Welcome to another episode of My Unfair Advantage. Omar Martin here. I am going to talk about Affiliate Marketing Do’s and Don’ts. My wife Melinda Martin is also in the house but she is on the down-low. What we’re going to talk about today is just some things that you should consider doing and some things that you really shouldn’t do when you’re promoting products. In order to be an affiliate, all you need is a following and an affiliate link for a product. What I mean by a following is really an audience, that’s what I should have said, you need an audience to promote the product to. I think because that concept is very simple to understand, a lot of people jump into the internet marketing space and decide they’re going to be an affiliate first because it sounds so easy. The reality is that it can be really overwhelming for beginners.
I created this do and don’t presentation from a blog post that I saw online which covered some pretty decent things to consider. It’s very simple, it’s very top-level stuff. It’s not detailed into like how to cloak links. This is just very basic stuff for you to consider when you’re promoting a product. Here’s what’s important: don’t dismiss this. If you’ve been doing affiliate marketing and not getting the results you want to get or you’re looking to get into affiliate marketing, don’t dismiss this stuff as trivial. For example, make sure you conduct some research. Don’t just say like, “Ah yeah, whatever Omar.” No. You should really look into what it is that you’re going to be promoting.
Creating a website to promote a product, you can set that up in minutes. There’s so many different page creators now. You can have an affiliate page promoting something up in a matter of just a few minutes or an hour max. That’s a beautiful looking page with the technology that’s available to you now. That doesn’t mean that you should jump right into doing it blindly without any planning or anything like that. Same thing can be said about starting a business. It’s easier than it’s ever been but you shouldn’t just jump in head first without actually creating a business plan.What should you conduct your research on? Find out what it is you want to focus on, what kind of audience it is that you want to have, how can you reach those people to actually satisfy a need that they have? Think about how you’re going to want to promote to them, how are you going to make your link visible to these people in a way that they’re not going to feel overwhelmed, overburnt, that they’re not going to be all creeped out by you putting a link in their face.
When you’re in the mindset of making money, to you, you’re looking at social media and you’re looking at these places as a source of traffic. You just want to get your link in front of all these eyeballs in hopes that somebody will click it and that somebody will buy it and that you’ll make money. That’s how you’re thinking of these places. But those prospects, those people that you’re considering prospects, they’re not thinking of those gathering places that way. They’re thinking of it as a place to get together, a place to socialize, a place to post pictures, a place to talk about hobbies and common interests. Then all of a sudden somebody rushes and jumps into the place and starts posting links to promote stuff. They get creeped out by it. They really don’t want to interact with you. They definitely don’t want to click on your stuff if they don’t know you.
Just because you’ve set up an affiliate site and you’ve got your products selected, and all of that doesn’t mean that money is just going to start pouring in. You’ve got to have to do some research, find out where that audience is, what product it is you want to promote to them. Then you’re going to have to infiltrate that audience, become part of that audience, learn what their needs are, find out who’s spending money in that audience, and what kind of product, price range you should consider. Doing research is definitely something that you should do.
Here’s something you shouldn’t do. Don’t rush into this. You need to do some planning. I think that I’ve talked about this so many times in the past where I’ve said, “Look. If you’re in a position where you need money fast, then starting a business is not the thing that you should be considering doing right now.” Starting any kind of venture where you’re trying to make money, it requires an investment of time, of effort, of energy, it requires some strategies, some planning. 
If you’re trying to go into that venture out of fear, you’re going to make poor decisions. When you’re broke, when you have no money, and when you’re starving and your cars are about to get repoed, you’re way too distracted. You’re trying to make business decisions from a position of fear. That’s the worst position to be in when you’re trying to plan out a strategy because you’re going to rush things, you’re going to skip over important lessons, and then you’re going to make the wrong decisions because you’re in such a hurry to make money fast. That’s not the way that it works, at least not if it’s going to be a legitimate business.
If you’re that strapped that you’re just like, “I need money by Friday, Omar or else I’m going to lose my house.” The last thing you should be doing is starting to learn how to build a website. You should be out there trying to get a loan or trying to get a second job or a part-time or get a payday advance or something in order to get yourself out of the jam that you’re in but starting a business? That’s not the position to be in to start a business. Unfortunately, this common sense kind of thing, it doesn’t ring true to people that are turning to the internet to make money. Don’t be in a rush.
I can’t stress this enough. Affiliate marketing is not a way to get rich quick. People envision making hundreds of thousands of dollars in their first month or two. That’s just not realistic. It can actually take months before you start seeing any money start to trickle in, depending on the tactics that you’re using. Some things are faster if you use some strategy. You find a good audience, find the right product, infiltrate that audience, and put it in front of them in a way that they’re not going to freak out and be repelling you, well then, yeah, you might start seeing some money come in.
There’s no version of this where you’re going to start making money without putting effort, without putting work, and without having some sort of an investment. If you’re coming from 0 knowledge, if you’re just coming from no knowledge of how to do internet marketing or affiliate marketing or create ads or do anything, you’re going to have to first go through that training phase, you’re going to have to invest time and money into learning how to do it. Then you’re going to have to go through the learning curve. Once you know what to do, you’ve got to stumble and fall and get it wrong. Nobody learns how to ride the bike perfectly and do stunts on the first time they get on. Nobody hits home runs right the first time up at bat and everything is always home run. No. You’re going to have some strikeouts, you’re going to fall, you’re going to scrape your knees.
First you got to learn the process then you got to go through that learning curve once you know what you got to do, and then eventually you’re going to get a system together and you’re going to start making some money. You can’t rush this whole thing. There’s definitely nothing wrong with putting in 110% effort especially if you’re a beginner in affiliate marketing and you want to work hard. But understand that your income won’t exactly match up with the amount of effort that you’re putting in. This is really important. You’re going to be putting a lot more work in than money you’re getting back.
With affiliate marketing even though you may think, “That’s the fastest thing to do. I don’t want to get into product creation because it’s going to take me too long. I don’t know how to make a product, I don’t know how to do a product launch, I don’t have affiliates.” You create all these reasons for yourself why you can’t do that. What you’re going to do is turn to affiliate marketing and think that you can rush it there. You can’t. You’re going to end up putting a whole bunch of time and effort, and then you’re going to see that the money’s only going to trickle in if you get any money at all from your initial efforts.
If you’ve still got that “time for money” mentality that you’ve been trained with all your life because the way that you’re brought up is you’re taught to be worth a certain amount of dollars per hour. “How much does that job pay per hour? How many hours do I have to work at that job? How much do I get paid for those hours?” Your whole life has been about exchanging time for money on an hourly wage. This is different. This is your own business. The odds are not even, the ratio is not even. The amount of work that you put in in the beginning is a lot greater because you’re learning the process and you’re stumbling and you’re falling. But then eventually the results that you get are going to be much, much bigger than any kind of job that you could have because you could control the amount of money that you make. Don’t rush the process.
Here’s something that you should be doing: be honest with your content. Promoting affiliate links isn’t just about raving about how awesome the product is that you’re sharing. This comes off as disingenuous. What consumers really want is to read honest reviews, get truthful information about things, and they want value. Before they click the purchase pun, you’re going to want to provide value to people. You don’t just want to just browbeat them with sales pitch, sales pitch, sales pitch. “This is awesome, this is amazing, get this,” and mislead people or try to trick them into buying something that they don’t want or need right now. 
Instead of just saying how great something is or how much you love this certain product or service, talk about it as if you’re talking to your best friend. What did you like? What didn’t you like? What felt like it can be improved? When did you use it? How did you use it? What was the reactions you’ve got? What’s the good? What’s the bad? If you’re doing this sincerely in front of people that have a need for this type of tool, they’re going to appreciate this, they’re going to come off much more genuine. Then if you’re only taking the good, hiding the bad, and using a whole bunch of persuasion tactics to try to trick somebody into buying something that they probably can’t afford or don’t even need, what you’re going to end up with that is even though you might be initially happy by the sales that you made, you’re going to be regretful later when people start refunding and when people start charging back, and when the money starts coming out of your account because you didn’t sell people the right way. You don’t want to be that person.
Here’s a don’t thing. Don’t only think that you have to share popular products. Obviously, there’s some products and services that you won’t be able to escape mentioning in certain fields. If you’re in internet marketing, if that’s your main niche, you’re going to be talking about traffic products, you’re going to be talking about list building products, you’re definitely going to be talking about video products. God knows there’s a new video product launching every single week in the internet marketing space. But it’s important for you to understand that it’s not just those big, booming product launches that are the ones that are going to make you all the money.
In many cases, you’ll be more profitable promoting the smaller products, the products that didn’t have the big pageantry and a big launch and that aren’t all hyped up. Instead, if you’re promoting products that are a really good fit for your audience, you’re going to be much, much better. Anybody can actually hop on Google and pick a few popular items to promote. But if you’re actually sharing something that a few people have heard about but is actually very, very tailored to their needs, you can very well make much more money selling an unknown product that isn’t currently in a launch than some big launch that everybody else is promoting, that everybody else is inundated.
That brings us to another point. It also gives you less competition. If you’re in a launch, you’re competing especially in the beginning. You’re competing with everybody else that’s promoting that product. If you’re brand new, you might not have big bonuses to give away and things like that. You might find yourself only making one sale or two sales after struggling for a whole week to promote a product because it was so saturated, there were so many people promoting that thing. However, you could’ve–during that same time–gone in a different direction, promoted something that was maybe more affordable, that was maybe more tailored to your specific audience, and ended up making five or six or seven sales of something completely different, that isn’t a big, noisy launch. You could’ve literally broken through all the noise and stood out by doing something different. Don’t just think that you have to share popular products.
Do choose your programs wisely. Don’t just go and say, “Okay nobody’s promoting this one, let’s go and promote this one.” There might be a reason why people aren’t promoting it. I talk all the time about finding a niche, understanding your audience–that’s important. But if you fail to actually choose your programs carefully, you’re going to be in a complete loss when it comes to apply for networks.
When it comes time to figure out what you’re going to market and when it comes time to make that connection with your audience, if all you’ve been doing is picking the ones that appear to sell well and that appear to be the most profitable ones, if you haven’t looked into it, if you haven’t been careful, if you haven’t looked at the metrics, that’s really where I’m getting at here. You want to look at how the program is converting and you want to know how much money it makes. You know what’s another thing to really look at? What’s the refund rate? How happy have people been with this product in the past? Because you know what? Sometimes during a product launch, a product is doing amazing, it’s converting so well. That’s because the sales page is making some amazing promise but the membership site, the product itself isn’t delivering on it. Even though it’s selling really well during that launch week, the refunds are starting to come in.
I’ll let you know a little trick that I learned that a lot of people do out there. They don’t issue the refunds right away. That way, during launch week it looks like nobody’s refunding. What happens is they have all these refund requests sitting in their help desk and they just haven’t answered those tickets and they haven’t issued those refunds because they don’t want their refund number going up on there and hurting their statistics. You want to choose products that are going to fit your audience, products that are going to be as custom-tailored to your audience as possible, as well as products that have good sales history that also have low refunds and vendors that have good reviews.
I’ve been on the tailend of this before where I promoted something and I didn’t look into it enough. I promoted it just because it was doing really well and everybody was saying, “Oh, this is great. Promote it. It’s making so much money.” Then after the launch is over, yeah, we made several thousand dollars promoting it but then you know what happened? The refunds started coming in. I didn’t know this vendor. This is the first time I’ve ever promoted that product for this vendor. You know what happened? The vendor disappeared, stopped answering refund requests. I had to pay people out of my own pocket just because I wanted to save face and because my relationship with my customers was much more important to me. You want to make sure that you choose your programs wisely.
With that comment, I’ve already mentioned this–don’t focus solely on sales. I know this sounds counterintuitive because you’re in this to make money. That’s the reason that you got into this. Of course you want to make money, I get that, you get that. It’s why you’re doing this. But no one in particular enjoys being sold. I say this all the time. People love to buy. If you disagree with that, well then I would have you take a look at the amount of credit, people that have terrible credit, people are in debt. People are in debt and people have terrible credit because they love to buy. We are a culture that loves to buy stuff. Buying is so easy now. You don’t have to get in your car and drive to a mall and try something on. You can buy it right from your computer, right from your phone.
People love to buy. But you know what? People hate feeling sold. It’s actually frustrating when you want to shop around and someone continues to push products on you. It’s just overbearing. Even though it’s tempting for you to just promote, promote, promote, and put your link in front of people, you got to keep in mind that it’s content and value that’s going to keep your readers and your audience coming back to you. Don’t focus just on sale, trying to sell and trying to pitch them.
They don’t just come back to your site just because they want to buy from you. They come back because they want to scan your newsletter, they want to read social media pages. They’re coming for useful information. They’re not coming to be pitched. The cool thing about it is that you can pitch them in the process of giving them that useful information. What I always say is you should provide value first. Don’t hit somebody up and right away open up with the sales page. No. Look to see how you can help people. 
This is why like I started saying in the beginning of this presentation, when you’re marketing from a position of fear, when you’re trying to make money from a position of fear where, “My God, my car is going to get repossessed if I don’t make $500 this week,” you’re going to be so quick to push that link, so quick to push that sale that you’re going to come off as overbearing. You’re going to make the wrong decisions. You’re going to hurt your reputation, you’re going to hurt your business, and then you’re going to say, “This affiliate marketing shit don’t work.” No. It’s not that affiliate marketing doesn’t work, it’s that you’re not working it properly because you’re just trying to push the sale, you’re being all about the sale instead of being about the value.
When somebody has a problem online, you should be the person that provides the solution, you should be the person that provides the education, you should be the person that they want to continue turning to when they need help with something because then that’s how you build trust. That’s how you get people to like you and trust you. Once you’ve got an audience that likes you and trusts you, now you can put products in front of them and links for them to buy and they’ll thank you for it.
This is how you’re going to do it; if you share things that are helpful, if you give them how-to guides, insider tips–these are the kind of things that are going to help you build the trust and relationship with people. This is how you’re going to get more followers, this is how you’re going to be branded as a person of value within your niche, and this is how you’re going to have people actually asking you for products, recommendations. That’s the way that you’re going to become a very good affiliate. It doesn’t happen overnight. Like I said, you’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to put in a lot more work in the beginning. The reward is going to come later on. But I guarantee you that if you keep these fundamentals in mind, regardless of whether you’ve been doing this for 15 minutes or you’ve been doing this for 5 years.
Maybe what you need is a back to basics refresher. Jump on social media, jump on one of the groups tomorrow, and make yourself a promise to just post valuable information for a week. Every single day post two or three valuable tips in some group. You’ll see that by the end of the week you’re getting likes, you’re getting engagements, people are asking you more questions. You’re going to see that you’re going to become a person of value. That’s the kind of relationships that you’re going to want to build.
With time, a group of 5 or 6 or 7 followers turns into 20, 30, 40, 50, 100. Over a year, you got 2000 or 3000 people that really enjoy your post because you’re posting such valuable information, you’re sharing such insightful things. They’re on your newsletter, they’re subscribed to your list, and they’re buying things that you recommend simply because you’ve proven to be someone that cares. Remember that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this presentation about do’s and don’ts in affiliate marketing. I look forward to seeing you in the next My Unfair Advantage webinar. Take care.