Noel Black
New Contributor
What's up, people.
Time to get serious. I spent the last week contemplating what I want to pursue, and I made a decision.
I'm writing this partly to organize my thoughts, but also to provide insight into my execution process for people that might want to go down the same route.
So, Here's The Plan:
I'm going into Affiliate Marketing, and more specifically: Paid Traffic Affiliate Marketing.
Why Paid Ads and not SEO?
Ultimatly for me, it's a matter of Control. I think SEO is great, but relying on SEO is equal to letting google have a firm grip around your fortune. There are probably people on here who can tell a stinging story about the pandas and penguins.
Paid Ads are greater (imo). One traffic network goes belly up? You can just choose another one of the 1000s available. You don't have to rely on FaceBook, Google or Microsoft.
Another dimension of Control that is great with paid ads is the daily budgets and bids you can set. You have complete control over your spending.
Landing Pages
Next up, a big piece to my puzzle. I believe direct linking to offers should never be done. That's equal to entering a cars dealership and getting the papers with the dotted line shoved right into your face the moment you set eyes on a car. Landing pages are your salesmen. And I want to get good at landing pages, that's the skill I'm going to learn.
I'm going to program my landing pages myself with HTML and CSS. This has several advantages:
- I'm not relying on anything but myself, no tool, no bloated wordpress that slows down pages, no nothing
- It will set me apart from other affiliate marketers and competition, also I can react faster
- I can maybe do some freelancing work, help some people with building HTML pages and maybe even get paid down the line to further finance my long term campaigns
Now the thing is, I don't know anything about programing, so I have to learn from scratch.
But there are AMAZING resources out there, like seriously amazing. I started a course on CodeAcademy and was already able to make two websites from scratch. (They look like they are from 2002 though, haha). It's actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be. You create something and see the results immediatly, very rewarding. (Still a long way to go though)
Affiliate Networks
Here is the next piece of the plan. Affiliate Networks are places where marketers can find offers to promote.
Now, the ideas is that the Commandment of Need still very much applies. Since I'm not creating my own product, but promote someone elses product I have to be very aware of how this offer provides relative value to people.
The plan is to go with networks that have a sign up process. This firstly acts as a barrier of entry (which is good) and secondly, I hope to have better chances of finding good products to promote on networks that are more strictly regulated.
Scale and Time
Now this is the great thing about anything online marketing related. Detachment and scaling are relativly easy to achieve. Once a campaign is working and gets going you can scale up the bids and then sit back. You could also hire a team of people to watch the campaign and bids later down the line, I suppose.
You can also invest in some tools (market/spy tools) to make the creation process of a sucessful campaign faster.
Some downsides
Here are the downsides to keep in mind:
- I'm not really building any assets (except for the occasional eMail list maybe)
- I don't believe affiliate marketing is something you can retire on, especially if you don't go the SEO route (but I think it's a great way to learn essential business skills)
- It's very much a grind, since products tend to come and go and campaigns can fall of quickly
Ask any questions you like. You can also be very critical with me, I like that. So if you think I'm missing something or if I'm being to naive, do tell me.
I think I plan on updating this everytime I achieve something of significance.
The next immidiate goals (aka. the small steps
- Choose one affiliate network and apply until accepted
- build an offer landing page for said network to have proof of competence
- get good enough at creating landing pages to be able to help people with projects
Next long term goal:
- Build one successful affiliate marketing campaign with paid ads
Keep going!
Time to get serious. I spent the last week contemplating what I want to pursue, and I made a decision.
I'm writing this partly to organize my thoughts, but also to provide insight into my execution process for people that might want to go down the same route.
So, Here's The Plan:
I'm going into Affiliate Marketing, and more specifically: Paid Traffic Affiliate Marketing.
Why Paid Ads and not SEO?
Ultimatly for me, it's a matter of Control. I think SEO is great, but relying on SEO is equal to letting google have a firm grip around your fortune. There are probably people on here who can tell a stinging story about the pandas and penguins.
Paid Ads are greater (imo). One traffic network goes belly up? You can just choose another one of the 1000s available. You don't have to rely on FaceBook, Google or Microsoft.
Another dimension of Control that is great with paid ads is the daily budgets and bids you can set. You have complete control over your spending.
Landing Pages
Next up, a big piece to my puzzle. I believe direct linking to offers should never be done. That's equal to entering a cars dealership and getting the papers with the dotted line shoved right into your face the moment you set eyes on a car. Landing pages are your salesmen. And I want to get good at landing pages, that's the skill I'm going to learn.
I'm going to program my landing pages myself with HTML and CSS. This has several advantages:
- I'm not relying on anything but myself, no tool, no bloated wordpress that slows down pages, no nothing
- It will set me apart from other affiliate marketers and competition, also I can react faster
- I can maybe do some freelancing work, help some people with building HTML pages and maybe even get paid down the line to further finance my long term campaigns
Now the thing is, I don't know anything about programing, so I have to learn from scratch.
But there are AMAZING resources out there, like seriously amazing. I started a course on CodeAcademy and was already able to make two websites from scratch. (They look like they are from 2002 though, haha). It's actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be. You create something and see the results immediatly, very rewarding. (Still a long way to go though)
Affiliate Networks
Here is the next piece of the plan. Affiliate Networks are places where marketers can find offers to promote.
Now, the ideas is that the Commandment of Need still very much applies. Since I'm not creating my own product, but promote someone elses product I have to be very aware of how this offer provides relative value to people.
The plan is to go with networks that have a sign up process. This firstly acts as a barrier of entry (which is good) and secondly, I hope to have better chances of finding good products to promote on networks that are more strictly regulated.
Scale and Time
Now this is the great thing about anything online marketing related. Detachment and scaling are relativly easy to achieve. Once a campaign is working and gets going you can scale up the bids and then sit back. You could also hire a team of people to watch the campaign and bids later down the line, I suppose.
You can also invest in some tools (market/spy tools) to make the creation process of a sucessful campaign faster.
Some downsides
Here are the downsides to keep in mind:
- I'm not really building any assets (except for the occasional eMail list maybe)
- I don't believe affiliate marketing is something you can retire on, especially if you don't go the SEO route (but I think it's a great way to learn essential business skills)
- It's very much a grind, since products tend to come and go and campaigns can fall of quickly
Ask any questions you like. You can also be very critical with me, I like that. So if you think I'm missing something or if I'm being to naive, do tell me.
I think I plan on updating this everytime I achieve something of significance.
The next immidiate goals (aka. the small steps
- Choose one affiliate network and apply until accepted
- build an offer landing page for said network to have proof of competence
- get good enough at creating landing pages to be able to help people with projects
Next long term goal:
- Build one successful affiliate marketing campaign with paid ads
Keep going!
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