Today, many people are anxious about how they’re going to pay the bills and are entertaining ideas of making money online. Is there an absolutely  guaranteed way to get money coming in easily, fast and regularly?  The short answer is no.  While Internet marketing is probably the easiest way for anyone to get a business started online and making money fast, there really is no turnkey overnight miracle method. Expecting instant riches is the perfect description of someone with ‘The Lotto Mentality’. 

With affiliate marketing, there is a lot of work involved. However, for the determined individual who is prepared to learn and be consistent, the Internet and affiliate marketing can prove to be the next best way to become wealthy as an entrepreneur.

At least with affiliate marketing, much of the hard work is done for you, namely the main product and the sales copy,  but you still have  to attract potential buyers and then market to them. So if you have a natural talent for marketing or you feel like you can develop it easily enough, it may be easy for you.

For most people, they need to put in the time to learn marketing skills as well as search engine optimisation and keyword research.  You might want to do some of your own article writing, too, if the affiliate program doesn’t have them pre written for you.

Do yourself a favour and dispense with the myth that there are easy ways to make money. 

Affiliate Marketing is an  easier way to make money than most others, but successful affiliate marketing is a learned skill to be studied and mastered over time.

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more  affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. – Wikipedia.

If you were around in the late nineties and early eighties, affiliate marketing was touted as – “Click here to get your personal affiliate link, let all your friends know about this great product and give them your link.  Cha ching!!! The dollars will come rolling it!

Sounds easy enough – right?

If only it were, we’d all be driving around in a Lamborghini or holidaying in exotic locations. Instead of which, too many of us are struggling to pay the mortgage or rent, pay for groceries, school fees, clothing and the endless list of other expenses that seem to rise in cost whilst our incomes stay the same. We end up like a hamster on the wheel of life which increases in speed the older we get.

So why is it that some affiliates seem to become hugely successful and very rich – while the majority struggle to just break even?

Typically, people don’t buy anything from you until they know like and trust you. Statistically, they need to see or hear from you 7 times before they will buy from you. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt – in the marketing world, it builds content.

If you want to buy a shirt, a book, a home gym, a tv, or whatever else you may need – you go to your regular store, whether that’s Kmart or Maceys offline and Amazon if you’re shopping online. The fact is, you’re comfortable with what you know and feel safer buying from stores and online companies you’ve dealt with before if you’ve had good service. The major retailers offline depend on customer loyalty to keep their name in the public eye and online marketers are the same in many respects. You wouldn’t go up to someone you didn’t know and had never even seen before and say “This is a great shirt. Do you want to buy it?” Of course you wouldn’t, yet so many would be online marketers  think they can put an ad online and people are going to flock to buy from us.  It’s possible that one or maybe two people would buy from that ad, but most would simply ignore the ad move on.  However, if the ad was coming from someone they knew, liked and trusted – they’d take the time to check it out, wouldn’t they?

How can I get people to know, like  and trust Me?

Remember earlier you read that people need seven points of contact before they will buy from you? How can you do that, if they’re strangers? The answer of course, is get those people onto your email list in an autoresponder and contact them regularly.

The money is in The List!