Affiliate Marketing: Why I didn’t make money…

Affiliate Marketing – it’s my favourite business model. But I didn’t make money when I first started. Learn how I turned this around.

You’ve heard this before…

The internet has made it easier than ever to run business from home.

There are numerous home based business models, from importing goods and distributing them globally online, to cryptocurrency and forex products, to affiliate marketing.

Over the years, I’ve used several of them profitably, and so they all work.

That being said, one of the things I’m often asked is this…

“which is my favourite, and which I would recommend to a brand new business owner”

Now, because I know all of these work, a large part of that answer is that it is based on your individual preference, IF (and that’s a capitalized “if”) you have a strong inclination towards any one of them.

For example, someone who has been a successful market trader his or her whole life my want to consider products related to those.

But, if you’re like me when I first started, and you do not have a particular expertise or passion that you want to spend your time creating a business around, then, in my opinion, affiliate marketing of digital products really is my personal favourite.

In fact it was affiliate marketing that helped me replace my corporate lawyer’s income in 6 months.

When I shared this with a student of mine, she told me that she’s tried affiliate marketing before and didn’t make money.

And the truth is that with any legitimate business, there will be people who succeed and people who are less than successful.  (I’m deliberately avoiding the word “fail”, as I believe that if you keep picking yourself up, you can’t help but eventually succeed.)

Affiliate marketing is a really simple business.  You recommend something, and if a person makes a purchase from your recommendation, you get paid a commission.

You do not need overheads like rent, staff, you do not need to hold stock, etc, which is why I think it’s so suitable for a brand new business owner.

Being that simple a model, a large part of whether or not one succeeds as an affiliate marketer, is understanding the numbers around it and making sure that they cost of making that recommendation doesn’t exceed the commission you get paid.

Allow me to illustrate.

When I first started affiliate marketing, I didn’t make money either.  I was affiliate marketing physical goods, in particular guitar and musicians’ accessories, for around $10 per sale.  I was paid a commission of 6%, or about 60 cents per sale.  If I had to make a recommendation to 10 people to make 1 sale, I would earn be earning only 6 cents for every recommendation I was making.

With those numbers, even if I was profitable, I would need to make a lot of sales to replace my income.

The trick is to sell high ticket products and recurring income products.  With both of these, it is much easier to cover your cost.

Imagine if I was paid $1000 per sale rather than 60 cents per sale.  Yes, people do pay for products that cost that much online, that they can afford to pay their affiliates $1000 per sale.  In fact, I represent products that pay higher commissions than that, but let’s just keep this discussion around $1000.  I could easily pay more for marketing, and make a really good return on selling such products.

Or if I was paid $20 per user per month.  You only need to make this sale once, and if you’ve picked a sticky enough product like accounting software, or customer relationship management software that businesses rarely change, you could get paid this monthly commission for a very long time!  Having just 1000 of such sales gets you a monthly income of $20,000!

That’s completely passive, from 1 product! 

The moment I made that switch, I started replacing my income. 

Now that you understand this, can you see how it is completely possible for me to have replaced my income in 6 months from starting?

* This is a genuine Business Tools & Training opportunity so no false promises.  This is not a get rich quick scheme, and so you need to put in the work to get the results.  Individual results will vary depending on the effort you put in. Please read the full Earnings Disclaimer at the bottom of this page.