Affiliate Marketing Gurus – Don’t Trust them
Posted on February 8, 2010 by Amit
I remember when I was starting out in affiliate marketing, I had a ton of questions, I didn’t know much about anything. I didn’t know what to promote, how to promote, what converts, what doesn’t. In fact being a newbie, I spent 3 months to build my first site, and until the site was live, I hadn’t for a moment thought about how to get traffic. I was under the impression, if you build – they will come, and they didn’t (big surprise). Once I realized my first two major mistakes – 1. Putting way too much effort to build an affiliate site instead of using a CMS, 2. Not having thought about traffic, I set out to educate myself.
A little search on the internet resulted a vast array of Affiliate Gurus. Some selling e-books, some telling where I can buy hosting/domains, some making me read a lot of their blog posts and still telling me nothing. I was more confused than before.
I believe my experience must be very typical with what most newbies face.
After having been in the field for some time and now having the ability to tell the real from the fake, here is my first advise to newcomers.
DO NOT TRUST THE GURUS
Why? They make millions, they even show you their bank accounts, affiliate commission checks and their shining new porches, so why not.
How Successful Affiliates Make Money
There are two types of affiliates. One type of affiliates promotes products, coupons and services from different vendors. The general public is their target customers, somebody looking to buy a PC, a baby sitting service, a digital camera. These affiliates never promote themselves as gurus. They are too involved in their affiliate marketing.
Then the 2nd kind of affiliates (These are your Affiliate Gurus) – who sell products and services to newbie affiliates. Their only target market is you, somebody trying to make some money online and not knowing how. Its a big market. Thousands of people start out every year to make some bucks from the internet and they need help.
And the Gurus pretend to offer help. Do you think they really want you to be successful so as to be their competitor. Do you think they will really give out their secrets for 40 bucks. In fact as you will see below they don’t have a secret. The secret is their ability to make you believe in them.
They want to sell you stuff. They want you to buy web hosting, domains, e-mail marketing tools (auto-responders). They want you to sign up with ppc, cpa, cpv networks. All through their affiliate links, of course. And last but not the least they want you to buy their e-books and software that they have developed after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars which will kick start your affiliate marketing career. It will find the niches, it’ll find the profitable high volume keywords, it will build your site, it will develop of a bunch of back-links, and it will deliver high volume traffic. All you have to do is buy the tool from them.
Get my point. Affiliate Gurus who are all too willing to teach you stuff is actually selling you stuff. Stay away from them. Don’t buy something that you don’t need. There is no magic bullet system, there is no e-book that will spill the secrets. Nothing will make you rich overnight.
There are affiliate forums like abestweb.com, where if you ask the right questions, you will get many answers from experienced affiliates, affiliate managers who have been making money for years and have nothing to sell you. All the advice is free. Take time to learn. Start small and scale up what works, scale down what doesn’t.
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