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3 Completely FREE Ways to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2020

Affiliate Marketing has become a buzz term of sorts on the internet in recent times.

More and more people are being exposed to it, with many shrugging it off as a scam or a fad, leaving few to actually try it out.

The problem starts when many of those who do try it out, are sold on it by some self-proclaimed mentor who promises them a quick & easy way to get rich.

They dive into it, make a few attempts, rack few (if any) sales and give up.

The thing is that affiliate marketing is not a quick & easy way to get rich. It’s a skill that you build over time. I do know a few people who have done it very quickly, this is because they invested a lot of money and effort into doing it.

And that’s the thing, it isn’t rocket science.

So if you do put in the work into acquiring and putting into practice those skills, you will be successful. There is no doubt about it, the only question is how long it will take.

One of the most awesome things about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need any initial investment to succeed. Like I said, any investment you make will shorten the time to get success. But no investment is necessary to start.

Well, if you don’t need to invest anything, how can you start? Where can you post your affiliate links for free?

I’ll share with you three ideas that are currently gaining popularity:

Twitter – or any other social media website, but Twitter is by far the easiest place to begin.

Twitter allows you to get your content out there and gain a following very quickly and with no ad spend necessary.

There is also a large (and still growing) community of affiliate marketers with varying degrees of experience, who offer advice and guidance.

Once you get into the community there is a vast array of products that already have an excellent reputation, in a way that making money promoting them is down to getting the sales letter right and promoting it to the right crowd.

The real hack that Twitter gives you though is getting traffic, which is by far the main pain point and biggest obstacle for beginner affiliates.

Once you start getting the followers, and join a couple of engagement groups, each tweet you make will easily reach hundreds and even thousands of people.

Even better, the traffic you get is “smart traffic”, because your followers and your followers’ followers are likely to be among the target crowd for the product, if you do it right.

For those reasons, Twitter is great for affiliate marketing.

If you want to learn everything you need to know about being an affiliate on Twitter, I highly recommend Twitter Cash Flow.
Blog – blogs are free to start, and while it can take time to build an audience, if you blog well and do it consistently it will happen.

The biggest pain point for most people with starting a blog is producing the content.

Most people underestimate their ability to produce content, and overestimate the level of expertise required to produce quality content consistently.

This second point is something that works to your advantage as soon as you start a blog – by producing the content consistently and getting better at it, you gain reputation as an expert.

And once you’ve started a social media account as an affiliate, you’re already producing content that you can use for your blog.

Take a tweet for instance. Twitter allows you 280 characters, so it’s likely that your tweet only contains the absolute crucial points, made in as few words as possible.

Copy a tweet into a text document and start expanding, just a little bit, on each point – you’ll soon have a blog post. And assuming you use the tweet crafting techniques provided in the Twitter Cash Flow ebook, your tweet turned blog post will also be a high quality post.

The same methods used to craft a good sales tweet are applicable to blogging, meaning one sales letter can be used for both media (although as mentioned, you’ll probably need to expand for your blog).

Anyone who has social media presence as an affiliate and doesn’t blog, is leaving money on the table. Simple as that.
YouTube – now I know, nobody likes making videos of themselves.

That’s why it’s great that a YouTube video doesn’t have to have a single shot of you and you don’t even have to use your own voice.

You can create a great YouTube video promoting a product without doing either of those. For instance, let’s take How to Be A Smart Affiliate, which teaches you (among other things) how to make people want to contact you and how to then sell to them.

What you could do is show in real time how you craft the tweet to get people to contact you, then how you engage with those leads. You can talk about your thought process, the options you weigh and how you decide, and how you learned all of these things from the ebook.

Or, let’s take Get Started, an ebook about flipping products that takes you step by step through the process of sourcing products. You could promote it by making a video of you going through the store (you don’t have to be in frame).

You could talk through exactly which aisles are the best to go through and show how you decide which products could be the winners.

That could be way more valuable than a blog post explaining how you do that.

And remember, technology allows you to do all of this without using your face or your voice, if you’re not inclined to use them on YouTube.

So there you have it. Three completely free ways to make affiliate marketing work in 2020.

It was a bit longer than my normal posts but I hope it provided you with some value – I’d love to get feedback if this is the sort of post you want, or if you prefer the normal format of question and short answer.

Remember, affiliate marketing does work, but it takes time, effort, consistency and patience. It also takes an approach through which you’re trying to help your audience, not push your products onto them.

Thank you for reading and hope that helps

Jon

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This post may contain affiliate links

How do I affiliate through email?

The key to doing this is to collect people’s email addresses.

And you could say that there are two approaches in this respect.

The first one is a “wide blanket” method. In essence you make it as easy as possible to join your list, and you add incentives to it.

For instance, you have an opt-in box on your website/ blog. Some people offer a free product to incentivise people to join their list. In this method you try to get as many people as possible onto your list.

You’re playing a numbers game whereby you then market to a lot of people, increasing the chances of conversion into sales.

The second approach is a “narrow blanket” approach. In this approach you only want the most passionate of subscribers, to ensure that when you market to them, you market to a crowd that’s ready to buy from you, thus increasing conversion rates.

In this approach you’d make your list exclusive (i.e. someone would need to justify to you why they deserve to be on your list), or even make it a paid list.

You can see the appeal of the second approach, as making it exclusive gives it a halo of speciality, like you’re getting something from this newsletter that you won’t get with other lists.

Obviously, this then means the quality of the content needs to be superb, and the products need to be extremely well vetted.

To get ideas on how to build your list you can visit this post by a guy whose email newsletters convert fantastically well.

Hope that helps.

Jon

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Why are most people unsuccessful?

Primarily, it’s a problem of mindset.

Most people tend to think of life as happening to them, they have little or no control over the world and their life.

The first thing you need to do to be successful is to own your life. Take responsibility for it, and understand that your current situation is a direct result of your past actions.

Most people are unable to do that. When you ask them why they are not successful, they will give you a list of external factors, portraying it as if they had no control over the direction their life has taken.

While no matter how adverse the background conditions are, you can always find people who overcame them and became successful.

Those people who became successful, are the ones who took ownership of their life, and made a conscious decision to change their situation.

Taking ownership of your life is a truly empowering position to take – it means that you can change your life at the stroke of a decision and some actions.

But most people are happy to be comfortable, “safe”, reactive and unsuccessful.

Be different!

Say “I am the direct result of my past actions, and I can change my situation with my future actions”.

Hope that helps

Jon.

Does affiliate marketing still work in 2020?

Does it ever!

It’s probably hotter than ever before, now that more and more people are seeking an additional income.

Affiliate marketing offers an irresistible package of very low (as low as zero) startup and operating costs and already existing profits.

In addition, you’re selling an existing product – presumably with proven results, and if you’re doing it right you can testify yourself to those results.

And once you get the commission – it’s 100% pure profit. No fulfilment costs.

More and more people have been awoken by the pandemic to the requirement of controlling the source of your income.

And many of these people view affiliate marketing as their gateway to earning online income.

It seems that the current preferred platform is Twitter, but any social media will do, including Quora.

So yeah, affiliate marketing is alive and kicking, and working for more people than ever before.

So come on, join the ride!

Hope that helps

Jon.

How can you learn affiliate marketing?

There are literally countless courses and ebooks – free as well as paid – that can teach you how to affiliate.

The basics will usually be the same:

You should affiliate for products you actually bought
Products that you have personally seen results from that you can share
The method and structure of the suggested sales letter will usually be similar.

Now, you may think that this diminishes from the value of a course if what it offers is basically the same as all the rest.

But first of all, this isn’t true.

While courses may be similar in the basic principles, the may differ dramatically in the details.

For instance, the way you would affiliate effectively on a certain platform, may not be the way you do it on a different platform.

Secondly, if the basic methods are the same, it’s only because they work.

And the great thing about affiliate marketing is that it isn’t nuclear physics. If you study the methods and apply them consistently, you’re going to succeed.

It’s just a matter of time.

Now, if you want to get started, the easiest way I’ve seen people do it is on Twitter. I’ve seen people make affiliate sales with under 100 followers.

I’ve seen people make sales with less than 50 followers.

It isn’t rocket science.

I never considered myself to be a salesman or a marketer, but methods I learned in this ebook landed me my first affiliate sale within days of purchasing it.

Without promoting it once. That’s how effective it is.

Hope that helps

Jon

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What works better for affiliates, focusing on one niche or doing products from various niches?

Focusing on a niche is always the best option.

This is because to be really successful as an affiliate, you need to have authority.

Think about it logically – if you’re just a guy recommending products,

And one week you promote a fitness related product,

And the next week you promote a stock market related product,

Why would anyone take your recommendation for it?

You wouldn’t know enough to offer an in-depth, valuable critique of the product.

In addition, if you’re jumping from one niche to another, you won’t be able to build a crowd.

Most people are interested in a specific niche.

So if you keep talking about different topics, they’ll lose interest – and you’ll lose them.

So find your niche

And in your niche, offer a unique take that will make your content distinctive.

Hope that helps

Jon

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How many affiliate marketers fail and how many succeed?

There are many affiliates who make relatively small amounts that put them in profit but might put into question the return on the time invested in it.

You see, affiliate marketing can take a lot of time and effort to get results. It can take a long time before you might see any results.

There are many affiliates who make large enough amounts to justify the time they invested.

And there are some who really cracked the code and can make a living off it.

The thing with affiliate marketing is you have to put in a lot of work upfront, with little to no results.

And for many people, that period is enough to get them to give up. They were sold that affiliate marketing is a get-rich-quick thing, that you just need to post your links where they’ll get traffic and watch the money pour in.

If you keep at it, learn what you did right and what needs improvement

And you invest in learning, you’ll make it eventually.

Can you stick to it?

Hope that helps

Jon

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What is one piece of advice you’d give someone to achieve financial independence?

Well first of all it depends what you mean by financial independence.

If you mean that you’re source of income is under your control, that’s very simple.

Start a business and there you go – your income is under your control!

If you mean that you’d never have to work again, I’d tell you that that’s a dangerous dream to have.

Because you’re resigning yourself to years of saving every dollar you can

To the extent that even if and when you get to financial independence – would you really be able to enjoy it?

Would you even know what it is you want after years of ignoring every craving that snuk its way into your head?

That’s why I would focus on the first, more broad interpretation.

You’re much more likely to enjoy both the journey and the destination.

Hope that helps

Jon

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What is the most fun part about affiliate marketing?

I love that it really does help people.

If you do affiliate marketing right and ethically, you’ll only be promoting products that you tried for yourself, have seen results from, and think others can benefit from as well.

You won’t oversell what the product can do for you, and you’ll market it to the right people.

If you do it right, you’ll be selling a valuable product to someone who’s interested in the value that the product provides.

And if you do that, your customer will be grateful that you sold to them.

I have been on both ends of this feeling (as the customer and as the seller) and it’s an amazing feeling.

It’s the best thing about affiliate marketing in my opinion.

That’s it, it’s a short one today – sorry for that. I’ve just got a big project going on that I’ll be able to share with you soon.

You’re going to want to be a part of it so make sure you’re subscribed to be notified on new posts.

Hope that helps

Jon

Did you like this post? Don’t forget to hit the Like and Subscribe buttons.

I’d also love to hear your feedback in the comments.

And if you want to get more content from me, check out my Twitter page @TheJonKahn

How do you make an online business successful?

I’d say there are three basic things that you must get right for an online business to be successful.

If you get these three and apply them, you’ll be successful – and the only questions then is how long it would take you to get there.

These three things are:

Expectations – you need to get your expectations clear.

Many people start an online business expecting immediate results.

They see people talking about their success stories, maybe they were “sold” on the concept by someone talking about how easy and quick it was to succeed.

But anyone who’s made any kind of money online would tell you that it’s neither fast nor easy.

You can see people making money in their first week – that does happen – but those people paid for that quickness with extremely hard work – so it definitely wasn’t easy.

When I started my dropshipping business, I only got sales from one out of my first ten or fifteen products. Each of them takes a lot of effort to list, but only very few will be “winners” that actually make you money.

So the first thing to understand is that it will be hard, and is likely to take time.

Consistency – this ties in very strongly to the first point.

Because you see, if you get that it’ll take a lot of time and effort to start making money online, you’re much more likely to keep going in the face of no or very little results.

I started this blog a few months ago, and for a long time I was writing pretty much to myself.

But I kept posting, aiming at a post every day, and eventually you get seen. For a while now I’ve had at least 1–2 new subscribers to the blog every day.

But for most people, if they don’t see the results quickly, they’ll lose interest.

Discipline – the third critical foundation to get right is the discipline.

Obviously in your online business you won’t have a boss.

When you’ll be tired, or want to watch another episode of that show on Netflix, or go out with friends – nobody will be there to hassle you or push you to work instead.

And it’s those little things that set the winners apart from those who eventually give up.

I schedule my tweets on my business Twitter account, because it keeps my following engaged while I’m at my 9–5 and when I need to work on my business.

I’ve had an instance not long ago when I realised, just as I was getting into bed, that I forgot to schedule my tweets for the next day.

It really wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had just gone to sleep and set the tweets up in the morning.

But it’s a matter of principle, of teaching your mind not to let yourself go, turning it into your support rather than a hindrance.

Those are the three things you must get right, no matter what online business you’ll be starting.

The rest flows from these three.

Hope that helps

Jon