14 Terrifying Truths You’ll Discover When You Start Affiliate Marketing

want you to tell me if this story sounds familiar you either hated your job you lost your job or you couldn't find a job so you hit up google because it's 2022 and google knows the answer to literally every question in the universe someone you've never heard of made a list of 999 ways that you can make money online and somewhere on that list they mentioned affiliate marketing so you watch some youtube videos and all the youtubers promised that you would make at least a hundred dollars a day in the next 30 to 90 days because affiliate marketing is easy right yeah six months later you're still stuck trying to make your first commission and the dream is almost dead in this video we're going to go over the 10 very harsh truths that you're going to find out when you first start affiliate marketing so that you can come into this with very real expectations so let's go burst some bubbles number one most of what you see people teaching in affiliate marketing is stuff that they haven't done themselves you are not going to be able to copy and paste a video once a day and build an affiliate empire that lands you off on a beach in thailand sipping coconuts but what you are going to do is make whoever is teaching that method a tiny bit richer as you spend 20 minutes watching their entire video number two is it's going to take a lot more clicks than you're probably thinking it's going to take to start making some money most of you guys know that i host my own affiliate program i have over 2 000 affiliates that come and they ask a lot of questions and in fact a lot of you are those affiliates now the most common question i get from affiliates looks something like this they say spencer i got 20 clicks on my affiliate link and i didn't get a single sale i think that your affiliate program or my link is broken so i'm here to tell you you're going to need a lot more clicks to make this thing happen now some platforms are better than others for example amazon tends to convert a little bit better than some of the other platforms out there but you're going to need a lot more than 20 clicks for example on youtube i can usually get a few sales for every 100 clicks that i get from a youtube link on tick tock i can get a thousand clicks and have no sales so on that note you're going to find that clicks that come from search engines tend to have a much higher purchase rate than those clicks that are coming from social media sites like tick tock or even facebook next is you need to know who you can trust there's a lot of lies going on in this space and there's two different kinds of lies which makes it a little bit harder you're the one i love oh really here are the two major ways that people are lying to you as you get started in affiliate marketing the first way is soft lies of omission that's where they show all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff that's happening to them so they might show that they made a thousand dollars in commission this month but they don't show you the 30 hours or the 2 000 that they spent in order to get that commission those are lies of a mission where you're not seeing what's really happening behind the scenes and it looks like it's all glamour and easy money when in reality they're either losing money or spending a lot of time to make a small amount of money and the second type of lie while less common still happens quite a bit and that's just straight up faking results it's not very hard to edit a screenshot and there are plenty of people out there that are taking these screenshots taking other people's screenshots or just tweaking their screenshots to show results that really aren't theirs the next harsh truth is that a lot of people who teach affiliate marketing actually make a vast majority of their money from teaching affiliate marketing and very little if any money from actually doing affiliate marketing for example i do sell a course but 90 to 95 of my time and energy and income goes to actually being an affiliate marketer and then my course just shows what i'm doing all day long now some people hate on courses and that's fine some people hate on unicorns and cute babies too because in 2022 we hate on all kinds of things i hate everything in that frame but i think you really need to look out when you're buying stuff and see if one they've done exactly what they're teaching you to do successfully and two where is their money coming from is it coming from doing what they're showing you to do or is it coming from actually you you no not me you yes i am you the next harsh truth is probably one of my favorite ones and that's to realize that most affiliates fail and if you aren't going to be the affiliate that fails you've got to do more you've got to be better and you've got to be a producer okay so you've got to stop being okay with being mediocre and just putting out some kind of content for the sake of putting out content or making these terrible landing pages in 10 minutes you need to make real good things happen and you need to stand out now this next one is a serious pain in my side and half of the new affiliates that i talk to think this they think that clickbank is basically the only place you can go to find products to promote clickbank is one of thousands of places you can go to find products to promote so not only is this idea wrong but about ninety percent of what you find on clickbank is going to be almost every company out there has some form of affiliate or some form of referral program legitimate brands with customers that love to come back and buy over and over and over again find something that you like and you love that will make your audience love you for showing it to them and promote that now for this next harsh truth we're going to use a statistic that i have no idea if it's right in fact it's probably wrong then why are you telling people but i do believe it comes somewhere close to being right and that's the idea that five percent of affiliates make 95 of the money and then the other 95 have five percent of the money and i don't know if that's true but from my experience it is and i'm not telling you to take that stat and say i'm out of here this is too hard in fact i'm telling you you do need to do affiliate marketing but you've got to stand out the five percent that are making all of that money are doing that by standing out they're not you know doing what the rest of the pack is doing they're doing something unique they're making themselves unique they're branding themselves they're doing something that makes themselves different from everyone else out there pushing the same exact products next you've got to realize that you are a tiny fish in a ginormous pond so one of the products that i promote is called clickfunnels and if you type clickfunnels review into google looking specifically for how many blogs are writing a clickfunnels review we run into about six thousand and that means that if you post a review of click funnels you