In this time of a down economy, who couldn’t do with another income stream? Those of who’ve been online for a few weeks or longer, realize that not every offer of income potential is quite what it seems to be.

James Nardell and his team at Shopster have been writing a series on myths bloggers have about affiliate marketing. This is the second in that series to help us all avoid some potholes on the information highway. (Does anyone still call it that?)

Myth 2: It’s Best to Start Affiliate Marketing with a Crash Course
A Guest Post by Raymond Lau

Is a crash course from a leading affiliate the best way to ramp up fast on affiliate marketing techniques?

Sort of. When looking for a crash course in affiliate marketing, the key words are “buyer beware”. While it is entirely possible to learn good fundamentals from a beginner’s course, there are many resources out there that are either misleading, out of date, or entirely loony.

A misleading technique is one that worked for someone, once, under circumstances they either cannot reproduce or cannot adequately expand. Avoiding this is as simple as doing your homework: look back at the history of the technique itself, and who is presenting it. The best business is built upon a stable foundation that can adapt to changes in the market. Learning the processes and habits of a fluke will only lead to troubles down the road.

An out-of-date technique is just as useless to you when starting out. Changes in affiliate marketing happen all the time, and as a beginner you simply cannot afford to start your business without a step ahead of the competition. Why even bother entering the race in the middle of the pack, where business winds down to the lowest bidder? Affiliate marketing is about innovation.

Of course, among the throngs of dead ends there are some shining examples of solid, easily-accessible courses from people who know what they’re doing. They’re not that hard to find (hah, they’d better not be!) and it takes virtually no time to get started with their guides.

Some are free, like the “Affiliate Masters” guide by Ken Evoy (http://aff-masters.sitesell.com/AffMasters.pdf) which thoroughly covers the potential beginning of your affiliate marketing life and provides a wealth of links to other solid resources.

Others, such as the Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook by James Martell, or Rosalind Gardner’s How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online, require an up-front investment but come with backup support and counseling by the authors themselves, allowing for a much more personal experience that may more thoroughly ingrain the fundamentals.

Whether you go for the free route or decide to pay for the information, there are three simple questions to ensure that what you’re learning will help you and your business:

1. Does it suit you? Look into the history of who is teaching and what they are saying. Make a judgment on whether or not what they’re teaching can be adapted to the markets you want to enter.

2. Is it stale? It’s one thing to learn a stable set of basics, and another entirely to clog your brain with dated information that has been reworked and improved upon since it first came out. Research the techniques offered to confirm they’re still relevant to today’s market.

3. What do you expect? Just because the course you’re taking promises to teach you the solid how-tos of affiliate marketing, don’t go in thinking you’ll get rich quick. By now you should know that “instant profit” is only made by people taking advantage of others who are looking for it.

–Resource box–
Raymond Lau is a marketing analyst for Shopster.com — a company that provides Web sellers with a dropship product source and e-Commerce storefront tools to build their online business. Shopster gives retailers and affiliates access to over 1 million products they can sell on auction sites or their own storefront. You can reach him at rlau@shopster.com.
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Thanks, James and Raymond!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Recently, I got to know James Nardell of Shopster. We spent quite some time discussing his business and how it works. It’s an interesting model, but I have no tangible products to sell. However, James and his team are a wealth of information about work with affiliates. So I asked if his team would write a series of blog posts on myths and misconceptions bloggers have about affiliate marketing and how it works. This is the first in that series.

Myth 1: Affiliate Marketing Is Easy
A Guest Post by Raymond Lau

First off, no business is easy. If it were easy and you could make good money doing it, everyone would be doing it. Any successful business requires two things: hard work and risk.

In the early days of search marketing, affiliate marketing was a relatively easy and low cost technique for generating revenue. It was cheaper to buy traffic and easier to optimize rankings in Google. There were fewer rules to follow and Google wasn’t in competition with affiliates. Advertisers weren’t adopting search marketing tactics whereas affiliates were giving it a whirl.

“Affiliate marketing has evolved and it’s difficult for newcomers to jump in without any capital and start making money,” says Chris Finken of OrangeSoda — a successful affiliate and search marketing company.

Times have changed for the affiliate marketer, but search engines are still the best way for people to find what they’re looking for online. For the affiliate, traffic-generation techniques have been focusing blogging. “Blogs remain a popular tool for affiliate marketing ‘on the cheap’ “, Finken says. Still, he warns about no- or low-cost Web publishing tools.

Affiliate marketers can’t just set up junk blogs, plug them with poorly written (or completely spammy) content and expect to start generating leads. Think about it¦ If that’s all that was required, no one would hire affiliate marketers. Companies could easily do that themselves.

Blogs are spider food. They are constantly updated with targeted content. They are exactly what search engines are looking for. If affiliate marketers spend the time writing decent blog posts, optimizing them for keywords, focusing on some SEO tactics, they can generate visitor traffic.

To make money, prospective affiliate marketers have to consider four things:

1. Proper perspective. Affiliate marketing as a side gig or hobby is increasingly difficult due to time and cash commitment needed to attract and retain shoppers that are referred to marketers.

2. Money. You need hard dollars to invest in site design, SEO, and paid search advertisements. Your site won’t sell itself.

3. Competitive advantage. You need to compete with HUGE sites like www.fatwallet.com (multiple value propositions to their members) and www.revtrax.com (taking affiliate marketing directly to customers who shop in stores — allowing marketers to track and reward the affiliate for store-based purchases). What do you offer?

4. A marketer’s temperament. You have to be willing to try stuff and fail. For everything that works, there’s going to be way more that doesn’t. You have to be up on the current techniques, be aware of upcoming strategies, and have a firm understanding of your competition.

The bottom line:
Marketers want affiliates to innovate into new distribution points that they don’t know about or cannot access. That can take time, money, and hard work.

–Resource box–
Raymond Lau is a marketing analyst for Shopster.com — a company that provides Web sellers with a dropship product source and e-Commerce storefront tools to build their online business. Shopster gives retailers and affiliates access to over 1 million products they can sell on auction sites or their own storefront. You can reach him at rlau@shopster.com.
_______________

Thanks, James and Raymond!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!