like that, we’re also going to give you a site. Do you want us to build your site for you? That’s $1,200,” or whatever it may be.

Right now, we’re testing this on one of my addiction websites, where we talk about alcohol addiction. We want to get visitors to opt-in, then we want them to join a monthly thing, and then of course we want them to graduate through things like personal coaching and other things like that. You see this everywhere, and it’s used everywhere.

Everything is Connected
Remember that all of these things can be kind of the same thing. They’re all examples of landing pages, and they’re all examples of squeeze pages. And if you build them correctly, they can be a marketing funnel for you. You can use all kinds of these things, and you can use variations of them. You have to find out what works for your market.

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

How to Motivate Yourself to Get Stuff Done: Simple Productivity Hack — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com

 

Sometimes, I don’t feel like doing a damn thing. Do you ever feel like that?

You know you need to get stuff done, but you just don’t feel like it. That’s exactly the problem.

We’re always waiting to feel something before we act, when in reality, the exact opposite occurs. When we act, we start to feel different. That’s why people get in traps of depression and lack productivity—because they’re waiting for a feeling to overtake them before they start doing something.

But if you’re in a rut and you don’t feel like doing anything, or you don’t know what to do, the best thing to do is get started on something. Whether it’s taking a walk, making a video, creating some content, or building a new website, or whatever it is, getting started on something. Because what’s going to happen is this: it’s going to start to change the way your brain reacts. Once we start motion, it creates chemicals in our brain that inspire us to do more things.

That’s why I could go weeks without doing anything, but then when I finally do one video, or one piece of content, or one webinar, or one piece of work, then I do more that day than I’ve ever done in the last month. And that’s how it works. You’ve got to get started on something now. You don’t need to jump the whole staircase in one leap and bound like Superman. You just need to get started on one thing and do it now.

So you have to ask yourself: what can I get started on right now that will not only change my mindset, but also get me in the direction that I want to go?

So stop waiting for a feeling to overtake you before you take action. Take action and the feeling will come.

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

 

The first thing you need to do is refine your market. If you want to do reviews on products, decide if you’ll review cooking things, or web hosting companies, or headphones, or computers, or laptops, or tablets, or whatever it may be. You have to refine your niche and base it on something people are actively interested in.   

If you use something that no one’s interested in, then you’re not gonna make any money. But here’s the cool thing: with the internet, people are interested in nearly everything. You can find all kinds of weird stuff that people are interested in that you can make money on.  

People have made lots of money with free blogs, Facebook groups, Instagrams, Twitters, all kinds of things like that. Now, the question is, how do we do it with no money, and how do we do it the right way?

 

1. Become an Affiliate

An affiliate is someone who makes money for selling a product. There are also CPA affiliates, which get paid for an action, such as when someone downloads a free toolbar, or fills out a form, or clicks a free link, call in, or something like that.  

Right now, it’s free to become an affiliate of most companies. You can go to a CPA network and get started with them for literally nothing. If any affiliate company ever charges you to become an affiliate, that’s not a good way to go. Sometimes they do require you to buy their product, but that’s for obvious reasons. Most of the time, you don’t have to pay anything. There are millions on companies out there that you can become an affiliate with. 

You’ll get paid for linking people when they go and do an action, and everything happens through the link. You get these links for free, because these companies want sales, right? They’re not going to charge you a lot of money to be an affiliate. They want you to drive good quality traffic to their offers, so that you make sales. Because when you make sales, they make money, at it’s very little risk to them. You sign up, you make sales, and then get paid.  

 

2. Use Social Media

Create a Facebook group or page. You can make a Facebook page for free. You can also make a Facebook group. You can go find people that are interested in your niche, whether that’s website building, or people who are interested in making money, or romantic ideas, or quotes, or whatever.  

Use Instagram. You can get a whole following on Instagram, and then you can set up a free blog to send them to so they can buy stuff, or you can send them your affiliate links or something like that.  

Post in forums. You can go out and post in forums. Someone might post with a problem, and you might have a link to a solution. The cool thing about forums is that you can get paid instantly. Be careful with the away you approach your traffic sources. Don’t go on forums and say, “Buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. Here, click this ugly affiliate link.” No one responds to that, and you won’t make any money. Do this the right way. 

Use Pinterest. If you’re on Pinterest, maybe you’re posting pictures of dresses, or inspirational quotes, or recipes. If you post a recipe on Pinterest, you can drive people a recipe toolbar.  

 

3. Set Up a Free Blog

You can do this on places like Weebly, or Blogspot, or Blogger, or use the free WordPress version. The downside is that you’ll have a domain that’s not really yours. It will say something like AffiliateMarketingDude.weebly or AffiliateMarketingDude.facebook or something. So, it won’t really be something that you own, and that’s important. Because if you do all this work and the company changes something,  you’re out of luck.

 

4. Use a Free Auto-Responder

You might also want to look into an auto-responder. There are free auto-responders out there. There are auto-responders that you can get started with for like a dollar a month, or $17 a month. There are also free trials or low-cost trials. Once you get an auto-responder, you can get free traffic all day long. Or you can buy it—but you should only do that if it’s profitable.

 

5. Get My Affiliate Toolbar

If you really have no money, go over to www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com and get my affiliate toolbar. This is like a cheat sheet for affiliate marketing. If you want to do this stuff and start free, go there and I’ve got some tools for you. We have some things that you can start with for free, obviously, in the hopes that later, once you make some money, you’ll join us in some other stuff so that we can help you make even more.  

If you do a video, do a good video. If you do an article, write a good article. If you go on forums, answer the questions well. Be a helpful person. If you go on Facebook groups and spam people, you’ll probably get kicked out. But if you answer a question well, you’ll make some money. This stuff works if you work it the right way.  

Now, the question is this: Do you want to own your own business or do you want someone else to own it? The last thing you want to do is be making money, and then suddenly everything’s gone because someone else decided to shut it down.  

 

Bonus: If You Have a Little Bit of Money  

1. Get a Website

I recommend that when you start out with the bare minimum, you make a website with a domain name that is your name. Something like BobsWebTips.com or BobsWoodworking.com or something like that, depending on your name and what market you go into.  

I teach you how to do this at www.GoHubSite.com. You get your domain name, which right now they give you for free when you sign up for hosting. You do have to sign up for web hosting, and if you sign up for three years in advance, it’s around $4 a month. So, it will be around $70 total. Why is this $70 important?  

With this $70, you get your domain. This allows you to host all your stuff on your own. You can put files up, start a mailing list, start different pages on your blog to send people to. You can make redirects. You can host links. You even get an unlimited amount of domains. You can have different blogs. All these tools we provide for you in the Simple Sites course.  

All of this stuff will help you build a following. You could do this without a website, but the best way to start is to get a website. It’s easy for your traffic to get to. The more barriers you have for them to get to what you have to offer, the less money you’ll make in the long run, and the more you’ll hinder yourself.  

 

2. Get Mentoring and Tools

The second thing is to get yourself a mentor and tools. We actually offer mentoring as well. You can go to SimpleSitesBonus.com, sign up for our mentoring, and it comes with a bunch of tools. Definitely save up some money for mentoring if you have it.  

If you want to get our mentoring and tools, right now the Simple Sites course is $297. It’s actually going to go up once the 2018 course comes out. It will be $797. 

If you don’t have money to start, then do what I’m teaching you for now. There is a gap between people searching and what they want. These vendors want people with influence. They want people with traffic. So, start to build up and save some money.  

 For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

How Affiliate Marketers Get Paid – Make Money Online – affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com

Today we’re talking about how affiliate marketers get paid. How do you get money in your account from your affiliate stuff?

Affiliate marketing is always driven by an action. Whether it’s CPA (which is cost-per-action or cost-per-acquisition) affiliate marketing, or whether it’s like cost-per-sale (or where you’re getting paid on a sale), no matter what, an action has to happen.

Self-Hosted Affiliate Programs
In affiliate marketing, you can get paid several different ways. Some big companies, such as Amazon or Best Buy, have their own affiliate programs, and they’ll pay you for affiliate marketing. These are called standalone or self-hosted affiliate programs. These companies will give you special links that you promote, and when people click on the link and buy products, you get paid directly be the company. Usually they’ll pay you by check or bank draft, or something like that. Sometimes they’ll even pay you by PayPal, or by putting money on a debit card every day or every week.

CPA Networks
Then there are what’s called affiliate networks. An affiliate CPA network is a network that goes out and finds a bunch of different things for you to promote. They go to all these different places, work out an agreement, and make a link. When you log into your affiliate CPA network, you’ll see a list of a bunch of offers.

My favorite way to get paid is always by using CPA networks. The reason is because with everything else, you need to make a sale. With CPA, you get paid when an action occurs. You have to get someone to click something, buy something, download something, etc., and when that action occurs, you get paid. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a sale.

OfferVault and ClickBank
OfferVault and ClickBank are two tools that we can use for affiliate marketing. OfferVault is a search engine that displays a bunch of offers and their networks. We use this to search for offers.

ClickBank is another tool we use. A lot of people think it’s an affiliate network, but it’s actually more of a digital product hosting service. They host digital products and order forms, and they process all the payments for these products. When you log in to ClickBank, you see all the offers like an old-school affiliate network, but it’s more direct, because it’s people actually selling stuff. JVZoo and ClickSure do the same kind of thing.

Now, here is more on the different actions you can get paid for with CPA marketing.

Pay-Per-Sale
The barrier of entry for a sale is really high, because you have to get people to actually get their credit card out and buy something. On Amazon their cards are already stored, so it’s a little bit easier. But getting someone to buy something is generally pretty hard.

Pay-Per-Lead
You could also get paid for a lead. When you generate leads for someone, these help companies to generate customers at the end of the day. As an affiliate, you want to do this ethically. You don’t want to entice someone by saying they can fill out a form a get a prize. People need to be genuinely interested in what you’re offering.

There are two types of leads: short-form and long-form. Short forms are easier to convert, so they pay less. Long forms are harder to convert, so their pay is generally a lot higher.

Pay-Per-Click
You can also get paid on a click. All you have to do is get someone to click. This can happen with AdSense, for instance. They give you a little code that you put it on your site. MSN does the same thing. They’re basically like big banner networks, big pay-per-click networks who want traffic, and they have all the software that generates it and makes it work, so that they get relevant traffic. Getting pay-per-click is going to depend on what market you’re in.

Pay-Per-Download
One of my favorite ways favorite ways to get paid is by offering free downloads. This is actually where I’ve made most of my money as an affiliate marketer, and still to this day I make a ton of money on downloads. With this, you just get someone to download something.

You might get paid to promote a toolbar. There are tool bars for everything – smiley faces, cursors, templates, forms, PDF editors, video downloads, and more. Because these are so simple to get, everyone likes them. They pay anywhere from $2 to $5 per download, which is really cool. You get someone to download something free that they were looking for.

Pay-Per-Call
There is also pay-per-call, where the company generates a phone number instead of a link. When the phone number is called and someone stays on for a certain amount of time, you’ll get paid.

Other Offers
There are also free trials and web hosting. Web hosting is another one of my favorites. There are all kinds of offers.Things like credit card offers would fall under something like a lead form. Banner ads would fall under clicks. A book form would probably go under download, because people might download a free e-book or something like that.

You can get paid to promote all kinds of products. It could be lead pages from HomeAdvisor, or toolbars from Ask.com, or maybe a dental referral network, or maybe as-seen-on-TV stuff like the squatty potty, or ab rollers, or something like that for floor workouts.

When you get started, you definitely need to have a bank account. You should have some kind of credit card, even if it’s a prepaid credit card, just something so that you can get started.

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

What it Really Takes to Earn $1,000 a Day as an Affiliate Marketer — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make $300 to $1,000 a day in profit with affiliate marketing? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

Very few people ask me what an affiliate marketer does on a day-to-day basis that actually makes money. This is very important, because that’s what you need to be doing. You can’t just go out there and learn a bunch of stuff–you have to take action and make it work. So, we’re gong to look at daily tasks and divide them into two categories: getting new visitors and converting existing visitors. Some content is designed to do both, but most will fall into only one.

You can repurpose and duplicate your content to fit into both, and with that you can double your income.

Let’s take a look at some of the things that work on a daily basis. It could be:

• Finding new traffic avenues
• Testing something (like Google AdWords, MSN or Bing ads, Yahoo ads, Facebook ads)
• Facebook post
• Facebook group
• Twitter campaign

 

People come to me and say, “Marcus, these are things that I’m already doing. Why am I not making three hundred to a thousand dollars a day? What’s going on?” Well, the secret here is that you need to be doing them deliberately. You can’t just go out there and post some raw ugly affiliate link on Facebook and expect people to buy things. That’s not how it works. You have to refine your market. If you have a bunch of people that are very, very hungry, and you have a hamburger stand, you don’t have to be a great salesman to sell a hamburger, because the people are hungry and you’re the only one who has food to eat.

So it’s very easy now online. You have segments and segments of markets, so if you go out there and just post something on Facebook or Craigslist and you just hope to get the right people, that’s not what you want to do. As a marketer, your number one job is to find the right audience. Find the right market. Who are you talking to?

If you’re going on Facebook, you want to go into a targeted group of people and talk to them, or create a targeted group and talk to them. If you’re going on pay-per-click ads, you have to bid on the right terms. Who’s looking up your stuff?

For example, on Craigslist, I recently found an ad for Uber. It said, “check this out, it pays x amount of money,” and it went to an affiliate link. I don’t know if Uber allows this (some affiliate networks do, some don’t), but it appears that Uber might allow it because there’s tons of them (unless they’re just getting away with it). But the moral of the story is that it’s a good match. You’re looking for people who want a job, and you post the Uber ad, and it pays you when someone signs up or something like that. And you’re just making money all day long. So that’s an example of a deliberate move. Same thing with Facebook. If you find a group of people that are into fishing or something like that, you want to get in there and provide some value, then link them to stuff that makes you money.

Providing value is another thing that we do as affiliate marketers.

When you look at this and know that offer for Uber pays 50 bucks for a new person to sign up on the form, you think about how to get all these people to that offer, whether it’s from Craigslist, pay-per-click, a Facebook group, or whatever it is. It’s got to be deliberate. It’s got to be within the terms and conditions of all the sites you’re using (which is pretty easy to stay within). Then let’s say you get one hundred people a day to view an ad, and three to five people sign up. Let’s say that four people sign up: Multiple that by fifty dollars, and that’s two hundred bucks right there from a couple of simple ads.

You have to be deliberate and delegate the tasks you do on a daily basis.

 

Let’s say that I find people who want to set up a blog and start blogging. I can create a report, a video, or some piece of content to teach them how to make a blog, and I get $100 to $300 per sign-up. All I have to do is put my effort into getting this right. Where are these people? Maybe there are bloggers on a Facebook group. Maybe there are people on YouTube. I could make YouTube videos for how to set up a blog video. Maybe I make a little PDF report for how to set up a blog.

Now, let’s say my daily traffic is 100 people watching my videos, because the videos are targeted. I tell people, “If you want these instructions, get my PDF at my site and get web hosting.” Out of that amount of people, let’s say that 3 people get hosting. I’m now making $100 to $300 in commissions. I’m going to be building a list, but I’ll be making money as I go along as well.

This is an example of how it works. When you’re building a list, this is where it really starts to compound and work really well. It’s not that hard to do. You have these videos that are getting new visitors, then you start to focus on existing visitors.

Now let’s take a look at the daily tasks I would do for existing visitors. This could be something like send email. Email is a really good one if you have something about blogs. You could go out and start a Facebook group in your market, and you could start to talk to people. Facebook groups are very big for that—you can interact with your audience. You could also do Twitter. You can find good content and give it to your videos. You could repurpose content. You could make all kinds of cool stuff and make lots of money doing that.

So you want to delegate the tasks, make them very deliberate, and focus on what pays. While you’re reading this, there are people on dating sites, on bidding sites, on Facebook, on Google, on sales websites—they’re everywhere. Your job is to do something every day that brings them to you brand new, or something that bonds with t them that you already know. You can go and convert your existing visitors with little daily tasks.

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

Money Making Mindset Hack For Making Money Online With Affiliate Marketing — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com

Today I’m going to teach you the number one thing that holds people back from making money online. It’s a secret that not a lot of people know about, and we’re going to help you understand it so that you can get past the hurdle and finally start making money with affiliate marketing. 

In life and in business, we have this idea that something big has to happen. If a guy makes a video on YouTube, it’s a big deal. If a guy makes a living on the internet, it’s a big deal. If a guy is on a reality TV show or he produces shows, it’s a big deal. If he has a book, it’s a big deal.  

I’ve been a slow starter for 2018. I’ve been trying to get content out, trying to do the live webinars, but I just really haven’t been on my game.  Just a few days ago, someone I do videos back and forth with on YoutTube (who’s got a bunch of subscribers) asked me to make a video for him for his channel. He wanted me to take a look at the book he wrote and give a review. It’s a big channel, it’s got a lot of subscribers, we’ve done this before, and it’s really cool for me.  

So here I was trying to get started. I thought, okay, it’s a big deal. I have to be in the mood to do it. I gotta sit down, I gotta think about what I’m gonna do or what I’m gonna write. I gotta make it perfect. 

I was making mountains out of molehills for this 90 second to 180 second video. I was looking at it like it was a big deal. A lot of people think, wow, he’s an author. He wrote a book, and that’s a big deal. But in actuality, it’s not. He went out, got content, took action, and made something happen.  

I met this guy online from a book review I did, where I read a book and shared my opinions and thoughts and takeaways from the book. He found me on the book review and I shared it. It wasn’t a big deal. It was me behind the camera, just talking as I do every day. We all talk every day, but for some reason with the cameras on, when we’re talking about money, it gets to be a big deal. 

Now, what does this have to do with you? In our lives we have a lot of blocks and filters, and they stop us from making money online. They make us think we’re not good enough. I still have them today. I’ve been doing this for 18 years– you think I would be pretty confident, and for the most part, I am. But there’s still that voice in the back of my head that says, hey, what if it’s not good enough? What if someone doesn’t like it? These blocks tell you that money is hard to get.  

We think about making $100,000 a year, and we think, how am I ever going to get that? That’s a big deal. But for me, by making $167,000 my second year online when I was 22 or 23 years old, I learned that it’s really not a big deal.   

We have these expectations that when we set something up, something else is supposed to happen. When you build a website, a bell is going to go off, people will celebrate and you’ll start making money, and it’s gonna be this big thing.  

But really, success doesn’t work like that. Success is a lot calmer. And there are thousands, if not millions, of affiliate marketers who make these numbers all the time.  

There are people who have blogs about food that make $100,000 a year. There are affiliate marketers that make $100,000 a year. There are people with little YouTube channels making $100,000 a year. But we have blocks and filters that make us think, what if I can’t do that? What if it’s not right? And that leads to inaction. 

There are a lot of questions I could have asked myself about doing book reviews online. Are they gonna be good? Do people mind? Do people like them? Will they get any views? Will they get this or that? 

But instead, I sat down and thought, okay, I’m gonna take action. I think people will value my opinion on this, so I’m gonna do it.  

These filters make you ask, does it really work? A lot of people ask me, does affiliate marketing really work? Does the stuff you teach really work? 

Well, yeah, it works. For me personally, it’s been working for a long time. For the people who have done this business inside and out, it’s been working even longer for the rest of them.  

Ask yourself, what if it does work? What if I could put a piece of content out there, whether it’s a video, audio, a report, a PDF, a blog post, or a list of something a lot of people look up? Whatever it is, what if I’m putting that content out there? Will people read it or see it?  

Well, yeah. You can put it online now, and you have to learn how to make people read it, of course. And then, if they can read it, ask yourself: will they take some kind of action that will make me  money?  

If you learn this stuff, you’ll realize it’s not that big of a deal at all. We’re taking people and helping them out with whatever it is they’re looking for, or we’re giving them some kind of entertainment or some kind of value. Value is in the eye of the beholder, so you can’t make it a big deal. Some people will look at content and think that it stinks. Some people will think it’s great. Your job is to find the right person who’s going to consume it and get the value out of it. It’s very simple.  

Of course, you have to do things the right way. You can’t just go spam Craigslist or put a bunch of junk on Facebook that people don’t want to read. You have to make good quality, decent stuff that people want to read. But again, it’s not that big of a deal. You don’t need a documentary-style video with a million-dollar production. You just need something that’s going to help. And the cool thing is that you have your little slice of the internet.  

The internet is a huge place with billions of dollars being spent. Amazon pays billions of dollars a year to affiliates. And that’s just one slice of one slice. We also have CPA networks, affiliate companies, Best Buy and all these other companies. All we have to do is find a way to make content that people will consume and lead them to things that make us money.  

So, you have to fight the inaction. I don’t mean you have to get the boxing gloves out. Just start doing something. You don’t have to start huge or extravagant. You just need to start somewhere.   

In my own life, I find that when I start somewhere, it starts a domino effect. I make one video, and the next one is easier, and the next one is easier, and on and on we go. And over time, I have a ton of content.  

Let’s say you set up a new video, and you get a hundred views, or even ten views. You might think that stinks and it doesn’t work. But instead think, where did those views come from? Why did people watch it? Did anyone respond? What did I do wrong? What can I do better?  

Or maybe your first video is a hit, and you get a hundred thousand views right away. So you keep doing the same thing.  

Doing this business is a 99% mental game. A lot of your studying as an affiliate marketer has probably involved a lot of thinking and worrying and blocks and filters, and very little action. Whatever you do, make it deliberate. Study who your audience is. Study who you want to reach and make a deliberate thing for them.  

People are searching for all kinds of things. You have to get past that mental game and just set something up. Because once you do, it’s gonna start a domino effect. You’ll get where you want to go. Getting to $100,000 a year online is not a big deal online. Getting to $1,000,000 online is not a big deal. Whether you want a dollar, or whether you want billions of dollars, you just have to start somewhere and follow it through. Stop looking at everything as a big deal and thinking that the world has to align for you. Just get started.  

For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.

Most Profitable Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketers: Cold or Warm Traffic — Which is Best? — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com

NOTE: Simple Sites Anniversary Edition Is Coming Soon… When It Does The Price Will Be $997… You Can Get The Current Version And The Anniversary Upgrade Here Now And Save BIG!

All traffic is not created equal. I’ll show you how to tap into the most profitable traffic sources out there.

There are two types of traffic sources: Cold traffic and warm traffic.

Cold traffic that doesn’t know anything about you. It’s very passive. Warm traffic knows something about you, or at least about your offer. Warm traffic is actively searching for solutions to their problems. We’ll be talking about your most valuable cold traffic source and your most valuable warm traffic source.

 

Most Valuable Cold Traffic Source: Search Engine

This is your overall most valuable traffic source, and a good entry point into affiliate marketing. Here, someone uses a search engine and searches for specific keywords. To get this traffic, you target those keywords. With most cold traffic, you have to get a lot of traffic to make a little bit of money. But with search engine traffic, you get a little bit of traffic and you can make a lot of money.

This works with other forms of cold traffic too. But first, if you want to build a business from the ground up, you do it with search engine traffic. Focus on people who are actively looking for what you have to offer. They want to buy what you have right now.

 

Most Valuable Warm Traffic Source: Email 

The second most important traffic is email traffic. Here, you email people who already know who you are and already want your information. To do this, you need to build a relationship with your market. The more bonding you do with your following, the more valuable every click will be. Your market will know you anticipate good content from you. When you send out an email they’ll click on it, and your email traffic will be worth a lot of money.

If you don’t have a relationship with your market, they won’t want to click on your emails, and they won’t care. So you have to make them care. There’s a different mindset between people casually browsing and people actively searching. If you can get inside the mindset of why people do what they do, you can be successful.

 

One More Valuable Cold / Warm Traffic Source: Social Media 

Social media can be a very profitable traffic source. Sometimes the traffic is cold, and sometimes it’s warm. Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.) can be examples of cold traffic sources. People use these platforms for different things, but they might not actively be looking for your types of information. When people on social media are mostly looking at pictures and posting content of their own, they’re not searching for your products.

Once people on social media know who you are as an advertiser, then the traffic is warm traffic. Users actively search for your information. Once you get your traffic from different sources, then you can direct your traffic to your own social media platforms. Using paid traffic and email traffic for this can boost your social media following.

So when you’re discerning what types of traffic to go after, ask yourself this question: Are your visitors ready and able to take action? If the answer is yet, then get going.

For more information, go to www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.