In his world of constant evolution, there is new information available everyday. This is why I offer you Affiliate Marketing Business Myths Part 2. If you haven’t, I invite you to read part 1 here.
There are many things that are being said about affiliate marketing that are far from the truth. It’s important to have the right information when you want to make the right decision for yourself.
Some of the myths I’m about to present to you are being told by people who want to sell you done-for-you systems that are very expensive and that most people can’t afford.
They want to make affiliate marketing seem like it is more work, more time, more money and more complicated than it really is.
It’s a marketing strategy to make you buy their offer/product. It’s not an honest one since they are amplifying what you have to do to become a successful affiliate marketer. They are making false claims in order to make their products/service seem the best option available to start earning money.
Some scammers use those techniques to make you believe that you absolutely need their awesome product to save time, money and efforts and be successful.
So let’s dive in those crazy myths. Maybe you have heard some of them. Let me know in the comment section.
*May contain affiliate links. Clicking on the affiliate links will most likely result in the same price you would pay elsewhere or you may get a special offer using those links.
Affiliate Marketing Myths
1- The first myth I want to debunk today is: Affiliate marketing is a get right quick scam. Well, no. It is not. In fact, this is one of the reasons why so many people don’t become successful with affiliate marketing.
Too often people are promoting new ways to make money online that promises big returns quickly, anything from 1 week to 3 months. Depending on how you do affiliate marketing, it can take much longer before you get any results.
In most cases, you won’t see results for 6 months. If you don’t spend at least 1 hour a day on your business, it could take you a year before you get some results. It’s up to you and your consistency to create content and it’s up to the algorithms to bring you some traffic.
You could be lucky and choose a niche that has very low competition and get tons of traffic and get tons of sales in the first month. Everything is possible. Keep in mind that for most people, it takes much longer and you have to be ready to put in the work.
There is nothing quick in starting an online affiliate business. You are here for the long run. If anyone tells you otherwise, make sure you make your research and see if you are about to get scammed.
If you aim for instant gratification, stay away from building an online business or any kind of business. There will be many hours of effort put in your business before you get to see any results. Patience and persistence are your best friends here.
You may want to read this article I wrote: What do you need to be a successful affiliate marketer?
Affiliate marketing is a get rich quick scam? Oh no, it’s legitimate unless you are being scammed and there is no way, unless you are super lucky, you will make money fast.
2- The second myth is: It costs tons of money to start an online business. Compared to a brick and mortar business, starting an online business is inexpensive.
There are ways you can get started for free! How is free expensive?? Ideally, you have about $2000 to cover starting costs, like proper training and tools to expand your online presence.
You can read my article on How much it really cost to become an affiliate?
You can get started for free, but you might realise that it might not be the right way to build a sustainable business. You can get many information for free on the internet and the only thing you may end up paying for is hosting for your website and that is around $3 per month. Then you need your domain name, which is around $20 per year. If you can’t afford that, find the money, find a way.
Building an online business is really affordable and if you really commit to it, you will find a way to get the money you need to get started.
So if you start your affiliate marketing business using the classic ways, like writing a blog or creating a YouTube channel, you’ll make sure to keep super low starting costs. You can record your videos using your smartphone. Most people get started that way on YouTube.
No, starting an online business doesn’t cost tons of money. If you don’t have any money to get started, you still have options available for you so you can get started.
3- The third myth is: There are tons of risks. Building an online business is one of the safest ways to build a business. The reason is simple: you can do it part-time while keeping your job. The second reason is that it doesn’t cost a lot of money to get started.
I don’t know what kind of risks people think they are taking when deciding to create an online business. What’s the worst that can happen? That you don’t make money and that you have spent some on training or on a done-for-you system.
Then what? Haven’t you learned new skills? Didn’t you learn how to create something online? Isn’t there a way you can use that knowledge in the future?
The very worst that can happen is you quitting on your decision of building your online business and maybe you will have lost some money in the process.
One risk is to develop new skills and become successful. Are you afraid of success? Don’t you want to get new skills that can be used in different ways, like becoming a freelancer, to help you earn money online?
I can’t think of any risks related to building an online business. I mean, you can get banned from social media platforms. That’s pretty much all I can think of. If you think of anything, let me know in the comments, I’ll add it to my article.
There are tons of risks to start an affiliate marketing business. No, there are very few risks. You can do it as a side hustle until the day you start earning more money than from your day job, then you might have a decision to make.
4- The fourth myth is combined with one that goes along with it: Getting started by yourself takes tons of time + you can’t do it on your own. No and no. Define tons of time. You can get started as you keep learning. You learn as you do. So I don’t know what tons of time means to you. And yes, you can do everything on your own.
You need to take some time in your busy schedule to learn about your business and how to set it up properly. That’s a minimum requirement. To get started, you may want to spend one hour per day on learning and on training. That’s normal. That’s not tons of time. Plus, you can binge on training videos on the weekend and swap your Netflix time with training videos.
Building a website or creating a YouTube channel takes time. But not tons of time. It’s normal. You need to put in the time and efforts to get some results.
You can do everything on your own. Be aware that there is a lot to do. At some point, you might want to start outsourcing so you spend more time on what is really important for you and your business.
When you get proper training, that you have a plan of what you have to do to become a successful affiliate marketer, you can get everything done by yourself. Of course, the real success path comes when you are surrounded with people you have the same goal.
Having a community of people who share their knowledge is priceless. It will certainly help you build your way to success.
Do everything on your own, spend your time wisely on building your business and be part of a community of people who share the same goals, which is making money online.
Getting started on your own doesn’t take tons of time. It will take the time you allow it to take. You can do everything on your own. You never have to outsource or hire people to work for you. Just know that while your business grows, you will have to spend more time working on it.
5- The fifth myth is: You NEED high ticket irresistible offers. Again, no, you don’t. It takes more work to sell high ticket offers. Of course the maths look good. It looks easier to make $1000 per month with one sale from a high ticket irresistible offer than selling 50 times something that brings you $20. But is it?
It takes more work to be able to make someone buy a $2000 product or offer. Not everyone is ready to pay that amount of money right away just because they read your blog post, they watched you 10 minutes video or they read your ad on Facebook.
People buy high ticket offers from people they trust. You need to build trust with your audience. It’s a longer process. So if you are ready to put in the work and you love the high ticket offers available in your niche, go for it.
You may want to diversify your offers and also promote lower ticket offers so your audience is even bigger because you have a product/offer for every budget. I believe that is the best way to do affiliate marketing.
Find great offers for every budget. Find offers you know will make a positive difference in your audience’s life. This is how you will have the most success with affiliate marketing.
Do you need a high ticket irresistible offer? No. Can you only promote these, yes. Can you make as much money promoting lower ticket offers, yes. Choose the offers that you like best and go for it!
6- The sixth myth is: Email marketing is dead. One little question for you: how many emails do you receive everyday? No, email marketing is not dead. It is alive. It is effective when used and monetized the right way.
There are billions of email addresses used by billions of people everyday. Big companies like Samsung and Apple use email marketing to promote their offers.
Your blog and your email list are the two things that truly belong to you when you have an online business. Your social media accounts can be shut down at any given time. The best back up plan you have is your email list.
You can read my article on email marketing for beginners.
Since people can be drowning in emails everyday, you will have to use strategies to get people’s attention. If you create good emails with good values, you won’t have to try too hard to stand out from the mass.
It’s a good way to do business as an affiliate marketer. It’s a great tool to grow your business.
So is email marketing dead? No.
7- The seventh myth is: You need to run ads to be profitable. Only if your affiliate marketing business is solely about promoting other people’s products on Facebook. Otherwise, no, you don’t need to run ads to be profitable.
You can rely on creating good content for your blog or YouTube channel and rely on your skills and on the algorithms to show your content to your audience.
Ok, ok, it takes longer to see the results, but at least you know if you are on the right track. If you create content and you pay for ads, how do you know if the content you create is good enough to rank in Google?
So save your money when you get started and create good content that will organically rank and attract your audience.
If you’ve had training to run ads you are all about creating ad copy, well, then you can invest your money in paid ads to promote your affiliate products. My question to you is: wouldn’t you prefer to invest your money in ads for your own products?
Do you need to run ads to be profitable? No.
8- The eight myth is: You can’t make money blogging. Well, tell that to all the people living off their blogs. Yes, you can most definitely make money blogging.
Now, what kind of money are you expecting? When you get started, after a few months, you can earn ads revenue from your blog and if you are lucky enough, maybe you can earn your first affiliate commission.
It takes time and patience. You have to put in the work. If you plan on replacing your current income with your blog, you want to have a long term vision and have a two year plan. Yes, it can take two years before you earn good money from your blog.
Since most people will quit before they get any good results, this is probably why we can still hear that you can’t make money blogging. Again, you can and it can be as much money as you want it to be as long as you put the effort in.
9- The ninth myth is: I’m too old to start an online business. That’s just an excuse. You are not too old to start an online business. Your brain can learn and develop new skills no matter how old you are. That’s the beauty of the brain’s plasticity.
10- The tenth myth is: I don’t have the skills. Nobody did when they got started. You have to get started to get the skills. Be open to learning new things, it will help you get started.
Did you have the skills to walk before you started walking? No. You learned them. You tried and you failed and then you tried again. The same applies to building a business.
Nobody had the skills when they got started. The successful ones have one thing in common: they weren’t afraid to fail because they knew they would learn and they would try again.
You get new skills by doing things. If you don’t do things, you won’t be able to do anything.
Learn the skills. Practice the skills. Master the skills.
11- The eleventh myth: Everything is already saturated. No it’s not. The proof is that there are new products that appear on a regular basis on the marketplace.
There are industries that are so popular that it seems like everything has already been done, but there is always something new that can be created. You just need to find what it is and how you can share that with your audience.
Just think about when you search something on the internet and you can’t find it or when you are looking for an answer and you can’t find anything relevant to your search query, this is where you can make a difference.
12- The twelfth myth is: There is only one way to do affiliate marketing. If you have read this article so far, you can tell me that this is wrong. There are many ways to do affiliate marketing like blogging, creating a YouTube channel, running paid ads, becoming an influencer, etc.
Choose what suits you best. If it doesn’t work, you can always change your strategy and choose another way to promote your affiliate products.
Keep in mind that there is no right or wrong way to do affiliate marketing, unless you are part of a scam. There are ways that are known to generate good results in the long term and others that are better for shorter term results.
13- The thirteenth myth is: You NEED to create content everyday. If you want to burn yourself, yes, go ahead and create content everyday. The answer here is no, you don’t need to create content everyday, unless you are using social media to promote your products.
You might want to create new content everyday for social media so people are aware of you and they get to see some of your posts. As you know, not everyone gets to see all your posts even if they follow you.
Read my posts on creating social media content. There are 3 articles.
The key to success here is quality over quantity. There is no point in creating a blog post that won’t give value to the people who are going to read it.
14- The fourteenth myth is: You have to be perfect to have success. That’s the perfect way to never get started. The key here is to take action. Nobody’s perfect.
Guess what? Practice makes perfect. That’s a way to say that the more you do something, the better you become at doing it. You don’t need perfection to succeed, you need to give value to your audience.
You want to aim for excellence. If you have put everything you could in that article or in that video and you are proud of it, who cares if it’s perfect or not?
Don’t use perfection as an excuse for not getting started. Do you think olympic athletes were good when they first started? We they perfect? No, they were not. So they keep practicing until they reach their level of perfection, their level of excellence.
Think about this for a moment: your uniqueness comes from the fact that you are not perfect. That’s why people relate to you and that’s when the relationship begins with your audience.
In Conclusion
From all the crazy ideas people have on affiliate marketing and building an online business to all the excuses that can be made for not building a business, I wanted to make it easier for you to know the reality instead of believing what people believe.
For everything that you hear about creating a business, someone has another opinion or another belief. Try to find reliable sources of information and not only believe what people who don’t have an online business think is true.
If you are on a journey to building an online business, you need to learn to stop believing everything you hear. Know that as you get some success, some people will start to jealous you because they will start to feel inferior to you.
Don’t let that stop you. Aim for the right people with the right information. Keep your goal in mind and you will be successful.
Cynthia