The Truth About Affiliate Marketing

The truth about affiliate marketing is that you're helping to build someone else's business, not your own. In many cases a person will come to your site, find out about a product from your site, click on your link-you hope- and then buy the product from another business. You get your commission, or not(he may not click, he may just go etc..) and then he becomes their customer who they get to have on their mailing list and get to resell to over and over again.
Affiliate marketing is great, for the merchant. He gets his link and name brand spread all over the web and much of it is free advertising for him until the point a sale is made through an affiliate link. I think he gets a really good bang for his buck.
Think about how this boosts the building of his business.
Now, there are things to look for in an affiliate program to make sure it's really going to do something for you if you work it and there some things to be aware of that are not widely known and I'll be going over that in a later post.
But my point here is don't simply be the other guy's salesman: Build your own business!
Most savvy affiliate marketers know how important it is to have their own website that is a place to go in it's own right, for the content that exists there and to make those website visitors his customers and to offer them something valuable in exchange for their email address so he can stay in contact with them and help them further.
I have a video on this site showing how to add a lead capture form to your site using Site Builder.
I have been using this on my websites. It was a good start as I hadn't even starting writing my newsletters until I got my first form submission. But I was sending all my 7 part newsletters by hand, having to keep up with who gets which one next and this was really eating my time.
Well I found a mailing list business which has an autoresponder (it sends out your newsletters at correct intervals to everyone signs up for them), that only costs $9.95 per month for small mailing lists. The opts-in form which you can see on the left up there was super easy. I've signed up with some other autoresponder free trials but I didn't time to mess with it. This was anything but time consuming. Anyway it's IContact, they have a free trial--no credit card to try it--so check it out.
You need customers to build your business, not just give business away after one quick trip through your website. You know you work to get that traffic.
Another thing I think is that selling other people's products is fine but make sure you start including some product or products of your own. I'll give you my thoughts and ideas on that in a later post. Read 4 Hour Workweek. I mean seriously read it, or listen to the audiobook in your car. He arranged all that free time because of his own product and delegating things wisely.