It is the dream of many online marketers to be able to live the Internet marketing lifestyle, but few actually manage to achieve it. Although there are many Internet marketing strategies that can lead to the wealth and freedom that is so desired, affiliate marketing is probably the easiest and fastest way to reach the ultimate goal.
In order to make the Internet marketing lifestyle a reality, first you have to understand what it really means. Many marketers claim to live the Internet marketing lifestyle, so what is our definition of this idyllic state?
My definition is simple: it is the ability to live your life on your own terms, secure in the knowledge that your income, from Internet marketing, will more than fund it.
It isn’t, for me, about how many or how few hours I work, but how much I enjoy all the hours in my days.
For me and my family, that comes down to eating in good restaurants whenever we want to, going to the movies or the theater anytime we please and dropping everything to just goof off for days at a time when the mood takes us. But in the end, I don’t really live an exotic life and love to just be able to spend as much time at home with my family and friends as I like. The 4-Hour Work Week that Tim Ferris writes about is great, but when you love what you do, how many hours are work anyway? Creating websites, writing computer code and browsing the Internet may be my work, but they are also my hobby and my passion. So who is working?
The normal image of the Internet marketing lifestyle involves fast cars, wild parties and exotic vacations in the world’s trendiest resorts – and usually involves someone making money while relaxing in a hammock on a paradise beach somewhere.
Of all the people I know who are wildly successful online and enjoy the freedom to live their lives as they choose, only two fit that jet-set image in any way!
The others are more like me and live their lives according to their own rules and not those imposed by a job or a boss.
Oddly, of all the people I know with that ‘lifestyle freedom’, almost all – probably 90% of them – are affiliate marketers. Their entire business model is based on selling other people’s products for a commission.
Those who claim to be in the know about Internet marketing often trot out the old truism that to make real money online you have to produce your own products. But I think that is a myth. It is true that you make more profits from the sales you make for yourself (100% of the price instead of a lower commission rate) but expanding your market can take a huge amount of very hard effort. Just creating the product can sometimes take months of planning and preparation and until it sells you really don’t know if that effort is going to be worthwhile. The very big rewards that are often talked about depend on your being able to attract the serious super-affiliates to promote for you. Unless you are already known to them or have some great contacts who can introduce you, that is a big challenge.
Don’t misunderstand me – creating your own products is a great way to make money online, but it is certainly not the easiest method!
Many people who have come to rely on creating new products on a regular basis have found that the economic downturn has made their business more precarious than they ever thought it could be.
Affiliate marketing, by its nature is much more flexible and can react faster and better to market changes.
Affiliate marketing is largely a business where you set things up once and then reap the rewards from your work for a long time to come. You find a promising niche market with products that can solve people’s problems, create a website that makes them aware of the solutions you’ve found and then set it free into the world to do its job of making you money – largely without any further input from you. You then find another problem, another solution and build another ongoing cash machine for yourself. And then you do it again, and again.
It is called multiple streams of income and is a very powerful protection against the many inevitable ups and downs of business. An affiliate marketer with ten sites (most will have a lot more) who sees three of them suffer a downturn is unlikely to be too worried because another three are just as likely to be seeing an upsurge. And if not, it is a simple thing to build a few more sites to jump on a new trend or hot product.
Another big advantage that affiliate marketing has over selling your own products is that you very rarely have to do any customer support. As an affiliate you are the middle man who introduces a buyer to a seller, so if there are problems along the way, or questions to be answered, that’s the job of the vendor, not the affiliate.
For this reason, those who practice affiliate marketing are much freer to enjoy their Internet marketing lifestyle than most other online marketers because they don’t have to be available to provide help and support at the drop of a hat. We, and I’m happy to include myself in this, are able to leave our desks – whether to disappear off on snap vacations or just to goof off with the kids for the day – pretty much anytime we like and nobody will care.
And, as an offshoot of that, affiliate marketing lets you remain largely anonymous if youwish.
Some people say that affiliate marketers are similar to commission-only salesmen in the offline world, but the comparison is not a good one. Offline sales people have to sell. That sounds obvious, but it is an important distinction. They live or die on how well they can persuade people to buy. That skill – dealing with the public and selling to them face to face is vital to the commission salesperson. But affiliate marketers are really not salespeople at all. They are more like trusted advisors who make people aware of things. The most successful simply act as a conduit between people with needs and those who can satisfy those needs. The objective is to excite interest and then pass the potential buyer on to the vendor’s sales page.
I suppose ‘introducers’ would be a good description.
A good affiliate knows to make sure that the vendor he represents has a powerful and effective sales page because although he has warmed up interest, the selling part is out of his hands. As soon as a potential customer clicks a link from the affiliate to the vendor, the affiliate’s job is over.
The Internet lifestyle is very appealing and when you achieve it, very rewarding. The freedom to live your life on your own terms is wonderful and should be the number one aim of anyone who hopes to make a living online. Affiliate marketing is just one way of making money online, but in my opinion it is the easiest and fastest way of making your dreams come true that I’ve ever come across.
That means being taught the ropes by someone who already lives the life you aspire to and can teach you how he does it.
One of the two super affiliates I know who really lives the jet-set lifestyle has created the definitive step-by-step course on how you can do it too. Click here to read my full and frank Unstoppable Affiliate Review to discover how he can open up the Internet lifestyle for you too.
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