Note To Affiliate Marketer: What Not To Base Product Picking Upon

Being an affiliate marketer is about finding cool products. However, product selection can not be based entirely upon:

1. Clickbank (insert vendor/affiliate directory name) stats. We will find out that stats, especially the stats from Affiliate Directory websites have little use and tell us only 90% of the story. They do not predict anything and they surely do not predict a winning product. At the very best all they can state is that one product sells better than another…that is all.

2. Someone else’s dealings. You will never know what someone does or how they have done everything. Seth Godin stated that he never gives out “how to” books because you can never recreate the factors that made that business successful in the first place. Sometimes even they do not know. And why would they tell you their secrets anyway? What I have found is that if a promoter tells you something new and that it works, it doesn’t. It is not as evergreen as they say. I do not know why my traffic increases when I leave my websites alone. It maybe a factor which Google doesn’t state, but who knows?

3. A marketer. Marketing is promoting a product so that targeted people will enjoy a targeted product. Marketing is best involved therefore at the start of product design all the way through to getting it in front of the eyeballs of your customer. A marketer will tell you what customers want and then they tell the customers about it. Marketing is not really about product selection, it is about product design and product promotion. Getting 100,000 eyes to see your product will not necessarily bring in 100,000 customers. What we will find is that affiliates who are making $5k/ month are actually missing out on tons of money…money that their hard work should be reaping, but it is not.

4. Having an entrepreneur’s spirit. Being an entrepreneur is not about making risky decisions or being the “sole worker”. People who have thought that way have actually destroyed their business very easily. Did you know that you are an accountant, marketer, solicitor, designer, writer, technician and graphic artist? Is that what you assume that an entrepreneur does? Well actually a business owner is that. A true entrepreneur actually works outside their business and not within their business. By working 40hours/ week is not keen spirit, it is dull work. Work that you shouldn’t be doing. If you want to work 40 hours per week then you are actually working a job…which you thought you had left or want to give up. Why go from 40 hours per week with benefits, to 40 hours per week doing everything and getting random results and random pay days?

I figured all this out late. Most people do. They spend so much time on a website for it to fail, then start up another one for it to fail as well.

Trying hard and then failing is not success and don’t let anyone tell you that. It is failure. You are doing something wrong. Sure some smart person who you want to slap will say “but you are closer to success”. No you are not! You are closer to burn out, a small bank account and frustration.

Everyday products get sold and everyday new products come onto the market. You just got to have an iron tight plan to match the product with the customer. If you don’t then you will not make anything regardless of the product or marketing behind it.

I have bought around 57 domain names because I had an idea. Out of those domain names, 4 I actively use. It is not that I give up easily, it is just that what I was doing was unbelievable wrong. But I didn’t know that it was wrong, so I did the same thing over and over again until I emailed Jeff Smith (one of a very small handful of marketers who actually emails you back) and asked him a question…which basically said “I have been going round the twist [gave low down and life story], what am I doing wrong?”.

His 2 line answer bashed me in the head and kept me awake for days.

My issue was that I didn’t realize that I was bad at something.

Note to Affiliate Marketer Part 2. It is a complete system

You see product selection and being a good affiliate marketer is only as good as the whole system.

You have heard the stupid saying from your boss/ teacher that “you are a cog in the whole machine and without you the machine fails” (the Incredibles does a better job at explaining it).

Every system works upon cogs. I just didn’t realize that one of my cogs was a terrible rusty mess.

In reality The Complete System results in product selection, but product selection was only one system which needed other systems to function. You can not just pick a product, it is doomed to failure. You can not just create a website. That too is doomed to failure.

If you want to make a quick buck, then do what everyone else is doing- going round and round in circles, blabbing that they make $10,000/ month (they all make that figure don’t they) and then sell theory. Most people online do not make what they state and most make very little.

Why?

Because they have no idea that everything is related. The System “your business of selling widget A” has many different systems which are all built up using cogs. These cogs drive each system to their finest point- their pinnacle. If they all work, then you have a business which you can leave alone- and not be part of.

That is a true entrepreneur business.

I recently read a marketing info blast that the Kindle can make you rich. It can, but in the right way. If you create a Kindle book (which is actually easy to do) what a lot of “treasure seekers” are doing they will not find their treasure. They will find a hole. What they do not realize is that Kindle is a system. For that system to work it has to be dependent upon other systems. One feeds the other.

Youtube is one system.

Blogger is one system

HubPages and Squidoo are two systems.

By themselves they do not give you anything. Most people are putting up Youtube videos for affiliate sales, but they rarely work as effectively as they should.

It is not plugged into a bigger system. It is a lonesome system working by itself- it will never generate the cash/ sales/ interest/ signups that you desire. It just can’t.

But if one cog is wrong, if one doesn’t work or fit within the system where it lives, the whole system will not work.

If we want to choose a product to sell we need a product selection system. However that system is influenced by another system- the media which you intend to sell from. But that system is influenced by how customers will find your media. And then that system is influenced by who is going to buy it in the first place. Each has a part to play and each must be defined, each must be perfected and each must be allowed to become what it is designed to be.

Therefore, a product can not be just found. It can not be picked and it can not be deduced by odd statistics or hunches. Many a business has failed through those means.

Warren Buffet is often talked about for being a highly intelligent investor. He is. He also had some major failures because he didn’t stick to the systems which he created for himself. He tried airlines- even though he failed with them in the past. Guess what, years later he failed again. He stays away from Internet stocks because the system that he created for stock picks says no to Internet stocks.

Warren doesn’t go to the Stock pages, looks for stocks and buys. He follows a system that he developed which worked. I looked up on Youtube about this and there are so many people with equations and stats and “this is how Warren picks his stocks”. Actually he doesn’t tell people how he does it, never has (he calls it “coatailing”). What we do know is that he follows a huge amount of research that he commissions and adds extra information. He follows a well oiled machine that has become his system. As a side note, stock picks was what he used to start his career. Now he predominantly buys businesses.

So what systems are required for the affiliate seller?