Starting My Journey as an Affiliate Marketer

Starting My Journey Takes Training

This is not actually Day 1 but rather Day 15 into my journey as an Affiliate marketer.  My purpose is to see what will happen if I follow the Wealthy Affiliate Plan.  I am putting the Wealthy Affiliate Core Marketing plan to the test. I want to see if in fact this training is going to work, how long it will take to see results and how much effort it is going to take to get those results.

This will be my record of my progress and the steps I have taken to achieve my goals and dreams.

What I have learned since starting the training is that the Wealthy Affiliate Core training is about building Authority Blogs – Authority Sites.

Authority Sites – What I Know

From what I know on the subject Authority sites take a great deal of work, time and effort to create.

The Positive 

• These types of sites are very stable and not affected by much when it comes to changes on the internet. They have so much quality content on them that the changes to the search engine algorithms have little affect on them.
• These authority sites are like the giant that is unmovable and unstoppable.

The Negative

• They are content monsters that take years to build.
• They take time and lots of content generation.
• The content needs to be high quality and needs to be ever growing.
• Starting an authority site in a market that is huge like Internet Marketing is a very difficult and perhaps impossible task (for most people).

Defining A Smaller Market

So instead of targeting the entire internet marketing space you do what they call niche down. That means that you pick a subset of the larger group to be your audience. The idea is to target an audience within this large market space – pick one say – Work at home mothers.

• You then create content that centers around this group of people.
• You target their desire – their interests – their troubles and problems.
• You speak to that one group.
• So your Broad Niche is Internet Marketing – But your micro Niche is stay at home mothers.

In my case I am targeting those who have lost income due to illness or job loss. This group of people have bills to pay and are not able to keep up with the mountain of debt. They are desperate for change and are looking for an opportunity for more income. They may have a regular job but it is not enough to keep their bills from building.

Step 2 is To Define One Person

The next step is to build an avatar of the person you are marketing to – building a persona of who they are. It is important to build your marketing and campaigns around that specific person. Not a group of people but an individual whom you are going to know like a dear friend. You want to know this person well so that when you direct your messages that they hit a home run with this one person.

Give this person a name, address, profession – make them real on paper. Define what they like, what hobbies they have, what education they have, what they are hoping for in the future.

This will be the person that all your messages and marketing will be directed towards.

You can use www.fakenamegenerator.com to help build the identity of your Avatar.

The same steps can be done if your niche is outside the Internet Marketing space.

Example

• Our Broad Niche is Fitness for men
• Our Micro Niche is Fitness for Men over 40 who are too busy to take time to exercise.

An overview of the Wealthy Affiliate program

It is split into 2 main courses:

1. The Bootcamp covers the Internet Marketing(IM) Niche
2. The Online Entrepreneur – the training is directed towards niches outside of the IM niche

Both courses are teaching you how to build an authority site in your chosen niche or market space.

What We Learned In Phase 1

Take A Look at << PHASE 1 of the Bootcamp>> at Wealthy Affiliate

Phase 1 of Wealthy Affiliate.

• Choosing our Niche
• Choosing the Theme for our WordPress website
• Finding some keywords to target within our niche
• Working on the general set up of our website.
• Walking through some of the tools available at Wealthy Affiliate
• Building some important pages for our site
• Create our “About Me Page”
• Create our Wealthy Affiliate Review Page
• Basics of SEO

Phase 1 – What I Like

• Great system for the novice marketer
• The system has sets of tasks with each lesson.
• As each task is completed it will show how much has been completed and whether you should move onto the next lesson.
• The lessons are structured with both written curriculum and video.
• Everything is step by step and very simple.
• The pace for building content starts slow and keeps building with time.
• Nothing complicated in the tasks – they are all very simple to complete

Phase 1 – What I Dislike

• For someone more advanced or experienced it is not very informative.
• I am not sure that pointing someone new towards the Internet Marketing Space is really the best for someone who is brand new to this market. It is competitive and will probably be difficult for someone with little or no background in Internet Marketing.
• This program is a bad fit for someone who is short on time and needs to generate income quickly.

Those are my thoughts for today.

But inside everything you can always learn something – even for those who are experienced marketers.
 (If you have never had any success online this just might be a great way to get started.)

Follow along for << My NEXT DAY as an Affiliate Marketer >>.