Affiliate Marketing 2020 (9)
Hey everyone,
I had a question about taking the time to invest in learning the skill of affiliate marketing. I see affiliate marketing as learning the skill set of running paid traffic to an offer and optimizing & scaling these advertising campaigns and I know this skill can be transferred to other business models so..
My question is...
Is it worth it to invest the time to learn the skill of Affiliate Marketing in 2020 and beyond vs taking the time to learn other business models such as building and selling information products, amazon fba,
Really I am going back and forth between either going all in on learning the affiliate marketing skill set vs all in on building a sales copywriting service, I am fascinated by direct response marketing and both of these skills seem to have their own advantages.
I am just looking for some advice or insight into the current digital business landscape. And to be sure the path I go down will pay off at some point, I am not trying to be negative or knock anyone, just looking for advice from someone who has more experience than I do.
Thank you.
BTW, this forum has been awesome, so much incredible information, tutorials, posts, follow alongs etc.. The mods and a lot of members here seem to be incredibly helpful and again just wanted to thank everyone for that.
Take a step back and figure out:
- which skills you have now (and see where they are most useful now). then check what parts you want to learn yourself.
- what you want to learn is often in line with things you like most to do (coding, copywriting, stats, creative/front end)
- write down what you have to outsource/buy/rip or create.
- then check which traffic sources (and/or vertical) suit best with your current skillset and future preferences.
based on this you might be able to draw a raw strategy. you will find hurdles which you have to overcome. learn and ask more concrete questions so you learn more in-depth stuff and develop a specialization.
Thanks stickupkid, I appreciate the feedback.
You can build a product and then use affiliate skills to sell it.
Building a well converting product requires a lot of testing of the funnel, to make it perfect and converting as good as possible. And for that, you need traffic, which you can get from the traffic sources we are all using here, to promote affiliate offers.
Same for copy-writing services, you won't know if the copy is good until you test it... which requires traffic again and the fastest way to obtain it is to buy it
So yes, I'd say it definitely makes sense to explore the affiliate way... the skills you will gain are transferable to so many other business areas.
One of the best of all time once said, “Learn to sell other people’s stuff first. Get successful at that and then you can sell your own shit”
His point was, do affiliate marketing first. If you can handle that, then you can do dropshipping or your own product. Or anything you want really.
Thanks @matuloo & @jaybot.
Having the skills of affiliate marketers (running, testing, optimizing, scaling funnels and ad campaigns) looks to be very transferable to other business models as they all require traffic to the offer/ lander/ product.
So yea makes a lot of sense to “Learn to sell other people’s stuff first. Get successful at that and then you can sell your own shit”
I think I was getting the shiny object syndrome and not wanting to miss out on testing other business models.
Originally Posted by clewis
Plenty of the forum members who started with the simple AM approach ended up running companies with bigger teams and the AM knowledge helped them to do it better.
It's like in any business... think about managers in, I dont know, machinery industry for example. A manager with direct experience with operating a machine, can certainly understand the overall process better than someone who has never produced anything "with their hands". Or let's chose something more related to what we do here... someone with even a minor coding experience will have a better idea about what's possible to do and how long it could take and communicate their ideas better to real coders.
It's basically a puzzle, the more pieces of it you have experience with, the better the final product can be
Thanks @matuloo, I appreciate the feedback.
Im going to follow the advise I was given here and study and learn the skills of affiliates, I think being able to run paid traffic is transferable to all the other business models I was thinking of, as you explained in your post.
So again, thank for your advise, ver much appreciated
Probably there are not many other things that died so often and constant as affiliate marketing.
Fact is that the online market is steadily growing and doesn´t show real signs to change that trend.
Affiliate marketing is growing together with the market.
Sure it changes over time but I don´t think it will go anywhere soon.
So in my opinion it should not be the question if affiliate marketing is still worth it in 2020.
The question should rather be if you prefer affiliate marketing = promoting other peoples products or if you would rather like to build own assets or create own products.
But even when you decide to go with own products it can´t hurt to start affiliate marketing a bit just to understand the market and the flows/funnels better.
There are many great product owners who know shit about marketing and there are many great affiliates who know shit about having own product - basically a heavenly match.
Probably only better is a great product owner who is also great in marketing
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum