Affiliate Marketing Success

Some people will tell you that affiliate marketing is a scam, that selling other people’s products is a waste of time, that you can’t make any money at it. Well, it is NOT a scam and it IS possible to make a tidy living on the internet. That doesn’t mean there aren’t scams out there and it doesn’t mean there isn’t misinformation out there. The purpose of my blog is to help anyone that’s interested, find out how to avoid the scams and find the pathways to making money online. For real.

I got started in 2003 by buying an ebook. In case you didn’t know, an ebook is (usually) a PDF document (Portable Document Format: think Adobe Acrobat) that you can download as soon as you purchase it. No waiting for the UPS guy, or the mailman; this is instant. The ebook I bought was about affiliate marketing, which I was just discovering at that time, after a somewhat painful first experience. (Sighs) I wanted to know more! While this book had some good information in it, it was mostly a collection of the seller’s affiliate links. Talk about getting a passive education!

I went on to buy lots of these ebooks, each telling me about different aspects of online marketing. The problem is just that; they tell you ABOUT these things, but they don’t really tell you how to get started and really USE these resources. I hit one road block after another, and I wasn’t exactly an internet newbie. I knew how to put up a web site, and hard coded at that! I understood about servers and FTP and hosting accounts and registering domain names, etc. But there were so many things missing from the material I found, and bought (!) on the web. It took a long time before I found something complete. It’s not so hard when all the pieces are included.

I know there are a lot of people like me that have been spinning their wheels trying to make a buck online, only to find that all their efforts still fell short. I figured that if I can teach people about visual communications and graphic arts, why not internet marketing? The key to teaching is not just being able to break things down and purvey it to students, but it is also a matter of flushing the useless information and having the ability to judge what makes sense within your industry, based on hard experience. There IS no formal training for internet marketing, so when you’re getting started, you experience information overload and it’s impossible to sort out the good from the bad. And to top it all off, there are always pieces MISSING! It’s so aggravating! These authors give you just enough to whet your appetite, but they sure don’t teach you how to cook!

It took a lot of trial and error, wasteful expense, not to mention a long time, to get any of this to work for me. Now I want to help others avoid the pitfalls and get on the right track to earning money online. Once you’ve had a taste of being your own boss, you’ll never want to work for someone else again!