Training

I want to share with you, exactly what I have learned along my path to working at home in Affiliate Marketing. But, first, a bit of background info.

When I went to sleep on November 21, 2008, I had never heard of the term; Internet Marketer. In fact, despite my 15 years (at the time) of experience with PCs, programming, building web pages, and network administration and set-up, as I went to bed that night, it had only been a week since the very first time I had ever even been on the Internet. I know that sounds hard to believe, but due to personal reasons, it was my first opportunity to do so.

Relatively speaking, even though I had zero online experience, I knew quite a bit about the Internet. I had been reading and dreaming about it for years. I had just never had the opportunity to actually access it. I was 53 years old at the time, and I was like a kid in a candy store. Of course, I had heard of people making money online, but I had absolutely no clue, as to how they went about doing it. Thinking of the possibility of making a living from the comfort of my own home, made it very difficult to get any sleep on the night of my “discovery”.

Affiliate Marketing is a proverbial double-edged sword. On the one hand, its extremely low start-up costs and, because of the Internet, its potential to reach millions globally, it is a very viable business model. You can start your own home business in Affiliate Marketing on a shoestring budget. There are literally millions of products you can sell to the world that won’t cost you a penny. Choosing a product to promote is as easy as window shopping in a huge mall, just walk along until something catches your eye, sign up to the program, and start your marketing.

On the other hand, the simplicity is deceiving. If it is so simple, so easy, why is the failure rate so stupendously high? The statistics are notoriously hard to authenticate, but we have all seen claims of failure rates between 95-97%. Whether that statement pertains to home business, Internet Marketing, or Affiliate Marketing, is hard to ascertain. People spout statistics all day long without having the authority or expertise to do so. I just did it! The point is, we see the stats thrown out on a daily basis, and if you have struggled at making money from this “Simple” and “Easy” business model after weeks, and months, and even years of effort, you know that there is validity in the stats somewhere.

A closer look below the surface of Affiliate Marketing, reveals that it is not “Simple” or “Easy”. When you start looking at all the aspects that an affiliate needs to be proficient with; seo, keyword research, list building, link building, article writing, article submission, traffic exchanges, email marketing, video marketing, social media and bookmarking, domain registration, hosting, ftp, graphics creation and optimization, web design, ad copy, outsourcing, forums, affiliate networks, PPC, CPA, blogging, analytics, viral marketing, HTML, PHP, CSS, Splash pages, Squeeze pages, Autoresponders, etc., etc. The list seems to go on and on and on.