There’s probably a bunch of eBooks on this but I’ll try cover it briefly. I dabbled with free methods of affiliate marketing for a while until I eventually realized, yes, there’s a lot of money to be made doing this BUT you’ll most likely see results after months and months of your efforts. The great thing with paid advertising is that you can almost instantly get traffic to your campaigns/websites and see what works/doesn’t work.

Anyway, let’s consider you’ve made your decision and want to start with free stuff. Lucky for you, there are many options. In the recent years there’s been a surge of social friendly websites which, in time have built a large community of people. Basically where there’s people, there’s money to be made. From YouTube to FaceBook to Twitter and even GumTree there’s lot I see people making money. There’s no one way to do this so my advice once again has to be general or it won’t be applicable to some of the methods.

1) YouTube Marketing: For starters do this. Go on YouTube and type any product and the word ‘review’ next to it. e.g, ‘JustCloud review’ or ‘GoPro review’. Most of the videos that will appear are by affiliates who ‘review’ the product and provide a link in the description box to send you to the merchant website that sells it. Now, if you BUY the product through that link, they get money. Pretty cool huh? This can be an option for you. 

So now you have a fair idea of what affiliate marketing is about. If you don’t, keep reading the rest of this series. If it still doesn’t click, (I researched for 2 weeks before everything started to click), then have a read of these resources that I saved while I was learning.

I remember when I was at this stage I was REALLY confused on what path to take. FaceBook, Google, Bing, PPV, PPC, PPCall, it was a lot for me. Because of this I jumped around from one thing to another for a good while. I think this was the main reason I didn’t see success for the first 3 weeks.

Before I try and direct your decisions I just wanted to say that you can make millions doing ANY of the above. Don’t worry about if you’ve picked the best one or not just pick what you think will work best for you and jump right in! There is no substitute for learning from action.

Since each method is slightly different depending on what you decide to pick, I’ll go over things on a general basis. From scratch,

Since I’m still fairly new to the whole paid affiliate marketing industry, I wanted to write about how my mindset has changed since the beginning. Also, what I was doing then and what I’m doing differently now. I will probably cover some things that I’ve gone through before but most of this should be new.

The Beginning

I started to learn about paid affiliate marketing around the start of July 2013 which is just shy of 3 months ago, (at the time of writing this post). I spent a good two weeks just reading, watching and in general absorbing tonnes of information, (like you’re doing here). As I read and came across valuable information, I would type it in a notepad which I had open at all times. I still do this when I come across good ideas or read/watch something worth noting. After two weeks I thought I had a good idea and decided to jump in to something. I tried about 10 campaigns, mainly trying to sell physical products on FaceBook, Google and Bing. I did a short affiliate marketing case study here of my first few campaigns. Check em out, they’re a good read 🙂

I thought it would be kind of fun to write about what I ACTUALLY do on an average day at ‘work’. This is usually the same thing Monday – Sunday since I like affiliate marketing and hardly take a break from it. I usually end up doing at least 2 to 4 hours of work on Saturday and Sunday as well. I just can’t help myself! Anyway here goes,

3:00am – Alarm goes off. I usually feel like going back to sleep but at the same time am curious to see if I’ve made any sales. I turn on my phone and check my stats. Usually I’ve made a good amount of sales so naturally I check my stats on prosper202. I’ll be now able to see exactly what lead to that conversion/sale. Once I have this information my sleep is normally gone and I’m excited to get up and test a few things. Before I get out of bed though I list down a bunch of ideas I get while checking my stats and make a short ‘to-do’ list. (It usually ends up being anything but short..).

There’s a few things I’ve had to change about myself while on this ‘affiliate’ journey. After coming out from a 2 year career in civil engineering I was used to a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle I later found out to be detrimental to the success of an affiliate.

You see, in the working world, you trade your time and effort in return to a promised, secure income. Whether that payment be 10$/hour or $50/hour, to the average person it’s enough just knowing that most definitely at the end of the day you are technically a certain $xx amount richer. This allows you to plan ahead. You can work out your monthly income and get used to a lifestyle of security.

As an affiliate or in business in general, it is not uncommon to experience a week of negative ROI, meaning to make a loss for a continuous week! It took me a while to realize that there is no such thing as earning ‘x’ amount per day. Why? Because everyday there are many factors that effect the performance of your sales/leads. From the time of the month to even the weather there really are an incalculable number of factors. For this reason, expect loss. Calculate your income based on a week or better yet, monthly basis. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache this way.