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| Affiliate marketing experts offer to teach you their secrets. Should you pay them? |
If you're interested in making money on the Internet, you have probably searched YouTube and Google for classes that teach you how to make money. But they are so expensive. Are they worth it?
I'm an affiliate marketer and I earn hundreds of dollars every month from affiliate commissions. That's not enough to live on but it helps keep money in the bank. I've tested a few of these courses over the years and I'm not impressed with them.
If They Make So Much Money, Why Are They Selling Their Secrets?
This is the question I always ask myself when I look at these courses. Some of these people want you to pay them hundreds of dollars a month, or thousands of dollars to enroll in their programs.
Have you ever asked yourself if these fees aren't "too good to be true" prices?
How much do these gurus need to make from each of their students? And why are you thinking about paying for information that you can read for free on the Web?
The reason why people charge so much for their classes is that they are using the Scarcity Principle to hoodwink you into thinking they're teaching you something valuable. The Scarcity Principle holds that people are more likely to pay for something that is hard to get.
Charging hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for a marketing course makes it scarce in one way: most people can't afford to pay for it.
But it's a lot of work to put these courses together. And that means there is only one reason why the prices are so high: these guys are making money from their course subscriptions than from their affiliate marketing.
Successful Marketers Don't Sell You Their Methods
It's not that these methods are secrets to be protected from competitors. It's that if you're making good money through affiliate marketing, you don't have any financial incentive to sell your methods to other people.
Successful people don't need to charge you money to help you. That doesn't build your character. It only transfers money from your bank account to theirs.
Scammers sell their secrets. Marketers sell products and services. Selling a course on how to sell things online is a scam.
I've even looked at courses that teach you how to sell courses online. Those guys are less scammy than the people who teach you the marketing courses, but they are still teaching you how to scam people
Affiliate Marketing Is Hard Because Everyone Does It
There are millions of affiliate marketing Websites. Most of them don't make any money. Most of the ones that do make money earn less than $100 per month.
When you hear about people who earn thousands of dollars every month from their affiliate sites, you're hearing about the small percentage. They may have secrets that work for them, but more likely they've sunk a lot of time and money into those sites and built them up over several years.
I know a lot of affiliate marketers. The ones who make money all tell me the same thing in private: they invested their savings in their sites. Some of them bought successful sites. Some of them spent years adding content to their sites and waiting for success to grow.
I've never met anyone who had instant success with affiliate marketing.
And I know a few people who tell me privately they regret spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on affiliate marketing courses that don't teach anything they didn't already know.
The competition in online affiliate marketing is intense. And the gurus tell you there is always room for more competition because the Internet is so big. What they don't tell you is that most people never earn enough money from affiliate marketing to support themselves.
Why I Am Not Naming Names
From the guy who sold you an ebook telling you how to sell ebooks to the guy who tells you how to get more links for your site to the guy who tells you to use pillar posts on blogs - they're all scams.
The names change every few years but the scams don't. New people come along, see the demand for marketing courses, and start the process all over again.
They all have a gimmick. They all have private forums, mailing lists, newsletters, and special promotional offers.
If I wanted to compile a list of marketing courses you should NOT pay for, it would go on for pages. I'd never stop adding to it.
You can search Bing and Google for affiliate marketing course reviews and you'll find plenty. Most of them are not worth your time, though, because those reviewers are paid commissions every time someone signs up for the courses through their links.
Naturally, if you make money only when people sign up, you're going to do everything you can to persuade people to sign up.
In Conclusion
Affiliate marketing courses are not worth the money you pay for them.
If you want to know how to find affiliate programs to join, search Bing and Google for "join our affiliate program" or "become an affiliate". The companies that offer these programs either direct you to the affiliate marketing platforms they use or explain how their programs work.
If you want to know what it takes to make money, that's simple: write product reviews. The reviews that work best are the ones written by people who actually use the products. Include your own photos and videos in your reviews.
If you want to know which products earn the most money, that's easy to figure out. Start by looking at the commission rates you'll earn, the prices of the products, and go from there.
Use Google Ttends to see if people search for products. You'll need to compare trends for product names to each other. You don't want to review products that have too much or too little traffic.
If you need links, you'll have to do at least 1 of the following:
- Earn them with good, interesting content
- Ask people to link to your site and hope they will
- Pay for links from people willing to sell them
I have to warn you, buying links violates search engine guidelines. The easier it is to get links the less likely they are worth getting.
Successful affiliate marketing always demands hard work. The key to success is to not waste months and thousands of dollars on guru lessons only to realize you're making $50 a month after a year.
