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The Unstoppable Skill Set Forged From Affiliate Marketing. (22)

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God damn we are in a good position!

I just read a post by Finch on this thread. He touched on the fact that as affiliates we can quit affiliate marketing, create our own products, and basically market ANYTHING.

A lot of people starting out forget about how transferable their skills are that they learn here. I know I sometimes take for granted the skills I have amassed through practicing affiliate marketing.

I mean it's bloody crazy! Our skills can be used in so many scenarios.

Here are someone ways I've leveraged my skills outside of affiliate marketing:

• I built an ad campaign for my roommate, who entered a fashion design contest.

• She ended up winning it, with $5000 cash, and an internship..
  
  
• I built an ad campaign for a few mates, who entered a NBA trick shot contest.
  They won, and ended up winning cash, and flights to NYC to watch the NBA.(in the end the video went viral, but I helped alit with the initial push).
  
  
• I built ad campaigns for my lodge (which hadn't been in business for over 4 years).
  It is now known as one of the top luxury accommodation options in New Zealand. The press recently hounded the lodge phone lines trying to find out Prince William & Kate were staying there.
  
  
• I built ad campaigns for my sister who makes art prints.
  Previously her income was solely generated through her painting sales, now it's 50/50 with her print sales.
  
  
• I built the first online ad campaign for Xero.com.
  They are now a billion dollar company. I decided to take cash instead of some stocks. I was 19, leave me online. One of my life's regrets.

Anyway the point is, the WORST case scenario for putting in time to learn affiliate marketing, is being left with a skill set that is valuable to some many businesses and people.

Never forget that!

Take the time to learn and understand every process, it will be worth it in the long run.

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This is excellent!

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Awesome as usual.

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Nice post
Don't forget the indirect skills affiliate marketing teaches you!

- Money management
- Negotiating
- Networking
- Book of business you've acquired over the year
etc...

All VERY important skills for any business.
The amount of experience you get from running your own business and handling all aspects of it blows any post secondary school out of the water.

I've been updating my 'resume' every year since i started internet marketing. Just to see the main skills/goals/experience I've amassed over the years.

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Out of curiousity, how'd you get the xero job, and what were your options in terms of stocks?

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SICK THREAD! the skill set developed is phenomenal affiliates are such all rounders as you learn skills for everything.

When I started to dabble in some day trading, the emotional control I had gained from running $xx,xxx in ad spend while going to bed and being able to fall asleep with little on my mind turns out to probably be the greatest skill needed and the reason 90%+ fail.

The skill set is enormous for an everyday affiliate and its very practical in the modern world even with the basics of each skill its a massive advantage. We're quite used to getting out of our comfort zone and that alone brings your ability to cope with life situations way way easier.

Design - Photoshop, Basic HTML, creativity
Testing - Split testing, statistical significance, reporting, data analysis
Technical - Nameservers, hosting, using cpanel, tracking, basic coding
Research - Campaign research, demographics
Traffic - SEO, PPC, Media buys, Mobile, Social, Viral, Contextual
Accounting - Keeping clean practices, the basics of accounting, money management
Communication - Networking events, negotiation, I/O's, writing, salescopy, blogging, teaching
Business - Cash flow, product creation, entrepreneurial skills, goal setting/achieving
Travel - Contacts in many cities, cultural skills
Mindset - Emotional control, changing limiting beliefs, discipline, positivity, vision, self dependance

We're life long learners here!

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If you can make this game work, and especially if you can do so not by relying on "gimmicks" (like how to cloak ads or arbing fake traffic) but rather by getting the fundamentals down, then you do gain a highly valuable set of skills for the "real world".

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I was working on my own at a start up incubator. This enabled me to network with a lot of the start up crowd in my city. I seemed to be the only one in that circle who had decent knowledge around performance marketing, so my name got thrown around a lot. Xero ended up contacted me.

I didn't get into detail with any options in terms of stocks, but even if I just asked for the stock street price I would of made close to an extra $500,000 for a few weeks work. Hindsight is a bitch.

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"I built the first online ad campaign for Xero.com"!!!! Wow. Well done.
Good post man.

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See his post right above yours. I asked the same question.

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Yep, this is totally true.

Indeed, these days I find myself recommending AM a lot to people who intend to start other online businesses, purely because there's no better way to learn how to market online than AM. And it teaches you a lot of other skills besides - indeed, other than programming and raising finance, pretty much everything you'd need for an (online) startup, for example.

I've personally used the skills I've developed in AM to help friends market everything from startups to Pilates businesses, to do a variety of interesting consulting work, to promote films, and a lot more.

Great post!

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Thanks Caurmen. How did you market for the consulting and film work? Thanks.

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I once contacted a small auto insurance company in Canada to try and get a direct deal with them. When i told them the #'s i was doing they tried to hire me over the phone.

It just shows how important affiliate marketing skills are. If you can drive direct sales in big numbers then you're in high demand.

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@nzbryant - I don't really have to market for the consulting at all - generally, if I'm chatting to someone who owns a business (which is about half of the people I know) and I mention I have some expertise in Internet advertising, I usually end up giving them about 30 min of free basic advice and then there's about a 50% chance they hire me or we end up doing some kind of joint venture project We have a pretty in-demand skillset.

As for the film work - do you mean how did I get the work on the film, or how did I do the marketing associated with the film?

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Thanks. How did you get to market a film?

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I made the film

Although if you want to get into film marketing, it's not hard. Find the indie film scene for your country (or another) and ask around for people who are launching a feature and need marketing help. They'll be tearfully grateful in most cases. You can do that a few times and hey presto, you're an experienced movie promoter.

The tricky bit will be finding the films that actually stand a chance in the marketplace in the first place. Pro tip: low-budget horror is probably the most reliable indie genre right now (in that maybe 1 in 5 of them will be successful).

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great thread. I sometimes feel a bit less motivated because I think AM is not passive income, as apps are in my case.
But then I remind myself 2 things - You can make six-seven figures quite realistcly, but more importantly you're building a skillset.

Now I'm 20, I've got at least 40 more years of using my skillset, now it's the time to grow it, and then when I start my own brand I'll know how to sell, which is critical, and how to reach miliions of people.

It's all about the investment

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Yep - I also chose it for long-term purpose. It gives you a competitive advantage for you and your business.

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Great success! Basically with these traffic skills, running successful businesses becomes easier!

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Bumping this. Alot of new guys need to see the potential of the business we are in.


- Jeremiah

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Just chanced upon this, am already motivated as an AM newbie but thanks for the reinforcement!

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I can vouch for this too.

Let me share something though...You can make good money without knowing jack shit about marketing.
How do i know? I made over $2m in rev selling teespring shirts and then hit a brick wall the last 1.5 years.
Following the herd and "build a brand bro" with Shopify resulted in digging a bigger hole in my bank account...

Went to China, Canton fair last year in November hoping to find my next product to build a brand from.
Came back home and realized that i really didn't want to do ecommerce anymore.

I simply wanted to buy media, convert the traffic and collect the checks, which eventually lead me into
affiliate marketing.

Started in late November focusing ALL my effort into AM and i thought i would make $1k profit within 2-3 weeks.
Hell how wrong i was, and that was when i REALIZED that i didn't know much about how to market.

Fast forward to today and i have learnt SO MUCH about how to buy traffic, optimize and how to tailor offers
to different demos (angles).

Starting a campaign and optimizing it from RED to GREEN was for me madness just a couple weeks ago.
I thought that no matter what if it doesn't give positive ROI from the get go, it's a loser.

Side note: i haven't yet found my profitable AM campaign, but been very close on some offers.

Point of this post?
I don't care if i struggle for one more year to make cash, the day i crack it will be the day i can
tackle any industry online with the AM skills.
And the posts above prooves it VERY WELL!

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