Getting a start in afffiliate marketing can sometimes feel like you've been tossed onto the world's largest treadmill. The more you learn, the more work there is to do - and every new technique you learn usually results in more work, not less. Most affiliate marketing courses - even the fancy $500 dollar ones - offer the same advice over and over again:
- Make a really fancy looking website
- Write a boatload of content every day for a couple of months
- Build boatloads of backlinks
The toughest part of struggling as an affiliate isn't hearing your family tell you to get "a real job". It's not even spending hours cramping your hands making tedious articles and seeing nothing in your Paypal or Amazon account. It's the hopelessness - knowing that even though you've heard enough about affiliate marketing to get a diploma in the stuff, it's still not helping you make a dollar! That's the real reason why so many people get desperate and fall for fly by night schemes and overhyped, worthless nonsense.
But what if there was a smarter path towards passive income? =
First of all, I've got good news - if you've been sticking with your marketing efforts long enough to have these kinds of struggles, you've absolutely got the right stuff to make it as a professional affiliate. Even better, I have a simple, stress-free solution that will pump your brain with the "hidden in plain sight" secrets that separate the serious affiliates from the losers.
I learned these techniques because I HAD to.
Like you, I spent a lot of time learning about affiliate marketing, and each new course intoxicated me with the prospect of success. I'd spend hundreds of dollars on expensive courses and clubs and insider secrets - hell, sometimes I'd treat myself to expensive restaurants just to congratulate myself for being smart enough to find these methods (promising to pay myself back when the money rolled in).
It never quite worked out.
Maybe the Cheetos and Mountain Dew crowd had time to spend fourty hours a week pasting in backlinks, but I had a full time job, a family, and this little thing called a "social life". It's not that I was lazy or unmotivated - but I didn't have mountains of time to spend, and I certainly didn't have it to waste.
I wasn't giving a lot of thought to whether my own lifestyle fit these programs. But I always wondered, whether it was at home or at the call center where I worked, why I was doing such a terrible job at this passive income thing.
My boss was having a great time making passive income, though. He was what we called a "seagull manager". He'd fly out of his office in the back every few hours, dump all over whatever we were doing, and then fly away again. In the middle of one of his twenty point tirades, I finally got fed up asked him what he was contributing to our sales goals.
He looked me in the eye and said, "My job is to know what you're supposed to be doing."
Well, that shut me up pretty quick.
That night, I took all those files on my desktop, "Insta Clickbank Zillionaire" this and "Commission Crucifier" that, and I dumped them in the Recycle Bin. All those 183 page PDF's and buggy "Three Click" Wordpress plugins weren't a tenth as valuable as an offhand comment from my boss.
Think about it - how many of those high level super-affiliates do you think are actually sitting in front of the computer all day writing articles to distribute to their Web 2.0 sites? Or seeking out blogs on vaccuum cleaners to post comments on so they can get a PR2 backlink?
Managers work less than grunts. And owners work even less than managers. If I wanted to get off the bottom rung, I needed a team.
My plan wasn't fully formed - and I had a lot of the same worries that you might have starting a project like this:
- I wasn't sure whether I could afford to pulll it off.
- I wasn't sure where to get started, or how to ensure quality work.
- I didn't want to wait days for work that didn't get done.
- I didn't want to hire out for a job some other guy did with a push of a button.
- I didn't want crappy work that was so badly done I had to spend hours making it worthwhile!
But I was more than ready to try something different. Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months turned to a brand new perspective on affiliate income. Something I dreaded became really, really easily once I invested in the right facets of my business.
Don't buy into the delusion that "slogging" is a mandatory part of getting a business off the ground. The fact is that no matter what your resources are, you can work smarter and earn more money in a shorter amount of time. Outsourcing works like crazy, and it's irresponsible to go it alone.
