When I published my post on how to make money with a blog by building reputation, many comments were pointing the fact that affiliate marketing wasn’t very obvious on my blog, although it accounts for more than 70% of my blog revenue. Well, it doesn’t need to be obvious in order to work. On the contrary, the less obvious your affiliate marketing activity is, the higher the chances are to succeed.
I know it sounds a little bit confusing. I bet all you know about affiliate marketing starts with: “make your offer as visible as you can”. Put it in the header of your blog. Stick it to you reader’s retina. Well, I don’t agree with that. And to be honest, I wanted to sound confusing on purpose. Because I really feel the need to puzzle your brain a little on this topic. If you landed here from some search engine, looking for a quick ‘n easy way to grab some cash from the “Internets”, you’ll be rather disappointed. Because there isn’t such an easy way to make money with affiliate marketing. Or, if it is, it’s most likely a scam.
Affiliate marketing means a lot of work, a lo of discipline, vision and persistence. It also needs a lot of honesty. For instance, I only recommend on this blog products I own and use. If there are ebooks that I recommend, you can be sure I read them and I have great respect for those ebooks or they authors. If there are some software apps, like Mac Journal, be sure I know and use that piece of software for years.
But now let’s get back to the point of this article. Like in any other moments of my life, every time I shift my focus towards a certain area, other related things are starting to pop out from nowhere. For instance, just when I started to mention affiliate marketing more on my blog, one of my friends, Corbett Barr, sent me an email telling me that he’ll restart his affiliate marketing beginner course. Well, well, what do you know! Now that’s a coincidence! 😉
What Is Affiliate Marketing For Beginners About
You should know by now that every time I hit this kind of coincidence, I follow. There must be something to be done following this coincidence, so here I am, trying to tell you a little bit more about affiliate marketing for beginners. When Corbett told me he’s going to relaunch it, I signed up like in 2 minutes. I was curious. And in the next 2 hours I browsed through the course. Some modules brought back some nice memories, while others made me have some really, surprising “a-ha” moments. Without spoiling it, here are a few things about this course.
“Affiliate Market For Beginners” has 5 modules and 21 lessons. The 5 modules are covering pretty much everything you should know if you have no previous knowledge about affiliate marketing:Â finding opportunities, site building, getting traffic (and sales) and some advanced topics. The 21 lessons are focusing on keyword research, topic selection, site building with WordPress, search marketing, content development and sales optimization. And if you’re curious about the advanced part (I know I was) this is about how to scale an affiliate marketing business.
After 2 hours I knew I was set: I had to write about this. But there was also something missing. Something didn’t yet clicked. Too little information. So I wrote 3 questions to Corbett, 3 questions that I knew any one of my readers would ask.
A Blitz Interview With The Man Behind This
Cobrett Barr: If you want to earn a living online, affiliate marketing is one of the top revenue streams. My course has three major advantages.
- It’s meant for complete beginners (to slightly intermediate), so if you don’t have experience with affiliate marketing, it will walk you step-by-step through the process.
It’s an ethical course on affiliate marketing that will, as I like to say, leave you feeling good in the morning. We don’t teach any pushy sales tactics and only encourage people to promote products they love in a way they can be proud of.
I guarantee you’ll make your first affiliate marketing sale after going through the course, and if you don’t make $1000 in the following months, I haven’t done my job.
2. How affiliate marketing helped you as a business man? Give me a personal story. I know you have one. We all have one.
Corbett Barr: My favorite story is the $1,000 on the beach day. I was in Hawaii with my wife visiting her sister for college graduation. We were busy visiting family and exploring the island, so I didn’t plan to work much that week.
At the last minute, I decided to send out an email to a handful of people about Chris Guillebeau’s awesome Empire Builder Kit. Then we headed out for a long day at the beach. We returned to the hotel after 10+ hours of fun in the sun to the pleasant surprise of having made $1000 in affiliate commissions from that single simple email. That’s when the real power of affiliate marketing really hit me.
3 On a scale of 1 to 5 give me a level of complexity for this program? How much it will ask from my time and my focus?
Corbett Barr: The course is meant to be easy to follow, but it will definitely take some time to go through. This is no silver bullet (they don’t exist), so if you were hoping for a get-rich-quick approach, this isn’t for you. You have to be willing to focus, go through the course material, and build your own affiliate program and experiment with what works for you. That process will take some dedication and time. How much time really depends on your level of experience, but some class members have made their first sale within a month. I’d say 2 to 3 months might be a good goal, doing a little each week.
How Much Does It Costs?
The cost for the whole thing is 47 USD. I won’t make any assumptions about this, now that you read the interview. I guess it’s obvious for everybody that this is a VERY good deal. So, if you really wanna know what’s this thing with affiliate marketing for beginners, go ahead and sign up here.
This price will only be valid for 48 hours starting August 10th, 8 AM, Pacific time. It’s 48 hours, folks, not one minute more.
One More Thing…
Just before hitting publish I got another email from Corbett, telling me that he was able to put up an enhanced version of this product. He called it the “Deluxe Package”. And he did this for a reason: this deluxe package contains 3 interviews with some of the most prominent rockstars in the blogging world nowadays. Namely: Karol Gajda, from Ridiculously Extraordinairy, Adam Baker from ManvsDebt.com and Everett Bogue from Far Beyond The Starts . Oh, and the names links are direct links to those guys twitter profiles, so I’d suggest to follow them regardless of your decision about the affiliate marketing course.
Well, that’s that. I followed my synchronicity and wrote this article. I’m feeling rather good about it, to be honest.
And let me tell you something: you reading this… well, this isn’t by hazard, don’t you think?
Are you going to follow?
I believe “learning is earning”. Corbett Barr seems to know all about affiliate marketing. Thanks for writing this.
Cheers.
Your subtlety will definitely win trust points from readers. For instance, Corbett makes that mention of the $1,000 day like it was no big deal. I am sure he has had bigger paydays since then, but he isn’t bragging about them. Instead he won in two ways. He convinces the reader that he is a knowledgeable expert who is capable of $1,000 paydays. He uses a figure that most people feel might be achievable someday. This makes people want to be more like him. This in turn makes people want to do what he does and use products that he uses or recommends.
Smart. Very smart.
I heard of affiliate marketing back in 2007 and I’ve been connected to it since then. Back then, affiliate marketing seemed just about clickbank. All the resources related to Affiliate marketing advised getting a click bank account, making blogs (that’s how I started my first blog), putting links and publishing hoplinks on the sidebar to earn affiliate commission.
What I’ve learned that Affiliate marketing turns profitable if you’ve a popular blog or some great SEO experience. Affiliate marketing is tough for people whose sole income depends on it.
There’s a wonderful book on making money over the internet using affiliate marketing I found on Scribe written by Ewan Chai called ‘How I made my first million dollar on the internet’. A must read for internet marketers.
Nice post anyway. Loved your useful insights on affiliate marketing.
Hi there, Looks like a great guide, Corbett Barr looks like someone who knows his facts. Thanks for sharing 🙂
This sounds like a great guide. I believe that too many people are using affiliate marketing unethically. You shouldn’t create webpages around products that you don’t believe in.
Hi Dragos,
I love the rigorous honesty I find here. Thanks for the info
Glad to hear that 🙂
Hey Dragos, thanks for the fantastic endorsement! I’m glad you liked the course. If anybody has any specific questions here, I’m happy to answer them. Cheers.
My pleasure, Corbett. i never endorse something I don’t like 🙂
Corbett’s course is really ass-kicking, and I’m proud to be a member of it.
I learn so much valuable stuff from it, even for blog building.
Back in the days I would have felt very uncomfortable about affiliate, but thanx to awesome peeps like him, I got curious and learned a lot during the process.
Do you use and build affiliate minisites beyond your blog, Dragos ?
Not really. I have a few websites, more like hobbies (you can see them in the footer). I may start to push them a little higher now. Will see.
I love that $1,000 a day story. People need to know that these stories are real but don’t happen that often.
With a little ingenuity, you may even find a way to earn $1000 an hour with AdSense.
Nonsense, right? Not at all…but it takes a lot of work, research, and creativity.
Nobody said it can be done daily. After all, going to the beach in Hawaii each day could get boring in time 😉
If you want to get good at anything you have to educate yourself. Thanks for teaming up with Corbett to offer this for your readers
Absolutely in sync with this one: you have to educate yourself 🙂