Do This If You Are New To Affiliate Marketing

in the last 7 years I've done more than $5 million in affiliate marketing commissions and these are the things I would do if I was starting over in 2024 and I wanted to hit that number again I would follow the rule of ones religiously this is the rule where you only pick one traffic Source you pick one lead magnet and you pick one product to promote and this is the only thing you promote in the beginning you focus on one when I first started I was blogging I was instagramming I was putting out YouTube videos I was promoting 40 different products and I thought it was great but I wasn't making any money as soon as you start focusing and you follow the rule of ones you will see massive results and you will see that your skill level in each of those one thing goes up exponentially once I'd set up the rule of ones and I'd pick the one of everything that I wanted to focus on I would follow it for 6 months I would commit to doing that traffic source and that lead magnet and that product for 6 months without changing when I first started I bounced around a million different times between things thinking that they didn't work even though I'd only given them a month or or so of effort you will do significantly better if you focus for 6 months and give something a real chance because it's not in the first 3 months when you really start to master something it's in the next 3 months I would focus everything on building a list including email addresses first names and phone numbers because when I first started I did not get anything but an email address it is very hard to personalize emails and get in inboxes and get people to read your emails when you don't have a name associated with it but as soon as you have a first name you can personalize and say hey first name how are you doing today and your emails become much more personal and you can sell a lot easier with your emails I also came to realize that emails only have a 20 to 30% open rate but you can send texts and get almost a 90 to 95% open rate so when you're promoting a product it's much easier and you can make a lot more money if you have both an email address and a phone number that you can send out messaging to I would choose a niche that's in an exciting growth opportunity phase and what I mean by that is you don't want to choose a niche or a product or anything like that that's been around for a long long long time and the reason for that is when I first got started the very first Channel that I started to do on YouTube was actually in the crypto space and I had terrible videos to be frank really bad videos bad audio bad editing just kind of like me sharing my screen talking about stuff way overthinking it way over talking it everything you could think of was not good about my videos but I blew up almost every video did extremely extremely well and that's because that was in 2017 that's when crypto was brand new people were just starting to talk about it over the you know Thanksgiving table and things like that and so there was a lot of conversation going on about this new thing called crypto but in addition to that there wasn't nearly as much competition as there is now in the crypto space right because this was a new thing there wasn't nearly as many channels about it there wasn't nearly as many videos about it not every little video had 4,000 you know different videos that were trying to Target one keyword there was just a lot more space for me to create content and a lot less competition for me to create that content against and because of that I was able to do very well despite not being a great content creator in that space I would focus on building a personal brand that set me apart from everyone else I'm a traveler I'm a sports person I'm a family person all of those things are things that I can show to set me apart and to make me different and unique and show people who I really am as a person I was hesitant in the beginning to build a personal brand but you will find that as soon as you build a personal brand around your affiliate business where you're no longer just a business emailing people and talking to people you're a person they can connect to you and when people connect to you they buy from you I would focus all of my time and all of my effort on building an audience through creating content so creating content does great at building an audience but what it really does well is it helps you build an audience that trusts you knows you and likes you it's also going to give you three really important things as you're growing your affiliate marketing business and the first one is instant Authority okay this is an authority that will come whenever you talk to anybody if you've managed to build up an audience and build up a group of people following you you have instant Authority on on that subject matter and one of the cool things about that instant Authority you're going to find that you have a lot of confidence you're going to find that when you teach and when you talk about it you do so with a lot more confidence because you have real people following you to learn from you about that subject you'll also find that having an audience will help you build leverage with affiliate programs and you have this instant leverage when you join any affiliate program where you can ask for things that other people couldn't ask for because you're coming in already with an audience and the last most important thing having an audience is it's going to let you pivot around a little bit it's going to let you change affiliate programs if something goes wrong with the one that you're currently promoting it's going to let you change niches even if you want to change to a niche that's similar if you have an audience you're able to do so much more and change direction so much easier because you already have a group of people that know you and like you and really want to know what you have to say I would choose affiliate programs for products that I like love and Trust at this point I won't promote a product that I wouldn't happily tell my own mother to buy in the beginning I just focused on promoting stuff that had high conversion rates that I knew I could get a lot of sales on this is not a long-term game plan for an affiliate marketer apply the mother test and only promote something that you would be happy if your own mother purchased through your affiliate link side note I would also focus on newer products things that hadn't been around for very long you'll find that there's a lot more excitement and a lot more trending things going on around brand new products and if you promote brand new products it tends to be much easier as people are much more willing to listen for something they've never heard before I would change my mindset so that I learned to level up without getting stuck in the Trap of comparing my myself to bigger affiliate marketers and people that have been there for a long time and what I mean by that 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