If you want to learn about affiliate marketing, there’s no shortage of resources available online. The widespread availability of such information is one of the reasons that just affiliate marketing is so easy to get into.
One problem with the wealth of information available online however is that not everything that everyone says about affiliate marketing is true. And being able to differentiate between the truth and the lies can easily mean the difference between success and failure.
Should you find yourself just starting out on the road towards affiliate marketing riches, an excellent place to start is therefore learning who not to listen to.
Here are eight myths about affiliate marketing that you’d be wise to ignore.
You Need to be a “Tech Person”
Contrary to popular belief, tech skills aren’t really needed to work in affiliate marketing. With the advent of Wordpress, setting up a website has never been easier. And if you find the task even remotely challenging, there are literally thousands of tutorials available online to help you.
Marketing skills and the ability to write content that people actually want to read are significantly more important skills to have.
You’ll be Making Passive Income in No Time
Those new to affiliate marketing are generally advised to remove the term “passive income” from their vocabulary. In the long run, passive income can certainly be made but before you can reach the passive income stage, you often have to go through the working for free stage.
Websites that generate passive income for their owners generally take many months to create.
If You Build it They Will Come
If all you had to do to make money with affiliate marketing was throw up a website, everyone would be doing it. Unfortunately, just because you build a website, that doesn’t mean that anyone’s actually going to visit it.
Building a website is just one small part of making money in affiliate marketing. If you want to turn a profit, you also need to choose the right site to build and you need to actually drive traffic to it.
Affiliate Marketing is Difficult to Get Into
If you want to make money in affiliate marketing, there’s only one genuine requirement, you need to be willing to put in the work. You don’t need marketing experience, you don’t need to be a wiz with the computer and you certainly don’t need to invest a boatload of money.
Provided you’re patient and you’re not looking for a get rich quick scheme, there’s no reason why you cannot be successful.
You Must Choose the Most Popular/Profitable Niche
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, choosing the most popular or most profitable niche is actually the last thing that you should do. The higher the potential for profit, the more competition there is going to be. And if you’re new to the game, you’re simply not going to have the skill set to successfully compete.
Beginners to affiliate marketing should focus exclusively on low competition niches. You mightn’t get rich but you will make money.
You Must Promote Physical Products
Contrary to popular belief, affiliates make money promoting all kinds of products and services. Just because you can’t touch a product, that certainly does not mean that you cannot make some serious money promoting it.
Many affiliates make money exclusively from virtual products such as e-books and software. Others make money promoting services such as web hosting and web design. Don’t limit yourself to the physical realm.
Once You Make a Popular Site, It Will Last Forever
The days of writing content, building backlinks, ranking in Google and then forgetting all about your site are long gone. And anyone that tells you otherwise will be eating their hat within a year or two.
Each year Google is getting better and better at finding sites that have been forgotten and throwing them to the back of the search results. A popular, profitable affiliate site can stay popular and profitable forever but only if you keep working on it.
You Can’t Make Money Promoting X
Finally, most people greatly underestimate just how many different types of products you can get paid to promote. As a general rule of thumb, if it’s for sale, you can make money promoting it.
Many affiliate marketers don’t promote their favorite products because they don’t think that there’s enough money to be made. This is a serious mistake to make. If you promote what you’re passionate about, you’re not only going to enjoy your job a lot more, you’re significantly more likely to be successful.
Nothing sells quite like passion.
Image Credit: eschipul
14 comments
Again a great post all these points are really helpful and clear all myths about marketing. Thanks alot..!!
@Rahul: Thanks for taking time out to stopping by and for your comment. I am glad my post is helpful for you.
“You’ll be Making Passive Income in No Time”, … I think this is a little mis-leading. It won’t be “in no time”, but it will take a few months to actually see results. A lot of hard work is involved.
Yes, it will take a few months..its not a get quick rich scheme 🙂
You Need to be a “Tech Person”without knowledge nothing is fully secured so a tech people can easily handle the problems or curves of the track.and if he doesn’t get any solution then he simply find out the required answer from online.
Just like any other business, you need to know different aspects of running your online business..tech being one of them, you don’t have to know how to code but conceptually you need to be tech savvy, you can hire a developer to code the site
As you said, analyze the niche that is suitable to you, research on that niche and start promoting it naturally. Don’t over do things which might get you on the negative side.
Hi Tom,
Those who have created myths are those who sell software, systems, e-books etc. that promise how to make money fast on the internet only for you to buy their junk products.
//Lennart
During my Starting stage I used to believe in all the above points but once you enter into any Field with your full heart and desire. No one can stop you from being successful
most of the newbies are deceived by the term “You’ll be Making Passive Income in No Time” it will take time to get money and experience as well, nice info thanks for sharing it with us…
Affiliate marketing can be an incredibly lucrative and profitable work from home business. But don’t be fooled by the hype of certain myths and become a successful affiliate marketer today because it takes time, effort and even right attitude to get good results.
Affiliate marketing is an awesome way to get profit or income in easy and short time but it is hard as to get success in it…
thanks for the awesome tips about affiliates.
Affiliate marketing is considered as a good online business. Though, it really takes time, hard work and needs an effective strategy for you to make sales or be successful in this kind of business.
Thus, I appreciate your useful tips here about affiliate marketing.
Other common myths i heard about affiliate marketing is that is secure method of earning. As per people once you start generating income from affiliate you continuously will earn that income but that is not true like other earning method this method also offer you income till you work on this