At the risk of making you feel like I’m forcing you to crack open the eggs you’ve been holding in your palms and guarding with your life, I’m going to approach this discussion with something that might not be too popular or go down too well. I’m going to tell you that you need to crack open those eggs, pop them onto a pan and then quickly prepare all the other ingredients which go into making an omelette.
After all, you need to break some egg shells if you do indeed want to make an omelette and that’s the mentality you need to go forth with if you want to make a success out of your affiliate marketing exploits.
You see it’s very easy to get into affiliate marketing – way too easy in fact. When things aren’t quite working out you can just as easily slip into your comfort zone and say that you’ll simply have to give it some time to gain some traction and perhaps start showing signs of working out for you. If you’re going to make it work you’ll have to get busy doing some of the uncomfortable things that are associated with affiliate marketing, or you’ll be just another statistic – you’ll be just another wannabe affiliate who is still getting their stuff together and then one day you wake up to find that you’ve spent so much money on trying to get the first sale and yet that first sale hasn’t even come yet.
It’s too easy to get into affiliate marketing for the mere reason that you can act like your foray into that world never even happened if things don’t quite work out. Who has any evidence that you ever identified as an affiliate?
So if you want to do affiliate marketing right you have to approach it like the serious business it is. First focus on a niche – pick your niche first and then somewhere along the line you can start integrating your affiliate links to products and services for sale which are related to your niche. This is an unpopular view because it’s not easy and takes a bit of time, but then again who exactly have the popular views and approaches on the matter helped actually make a success out of affiliate marketing?
I’ll tell you – they’ve helped those who are selling wannabe affiliates all the tools they supposedly need, some of which tools are very useful admittedly, but a huge chunk of how affiliate marketing works is geared towards the markets surrounding the core activity of affiliate marketing.
So pick your niche first and drill one inch wide only, focussing on drilling kilometres deep. In other words, create a specialist blog which zones in on the smallest of details in your niche and then in discussing solutions to problems, present your affiliate links as part of those solutions.
The aim must be for you to create a platform through which very useful information can be obtained, even if the reader didn’t intend on buying anything. Ironically that’s what it takes to succeed at affiliate marketing.