The Biggest Secret in Affiliate Marketing

Want to become a Google millionaire? Ready to unleash the secrets of the super-affiliates? Want to discover how to dominate any affiliate niche? Wrong website, my friend.

It’s no secret that affiliate marketing is blighted by spammy, scammy ‘get rick quick’ rubbish. The hysterical sales letters are endlessly entertaining, but reinforce the myth that affiliate marketing is a magic moneytron that guarantees a gauche yacht, a trophy wife and a mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

You’ve probably heard self-styled gurus bragging about the ‘super-affiliate lifestyle‘ – think P. Diddy on a budget, if not – but none of them will tell you the biggest secret of all.

Most affiliates fail. As in ‘fail to earn a living’. A year ago, e-consultancy.com and Affiliate Program Advice polled 1,536 affiliates for the first UK affiliate census. They found:

• 49% of affiliates earned under £500/year
• Only 27% are ‘day-job’ affiliates
• 39% of ‘day-job’ affiliates earn under £20,000/year.

So we can estimate that only one in six UK affiliates earn over £20,000/year, assuming a representative dataset and that there won’t be too many part-timers above that bracket. For benchmarks, the average graduate salary in the UK is £20,800 (2007), while the median income is around £23,244 (2006).

The truth is that affiliate marketing is a hard way to make an easy living. Think Glengarry Glen Ross: it’s a tough racket, and it’s not going to go get any easier. The difference? Affiliate marketing looks easy if you’re doing it right.

Alas, rock solid advice is hard to come by for newbie affiliates. The all-new AffEarners.com forum has come up with 99 Reasons Why You Will Fail at Affiliate Marketing.

1. You don’t get enough traffic
2. You get the wrong traffic
3. You promote the wrong product to the wrong people
4. You give up too soon
5. You don’t understand your product
6. You don’t rely on your affiliate manager
7. You can’t build a proper website
8. You don’t research your niche
9. You don’t have a niche
10. You only promote one product
11. You don’t know how to build a landing page
12. Your copywriting sucks
13. Your design isn’t appealing
14. You overloaded with banner ads and drove prospects away
15. You built your site in flash

If you’re starting out in affiliate marketing, I urge you to study the full list until you can recite it by rote.