Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
The trouble with affiliate marketing scams is that they make it difficult for the genuine opportunities to be heard above the noise. After all, some of the review sites seen around the internet these days are nothing more than links to merchant sites and the reviewer has neither used nor tried the products he or she is recommending.
I mention this today because a good friend of mine has just contacted me from London and asked if there is a way to tell the real thing from the scams, no matter what the market or product may be?
There are some basic rules to identify affiliate marketing scams and some of these are pretty obvious when you think about it.
If it seems too good to be true, it usually is!
Time and time again you will see claims for ridiculously high amounts of earnings and lifestyle. Believe it or not that bit is actually true, many affiliate marketers are making incredible amounts of money, people like Greg Davis and Ben Moskel who recently talked at the System Intensive in London.
No, the scam is they imply it’s easy and you can do it! Follow their easy step by step process, press the magic button and voila, success!
What they have failed to tell you is that these top people have been in the business for years learning their trade and eventually started making money. The big money after many years of hard work.
The only people getting rich on these promises are the people selling you the miracle push button. Perhaps to call them an affiliate marketing scam is a bit harsh because their products probably have some real value, just not the value you expected after the promises.
The real affiliate marketing scam is that what they should have been telling you is that you make a lot of money being an affiliate marketer on the internet but in order to do so you will have to learn some skills or purchase those skills from somewhere such as www.Elance.com and all of this will take time.
You will need to learn skills such as those I have listed below and many of the skills you need to develop can be obtained free. As you begin to earn some money online you can begin to invest some real money in yourself and your online business. The skills do not need to be immediate but over a period of time if you work on these skills you too can earn the real money.
The skills you may need to acquire are:
Pay Per Click (PPC) – Perry Marshall is one of the masters of Google Adwords and has been online since the beginning. A genuine guy with one of the world’s biggest followings. He will teach you how to buy the right traffic for your website.
Search Engine Optimization – James Martell has been online since the start and even uploaded pages using FrontPage! He has developed his skills and experience over many years and is now a master at obtaining high ranking optimized pages for you website.
Marketing – Glenn Livingston is recognized as marketing guru who to my knowledge has never failed when delving into a market because he knows how to find out what it is the market wants to buy! A very clever guy with some great free stuff.
Affiliate Marketing – Again James Martell who has been an affiliate marketer since the beginning and is a guest speaker at many of the conferences due to his world wide experience as an affiliate and his online training which has launched many an online business.
If you take on board these professionals and learn your craft from them you will avoid any affiliate marketing scams and build your business on solid ground.
