Top Eight Myths About Affiliate Marketing

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