Affiliate Marketing – What It Means To You! Part 4 – Final Part

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Content Generation and Platforms Suited for For Affiliate Marketing!

You should already know what affiliate marketing is by now, but just so we’re clear let’s sum it up in just a quick little sentence. Affiliate Marketing  literally just refers to the process of making money as an affiliate through marketing products to certain individuals.

These products can take any shape or form; they can imply actual items such as e-books, software applications or even songs, but at the same time they can also imply simple articles or videos you post on a website like YouTube.

To put it bluntly, affiliate marketing is literally you outsourcing your content to the world through a popular medium and making money of it by selling other’s people’s products, offers, services, etc.. There are hundreds of mediums to choose from, but the majority tend to work the same.

You have for example YouTube, the king of online video sharing; you have Instagram, the most popular website for young entrepreneurs and newcomer influencers, you have Reddit, where most people just want to have a good time and laugh at funny jokes and be amazed by ridiculous stunts, Quora where you’re always trying to prove your creativity by asking the most absurd questions ever for the sake of getting attention and then you have just blogging in general.

Blogging can be practiced on most any platform out there, you simply write your heart out and you wait for people to read what you wrote and give you feedback on your work. It’s pretty straightforward, and also extremely popular, although it does have its many ups and downs.

For example, it doesn’t always work out for you to be opinioned, sure it’ll get you some clicks but it can actually get you separated from your fans which will end up being extremely bad for you.

At the same time, not taking any direct stance on any matter can be seen as boring. It’d literally make your blog a newsletter, which not a lot of people are so fond of.

So, what you do need to do is you need to find the perfect balance for the matter, find the perfect way to spread your message across while also not stepping on anyone’s toes.

You are literally being a journalist, which is never an easy job, but alas, it is a job nonetheless, and the more you do it the more you are sure to have money piling up in your sleep because people don’t just drop those articles one day after you post them.

People will click on those every single day for a good long time even after you post them and forget you ever posted them in the first place.

So, with that out of the way, how about we discuss exactly how you’re supposed to get started with affiliated marketing since it’s nowhere near as simple as it sounds and of course, there is no simple way around it all.

What we can offer you though is a series of tips and tricks that will be sure to increase your chances of getting into it and of course, how to make the most amount of money out of it all. In order to actually get into affiliate marketing you need to first and foremost find the perfect medium for you.

So, ask yourself right here and right now, what are you talented in? Are you a good writer by any chance? Are you a good songwriter? Can you make a beat stand out from the cesspool of other beats readily available to everyone online?

Maybe you’re very creative and you just want to take interesting pictures to share your creativity all around? These are the types of questions that you need to ask yourself in order to find the perfect medium for you. We’ve already mentioned the top websites that you can choose from above so we won’t get too into them all over again.

The important thing is that you need to get into the right one for you and literally just find the perfect way to get to the top, regardless of whether that means you’ve got to fabricate the best story for yourself or if you need to simply be as creative as possible to attract an audience.

So, once you believe you’ve found the perfect platform for you to work off of what you need to do next is you need to make sure that you’ve done your research properly. This is quite a hard step to take but trust us, it’ll be worth it.

It’s extremely easy to just sort of drop your work off without any extra thought put into it and hope for the best but most of the time that won’t get you anywhere. If anything, it can even hurt your reputation later on if you’re not careful.

So, do your research, make sure that you know what you’re getting into, start understanding the many different inside jokes that they have got going for them behind the screen. It’s definitely going to take a very long time to actually get through it all but the results will speak for themselves.

You’ll know which topics to avoid, which topics to approach and most importantly you’ll know exactly what you need to do to get the attention from the community.The secret to attracting the attention of the community is to first be a part of the community. It’s really that simple.

If you’ve never been a part of the community in the first place then you will find it extremely hard to actually make a dent in anyone’s attention spans. After you get this huge step out of the way your next step is to be patient.

Yes, it sounds a bit weird to say something like that right after telling you to do all of that work in the first place but there is no way to skip this process either.

You need to understand the fact that you will not get extremely popular overnight, which is fine in itself. You shouldn’t get into this industry if you’re expecting immediate results. Remember, you’re not going for quick money here; you’re trying to win on the long run.

What this means is that you’re mainly looking to get yourself financially secured for the next couple of years as opposed to simply making a quick dollar and then going for the next project at hand.

So, patience is the key to making it. You must not discourage yourself by seeing all of these random people getting to the top so easily, that’s not what this is all about. What you need to do is you need to try over and over again and never allow anyone to tell you to quit either.

You’ve got to try and never slow down, never put your pen down and say that it’s not worth it anymore, never uninstall the software and just drop it for good, the more you work the more you’ll make and the more you make the more you’ve got to work. It’s a simple cycle and you’ve got to understand the fact that the glue that sticks it all together is patience.

Without it you will get nowhere, your cycle will crumble and you’ll drop out before you even get to the good parts of your career online. So, again, patience is key,
there’s no way to skip this step either and of course, if you follow through with this part you will make a profit in no time.

The second most important rule of making money through affiliate marketing is a tad more difficult yet again. It basically implies that you get extremely picky when it comes to the products and brands that you choose to represent you. You shouldn’t just choose the first sponsor that decides to throw a few dollars your way. You need to do your research and choose the best possible outcomes for you.

There’s no other way around it, really, if you decide to choose every brand you meet up with along the way then you will just end up tarnishing your own image too much for anyone to still follow you anymore. If you become known as one of those influencers that will take anything then sure, you will get a swarm of random sponsors every time you post but your audience won’t like it in the least.

For example if you start promoting a brand that is known for testing their products on animals then you will get a good chunk of your audience to no longer support you, while if you end up doing something as silly as promoting a page that basically believes that “shocking the gay away works” then you will seriously damage your reputation overnight.

You can end up going from 1000 fans to 100 overnight if you keep on supporting every single brand that comes to you for sponsorship. So, make sure that you only select a few brand deals every now and then and do your research on every one of them. You need to do full background checks and see how compatible they are with your content too because you don’t want to be labeled as a sellout anytime soon.

The moment people stop believing in you is the moment you stop becoming an influencer. If people see you as a sellout then your voice becomes one of many and it soon disappears altogether.

Make sure that you avoid this by simply always keeping up with what brands contact you and such and you’ll surely make a profit in no time.

Another tip that we can offer you in order for you to get the best affiliate marketing experience possible is that you don’t limit yourself to just one platform. We know we already stated that you need to find the perfect one for you, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve got to stay 100% faithful to that one without ever branching out or anything like that.

The best way about it is to find the perfect platform for you and then have all other platforms gravitate around the main one. So, let’s say for example that you’re a YouTuber with around 500,000 subscribers. Just because you’ve got that many subscribers that doesn’t mean that you’ve got to stay on YouTube and never branch out and try out new things.

You need to make an Instagram account where you post random funny pictures with your friends and family members, you need to make a Twitch account where you interact directly with your fans and you play games with them, you need to make a Reddit account where you have them build a community around you and see them interact with each other and make inside jokes based around you.

Every other major influencer out there has accounts in every platform that is popular nowadays. So you should never make the mistake of limiting yourself to only one. You can always choose one as your main source of income, but that never means that you simply stop using any other platform from that day on.

Simply focus on the main platform at hand while also making sure that all those other platforms are updated. That way you can attract at least 50% more fans every time you post something new to every single platform you have an account on.

Next up what you should always know is that you need to go for the niche communities as much as possible. We briefly brushed across this above but we definitely need to talk about this some more because of just how important and detrimental it is to you and your career.

Sure, you can try to be as inclusive as possible but let’s be honest here; the more inclusive you are the more likely you are to literally just come off as extremely bland and boring. You need to avoid these labels as much as possible because labels tend to rule the world in this industry, so in order to do so you need to make sure that you understand your fan base as much as humanly possible.

See what makes them happy, make sure that they’re always satisfied, keep feeding them the same content that you know for a fact that they love, make inside jokes, continue jokes you made a few posts ago. This literally implies that you make a stronger connection with your fan base and that’s about it. The more inclusive you are the more you seem to lose that connection that you have with your fan base which is why you must make sure to interact with them on the daily too.

If you’re on YouTube for example answer as many comments as you can, reference the comments too to make sure that you give your fans the impression that you’re always there with them, laughing at every joke they make. You can even make a series in which you read and laugh at what people say in your comment section in order to give your viewers a voice that can be heard loud and clear, aka your own voice.

It does sound a bit cheesy but by making sure that you follow through with your niche community you literally assure yourself a good long lasting career in the industry. There are plenty of examples of people that ended up alienating their own communities because of how much they didn’t resonate with them anymore.

You need to work with your strong suits, and if you don’t know what those are for you specifically then look no further than your own community. Again, interact with them, ask them what kind of content they want from you, what they’re expecting and most importantly why they decided to follow you in the first place.

Depending on your answers you can actually help your career move forwards and make way more of a profit by simply playing to your strengths some more. So, always research the product demand. Outside of the obvious YouTube career path we discussed above you need to make sure that your product is the best product for your clients.

Check out the history of your career. See where you peaked and what caused you to peak in the first place. What kind of content did you produce that caused you to break a record that day? Do the opposite too, try to find out when exactly you got the lowest amount of attention and most importantly why. If you manage to find out these facts about your own personal career then you will make a lot more money and break a lot more records in the nearfuture, we can promise you that.

Next up we should mention that you should never allow yourself to be left behind. You must always be one step ahead of your competition which means that you cannot, and we absolutely must insist on this matter, you cannot use outdated ways to attract new people. You need to always evolve, look at what made everyone follow you in the first place then start thinking about bringing that idea to a new level.

Take up new techniques every time you can, make sure that you’re always one step ahead of your competition and never be one step behind. It doesn’t matter if you’re one step behind or if you’re 100 steps behind, the result is the same always.

You need to be the one starting the fads; you need to be the one causing the changes not the one always following them from behind. The key to success is patience and always being one step ahead. If you’ve got these two going for you then you really shouldn’t have any problem starting to monetize your way into the affiliate marketing industry.

Another extremely important tip we can offer you is we should definitely ask you to always use professional tools to get your work done. If you’re still using free to use applications to edit your pictures or enhance your software then we’re sorry to tell you this but you won’t get anywhere near the same level you’d get to if you were to use professional tools.

The more professional the tools are, the more professional your work looks and that’s a fact. You must never portray yourself as a beginner as someone that’s just getting into it, because that’s not good for business. You might be thinking that maybe the look of the new underdog isn’t all that bad, since you have a lot of possibilities if you do that anyways, but the truth of the matter is the fact that no matter what, the big fish investors and sponsors will always go for the safe bet experienced professional looking worker as opposed to the newcomer boy wonder that has just started out and is willing to go the extra mile.

So, again, make your content worth investing into. That’s literally just how easy it is and it’s insane how many people still haven’t figured this out themselves. If you do want to make it to the big leagues then upgrading to professional tools is a must, and if you don’t believe us then look no further than at most any online influencers out there.

There really is no other way around it, do it and you’ll make it. Don’t do it and your chances of making it are actually getting chopped down in half right as we speak. Another way to make yourself known in the affiliate marketing industry is by making a platform of your own as opposed to making use of a pre-existing one. The only real problem with this is that it requires a lot of extra steps and of course, there’s nothing worse than having to overcomplicate your work.

But alas, making a new platform of your own in which to offer your services definitely has its many ups too. First things first there are no fees that you’ll have to pay to be on that platform in the first place. A lot of websites that offer you the space to upload your content to tend to ask for a certain fee before your clients can actually purchase the digital products from you. The fee is mostly paid by the client but every dollar they pay the website is a dollar that could have gone to your wallet and that’s a fact.

So, that’s one of the main reasons as to why you need a platform of your own. Second of all, you get a lot more room to be creative by doing so. If you are your own boss you basically can post whatever you want and not have to worry about it getting deleted or thrown under the bus and forgotten. If you’re the boss then that’s that, and there’s nothing more to it whatsoever.

You choose what goes on your own platform so there’s nothing anyone else can say about it. Sure, you are still advised to post quality content as opposed to just posting whatever you could ever ask to post online, but the fact of the matter is that at least this way you get a say in what’s right and what’s wrong. Third of all having a platform of your own tends to help you actually get a different type of a business of your own.

What we’retalking about may seem quite weird at first, but the more popular your platform gets the more likely it is to actually potential freelancers that are willing to work on your platform in exchange for a share of the money. If you do actually get to this point then you should know by now that you literally just made it as a professional affiliated marketer.

The moment people start offering their services on your website is the moment your website can run without you actually interfering with it anymore. This basically means that you’re making money without actually doing anything to make the money in the first place. that is literally any affiliated marketer’s dream right there, and it can be achieved quite easily if you know what you’re doing and if you’re always making sure that you’re got it all going for you.

It’s a simple yet effective mindset and one of the easiest ways to make your career reach this point is by making a website page of your own. After that step’s out of the way you need to start tracking your progress and start noticing any serious spikes along the way.

This is an  ncredibly important part that you cannot skip no matter what. Sure, you’re making money without actually doing any work yourself, but you do need to keep a close eye on everything that’s going on with your career. There isn’t much that you can do about a single spike along the way outside of just seeing what caused it and what caused it to go back to normal.

There are plenty of trackers that you can use but the most popular one is definitely without a doubt MonsterInsights (that’s not an Affiliate link). So just download that software, install it and start running it. Input all of your information there and right after you’ll see the graph showcasing just how well your career has been going for the past couple of years or so.

You need to remember though that just because you’re in the green for now it doesn’t mean that you will always be. We stated above that you always need to be one step ahead of your competition which is why you need to put extra work into never being left behind now that you’re no longer working yourself. Handling a service of your own is hard enough, but having to handle the platform too just means double the probability of making a mistake.

After this is up and done with, what you need to do next is a big step that, again, requires a ton of research to be done prior to coming to a conclusion. First and foremost, you need to find affiliate partners that you can work with in order to make sure that you’re not left behind. You might not like the idea of having to band together in order to make more money but at the end of the day it’s not about making the most money anymore, it’s about making sure that you’ve got a constant influx of money that you can rely on whenever you need them.

So, do your research and make sure that you don’t miss anything. The more work you do the more likely you are to find the proper affiliate partners for you too so make sure that you don’t bypass any red flags along the way and simply avoid them when coming to a conclusion.

This is your career that we’re talking about, don’t skip any small details along the way because these small details can end up being the career choices that either make or break your life’s work. After that’s out of the way what you need to do is you need to make your own pay per click advertisements.

This will take a gentler and knowledgeable hand than the one that we mentioned above, but you do need to understand that the more work you put into it the more money you’ll be able to take out of it. So, you’re probably wondering how these pay per click advertisements will end up helping you at this point.

The answer is quite clear actually. Basically there are two main reasons as to why these pay per click advertisements are so important. The first one is the fact that you are replacing everyone else’s advertisements with your own, which means that you no longer need to worry about finding the proper channels to advertise on your platform anymore.

The second reason as to why creating a pay per click advertisement is so important is the fact that regardless of how much traffic you already get you could always get more, which is why you need to try to get as many different people as possible from different mediums. You need to fish out as many new people as possible because not everyone will become an instant returning client so you’ll always need new people coming in to replace the ones never coming back again.

So, just to reiterate, you need as much advertising as possible once you’ve gotten past the point where you’ve made your own website.

Even websites such as Netflix have to advertise their series on every platform they can get to, so you can only imagine just how important these are for your company when even a behemoth of a company such as Netflix has to advertise itself so thoroughly.

Now, another quick tip we can offer you is to make different types of content for different types of people.

For example maybe you want to add in a daily news type of a blog to your website. Just hire the workers needed and start selling away to the people watching your work as soon as you start publishing. You can also add another tab to your website where people can find original nice sounding beats that you’ve made or your workers have made.

You can have another tab where you offer new versions of the pre-existing software you’ve created. There are so many ways that you can increase your reach further on, but the only issue that we need to address here is the fact that you absolutely should not be abandoning your roots for the sake of getting new clients to sign up.

You cannot just stop doing what your fans originally signed up for and start going for a whole different media because guess what, you’ll find yourself with a lack of clients in no time.

Not a lot of people will go for someone that has just started out in the industry, you should know that already, but the fact of the matter is that if you dismiss your already pre-existing fan base then you will eventually have no one sitting by your side anymore.

That is how you manage to game over yourself, really. The moment that you get abandoned by the people that got you to where you are is the moment that you have failed as an affiliated marketer.

After all, you are literally being sponsored by your customers, it’s that simple. Without you, they are left without all of the products that you were originally offering them and without them you are absolutely nothing. Sure, the new clients may be interested in your craft but that doesn’t mean that they’ll stick with you through thick and thin like the original fans.

Just To Conclude:

In conclusion, what have we learned from these posts?  We learned the fact that a digital product is basically any type of a product that is stored and simply meant to be utilized only in digital form. This is the complete opposite version of physical products which refer to any product that is stored and used in its physical form.

We also learned the fact that an affiliated marketer is the person that uses his extensive knowledge and talent to generate traffic and build communities in order to sell the digital product we mentioned above and thus eventually reach the point where he or she makes  money without actually doing any more work anymore. That’s the goal of any affiliated marketer, as mentioned previously.

Affiliate Marketing  is as you may have guessed by now the process during which, you, the affiliated marketer promote and sell digital products. There are plenty of mediums to choose from that you can use to make a profit out of but you should always choose one major one when you’re looking to make a name for yourself so that people trust you and you can sell to them.

But just because you choose one that doesn’t mean that you can’t also make multiple other accounts in other mediums too. You need diversity; you really do, because without that diversity you are not working at full capacity.

Just think about it like this, there are plenty of people that only use one medium, so isn’t it way better to make sure that you advertise your main platform’s services on multiple other platforms as well? You’re literally managing to attract more and more people that could have never actually even thought about visiting your main platform if it weren’t for you advertising it on other platforms.

Your main purpose in all of this is to create a stabile company that can go on with or without your intervention. Your main goal in all of this should always be that, no matter what. If that’s not your goal then you aren’t doing it right. After you do reach that point though you should still show interest in your work and monopolize more and more advertisement space and make sure that you never allow yourself to be left behind.

This is going to be an everlasting struggle, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the road that was needed to get here. At the end of the day  this is just more of the same that you’re already used to, so it’s not like you’re not readily equipped to take on this challenge. If you do reach this point you can consider your career to be on easy mode all of a sudden.

The stakes may be higher but actually messing up and going down is way less likely than getting to this level in the first place. So, if you do actually reach this point then you need to be proud, you need to flaunt yourself for becoming what we can all agree on as a professional affiliate marketer.

You need to wear this badge with honor and make sure that no matter what you’ve always got your self-thriving website in the back. We thank you for choosing to read this guide all the way through and we especially hope that it was helpful to you. We tried to simplify the matters as much as possible but even so some aspects may still be hard to quantify for you. Regardless, you’ve got most if not all of the steps to becoming a professional affiliate marketer, so there’s nothing else standing in your way except yourself.

So, again, we must thank you and wish you good luck ahead.

If you would like to learn a little bit more about making an income online, take a look at this Free Webinar by my friend Noel Cunningham.  Some great training in a very relaxed easy style.

mike-hynes.com Free Webinar

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