Adventures & Insights 4/28/24

Last Updated on April 28, 2024 by Eric Cantu

Sunday, April 28, 2024

How was everyone’s Sunday? I’m sending this a little later than normal, so forgive me. Today Tonight I want to talk to you about the best business choice I ever made: getting into affiliate marketing.

The year was 2016, I had just gotten out of a breakup, and I was wanting something new. I wanted a new challenge. I had forever wanted to travel more, so in the back of my mind there was always this itch of “how can I make more money to travel?”

I’ll preface this by saying the only real “online business” experience I’d ever had up to this point was with MLMs. You know MLM’s right? Multi-level marketing or “network marketing? It was like the big popular thing in the 2010s where everyone had some kind of home business and you recruited people in and then they recruited people and everyone got a handful of customers and you got paid on everyone’s work as a team.

Sound familiar? The hardest part was explaining to people how it wasn’t an illegal pyramid scheme. (You have to have an actual product in MLMs whereas pyramid schemes have no real product, and are thus illegal).

This was my first “online business” experience. Yeah it was fun, me and my buddy did well, but ultimately MLMs aren’t sustainable. You’re getting paid on the efforts of the team, and if the majority of the team isn’t working like you are, it ultimately fails.

So I started looking into more straightforward types of online business. Initially all I found were the weird gurus online that I made mention of last week. The ultra cliche, red flag, “try my full-proof system” gurus that roll up in their Facebook ad in a sports car or walking out of a mansion.

That wasn’t what I wanted at all. I just wanted to learn how people made money on YouTube, how people made money blogging, and how it all worked.

Honestly, I think I just got lucky. I found an article on a website that was so much more straightforward than all the flashy ads I’d seen. It talked about how bloggers make money promoting things they use online. It led me to a training platform that was ridiculously affordable, and SEVEN YEARS LATER I’ve never left.

So let me give you the cliff notes.

To build an online business:

• First: choose your niche. This can be literally ANYTHING. You don’t have to try to find some hidden, untapped niche. Forget that. It’s not the beginning of the internet anymore. There are no “untapped” niches. Just go with something you have genuine interest in. Travel vlogging cameras, chess for beginners, you name it, there’s profitability there to be had. The only real trick is to be specific with your niche and not go too broad.
• Second, build a website. This I had no background in, but it’s so much easier than you think. Websites are built around themes, and when you get the hang of the basic elements of the site, it’s not like you have to know all this code or HTML or anything like that. You just add an image here, a logo there, a menu, basic organizational elements, and your website is ready. It’s amazing how far website builders have come in recent years.
• Next, create content. Think of affiliate marketing like fishing. Seriously. I’m not even a fisherman, but this analogy is my go-to. Every piece of content you write on this website, every article, is like a hook. And you want as many hooks as possible in the water, right? The key here is understanding how to use Google to find the most popular searches your target audience is making. People all over the world are using Google every minute of every day to lead them to what they want to learn or BUY. So when you know the exact searches your target audience is making, you basically reverse engineer that and create content that is the ANSWER to those searches. Your audience makes a search and your content comes up as the answer. (Keyword research was one of the most eye-opening lessons in the training for me).
• Last, monetize that targeted traffic you’ve driven to your site. There’s so many ways to monetize your traffic. Even people just arriving at your website can be monetized, but past that there are affiliate links that make it so that every single time a purchase is made you earn a commission, and the best part is there’s no ceiling. When you learn to get your content at the top of Google searches that article basically turns into a cash register. “Cha-CHING!” And here’s the cool part. You don’t have to focus 100% on a website. You can do all this in any combination of ways. You can build a YouTube channel, use social media marketing, email marketing. All these are different approaches to the same goal, and they WORK!

Now, it doesn’t all just come together overnight. You have to focus on learning first, then you learn how to create solid content that converts, you get better at what your’e doing, and as with any business you start out of the blue, you make a million mistakes your first few months. But then it clicks and you suddenly have a nice beautiful $4k month in your first year.

That’s literally what happened to me.

So when I shout from the rooftops about how much opportunity there is online. It’s for a reason. There are a handful of solid training platforms out there, and when you know how to spot the red flags I showed you last week (you’re welcome), it makes things a lot easier on you.

So what about you? What’s your passion? Do you want to travel the world like me? Or are you just trying to give yourself a little more time freedom? Everyone has a “why” and if you want to be successful with your own online business venture, I think your first piece of homework should be nailing down yours.

What’s your “why?”

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