When I first started in affiliate marketing, I was intimidated–to say the least! I wanted to work from home to spend more time with my family and to help with my grandson.
Affiliate marketing looked like it would be a great fit to find that perfect balance between family and earning an income (which we very much still needed!)
The more research I did, the more excited I became and knew I was going to try it. My research also showed me that I’d need some training in order to be a success. But what is affiliate marketing training and how can I get it?
Let me show you the program that taught me everything I needed to make money, retire early, and work from home!
First Up–What is Affiliate Marketing?
For those who may not be familiar with it, let’s start out by explaining what affiliate marketing is. Google dictionary defines it as:
“a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.”
What does that mean? Simply put, an affiliate marketer has a niche website where they write articles and reviews and provide links to online merchants who sell products or services.
When someone clicks on one of those links and buys something on the merchant’s site, the affiliate marketer gets a commission. The referral doesn’t even need to buy something that the marketer promotes–they’ll get a commission on everything they buy.
So if you’ve ever clicked on a link on someone’s website that took you to an online store, such as Amazon for example, you have been a customer of an affiliate marketer!
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How Hard is it to Create a Website?
Creating a website was the part of starting my online business that intimidated me the most. But
technology has made some great advances and creating a website couldn’t be easier!
Years ago, you’d need to know how to write HTML code and how to insert meta tags (?!?) or pay hundreds of dollars for someone to do it for you.
Now, with platforms like WordPress, your website can be created in 3 minutes with just a couple of mouse clicks! You choose your niche, create a domain name for your site, and within minutes you’re ready to write articles!
Why Would Training Help Me?
OK, so if creating a website is so easy, why would you need training? Because having a website is just the first step. You need to drive traffic to your site in order to start making any money.
The three top search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, are the holy grail for any affiliate marketer. If you can get on the first page of these search engines, you will have traffic to your site. If you have traffic, you’ll get customers linking to your merchants, and that means commissions!
As recently as just a few years ago, anyone who stuffed a bunch of keywords into a 500 word article could get to the top of the search engines and get traffic. But with so much spam and scams out there, all of that is changing.
When the search engines rank websites to determine which ones they choose to show in search results, they want the most relevant, quality sites on the first page.
They choose the websites that are easy to navigate, educate their readers, and give them a positive experience with a lot of quality content whether they’re on a laptop, tablet or cell phone.
That led me to a lot of questions:
- How do you know what the search engines consider quality content?
- How often do I need to post articles to be seen as a trusted site?
- How do you know what formats will create the kind of positive experience that will be rewarded with higher rankings?
- What kind of articles do I need to post, and how long should they be?
- How can I protect my site from spammers and scams?
- How do I monetize my site to make money when I start getting traffic?
- How long will it take before I start earning income from my site?
These are the kinds of questions that made me realize I needed to look into getting some training. If I wanted to start a quality online business that would become profitable to reach my goals, I needed to learn how to do it right!
Beware of Scams and Get-Rich-Quick Claims!
When you’re researching affiliate marketing online, it becomes pretty clear that there are plenty of programs out there that are very anxious to see you and the money in your wallet parting ways.
They’ll promise you the world, that you can become rich and start making hundreds of dollars right now. Every sales video is the story of how some down-on-his-luck person found the secret to making money online and now has more money than they could ever want!
So how do you know what programs are legitimate and how can you avoid scams? How do you know who to trust to really teach you how to build an online business?
The first thing you need to recognize is which sites are promoting nothing substantial other than a get-rich-quick claim. Have you ever checked out a program and heard the following claims?
- You can make $1000 a day starting today!
- Buy our program for just $37 and you can make thousands of dollars working 30 minutes a day!
- Set it up in just a few clicks and our done-for-you system will start making you money today!
The fact is that success in affiliate marketing takes time, patience, and hard work, and any legitimate program will tell you just that. Any program that makes outrageous income claims or tells you that you barely have to do any work is likely a scam.
The second thing you need to consider is whether any program being offered is run by successful affiliate marketers. You can find a lot of reviews out there by people promoting that a program will make you thousands of dollars, but it’s obvious that they do not understand affiliate marketing.
They use the concept of affiliate marketing, but anyone with experience knows that it doesn’t work as they say it will. They want you to pay money in order to see what they have to offer, but you don’t really have any idea what you’re buying!
In my opinion, any legitimate program will let you have a trial period where you can experience what is in their platform and see whether the information is quality training or not.
When I was younger, I fell for an internet marketing scam, and it cost me several thousand dollars. I was bound and determined to not get scammed again. I want to know what I’m getting before I pay a penny–and you should too!
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#1 Recommendation for Excellent Training
I first became familiar with the program that I eventually chose to get my training from by accident. I love to make homemade soap and was researching whether that was a good way to make money from home.
There was an article that detailed all the pros and cons and also suggested that I could make money blogging about soap making with a program called Wealthy Affiliate!
I immediately noticed that this article had been the top post on my Google search results. It was very interesting, informative and well written by a successful affiliate marketer.
So it seemed to me that this marketer had learned how to successfully drive traffic to his site.I clicked on his link to Wealthy Affiliate and immediately signed up for their free membership to find out what it was all about!
Within minutes, I had my first site set up and access to their program. What I found was a top quality platform designed to train and assist affiliate marketers to be successful with an online business.
The program is community based and actually designed to encourage members to help each other and answer any questions you have. They actually have incentives for knowledgeable members to reach out and mentor those who are inexperienced.
Not one person in Wealthy Affiliate is going to tell you that you’re going to start making money right away or get rich in 3 months, and I liked that! Everyone knows how hard they work to create quality articles and they’re happy to be honest about it and not create unrealistic expectations just to keep you in the program.
There’s no hard upselling for more and more products. They do have a premium membership for those who want to expand their business and get additional training–which is well worth the $49 a month it costs!
But you can build and run up to 2 websites and stay on their free membership indefinitely. When you’re ready to own your domains, you can scale your income as high as you want.
Wealthy Affiliate is my #1 recommended program for anyone who wants to start an affiliate marketing website, and I encourage you to check out my full review here!
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You Can Be a Successful Affiliate Marketer!
There are so many advantages to working from home. If that is your goal, or if you just want to have another stream of income to pay off debt, retire early, or buy that new car, I guarantee you that Wealthy Affiliate can give you the training and knowledge you need to be successful!
Do you have a goal to work from home? Does affiliate marketing sound like something that you would enjoy? Let me know in the comments below. Build Your Early Retirement is always happy to hear from you!
I know exactly what you mean. I was intimidated by affiliate marketing. I was thinking, who will be my customers, how to build a website (last time it was coding for me in school many years ago, so hard), what to sell, and so many questions. Unlike you I knew it right off that I need to get training, but the question is where should I get a good training with reasonable price. I was doing my research and came across many platforms on youtube. I almost fell into this trap, the program is called Dan Lok, the high ticket seller, it was so expensive but he has credibility and was at TED talk once. It was so close that I almost spend $2000 plus dollars with some upsells. Luckily, my instinct tells me to do some more research and I found later that people who work for Dan Lok, personally harassing this person’s blog. My instinct told me something is fishy and I found some people mentioning WA and I gave the free trial a try. So far so good I love the platform and all the latest training that I can access. I think in order for us to be good at something, we have to keep learning in order to excel in anything. My answer is yes, we need training 🙂
It’s good that you followed your instincts and glad to see that you’re having a great experience with WA! It’s one of the few legitimate platforms out there where you can get full training, world-class website hosting, and a community of experienced marketers to help–I love it!
Affiliate marketing is one of the growing business in the internet recently and I have been doing it for the past six months. Even though I started it six months ago there was a lot for me to learn from this article. I learned a lot of stuff that I didn’t know before reading this article. I’m going to make the changes and thank you for sharing this information.
You are welcome, and good luck with your online business–I wish you every success!
Hey i really enjoyed this article, very informative information about affiliate marketing. It is good to get the best training and for the right price. Thats why i love wealthy affiliate, there are no upsells or lies to get more training. I have learned so much in the 5 months i have been here and i keep learning as i go.
I’m so glad you are having a positive experience at Wealthy Affiliate! Everything I learned about blogging and affiliate marketing I learned from WA. They keep their training up to date and teach you everything you need to know to create a successful online business. Thanks for stopping by!
Thank you so much your article tells it all, and you have made it easy and clear to understand everything about affiliate Marketing I have been scammed three times, but I appreciate that I can now get into something that I understand well.You have even shown how easy it is to build a website which makes it appear hard for most of us.Thank you
I have fallen for a scam myself and it’s hard to recover trust and try again. But when I signed up for Wealthy Affiliate’s free membership and had my own website within a couple min and saw for myself that it wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, I knew I had the right program. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment!
I am a brand new user of Wealthy Affiliate and I couldn’t be more impressed. I’m glad I stumbled across it and you are doing a service to all others who are interested in learning how to do what they love everyday. The ability to work hard with affiliate marketing in order to be financially independent is a goal we can all achieve and this program gives us the tools to succeed. Best of luck to you!
I couldn’t agree more, Tony! Thank you for taking the time to comment and good luck to you as well!
Thank you for such a great post on affiliate marketing and Wealthy Affiliate. I like how you let us know that no matter what our niche/interest are, we are able to build a site on it with proper training to get it noticed and on the front page of the most used search engines. For myself, I did not realize that I could basically build a site about anything. That threw me into a panic, because my mind of course was racing with ideas. Luckily Wealthy Affiliate also provides you with tools to help in that as well.
Best Of Luck In All You Do
I had no idea that you could do affiliate marketing with any site! The great thing about that is you can choose a niche that you’re passionate about and know that there will be a way to monetize your site. I think having a site about something you love is so much easier to write about and shows in my work! Good luck to you, Lee Ann!