The first and most important consideration before you get started with affiliate
marketing is to know what you want to get out of it. This may sound like the ‘boring
stuff’ and perhaps you just want to get stuck in as quickly as possible; in fact though, not
knowing your goals or having the wrong expectations can be a huge setback if you don’t
take the time to think this through. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is a big part of
why a lot of people fail at affiliate marketing.

Largely responsible for this issue, are all the adverts that flood Facebook telling you that
you can earn thousands of dollars a day by just posting a few ads. Then there are people
like Tai Lopez, telling you that you can earn millions like them and be a genius
billionaire by following their course.

This sets up unrealistic expectations and leads to people going into affiliate marketing
underprepared and with a lot of false hope. It also leads to some serious mistakes.
In theory, you can make money as an affiliate marketer by following four very easy
steps:

• Find an affiliate product to market on JVZoo or Clickbank
• Create a landing page flaunting the benefits of said product and including your link
• Pay for highly targeted PPC ads through Facebook
• Profit!

Easy right?

Facebook ads are PPC which means that you only pay if someone clicks them. So if you
set-up an advertising campaign that’s entirely ineffective and everyone ignores… it won’t
cost you anything! If your landing page is very good then you can expect to convert a fair
amount of visitors into buyers and with a decent digital product, you should be able to
earn about $30-$50 per purchase. Considering that you’ll only be paying a few cents for
each customer – who has already shown an interest in your product – that means that
you can almost guarantee a decent ROI from those advertising campaigns. The longer
the ad runs, the more you can earn and the more you can reinvest to scale your
products.

What’s more, you can target the ads to show to precisely the right people using the
information available on Facebook. Got a book on how to plan a cheap wedding? Great:
just target your book toward people who are engaged on Facebook!
Meanwhile, you can build up your own direct audience through a website and through a
mailing list so that eventually you won’t even need to pay from advertising and you can
sell over and over again to your list that puts their trust in everything you say and
recommend.

This is the promise of affiliate marketing and it sounds like a simple, fool-proof way to
make money. But there are some catches that very often get overlooked by the people
selling the online courses and the eBooks for $1,000.

One of these catches is that there are hundreds of other people trying to sell eBooks on
making money. And there are hundreds of other people competing for the advertising
space on Facebook. Facebook ads show based on who has the larger advertising budget
and the result is determined by an automated ‘bidding process’. In other words, you
need a fairly large budget in order for your ads to be seen, meaning that you can actually
end up spending 50cents to several dollars for your ads to get clicked.

This now means that you can still profit, but in order to do so, you need the perfect
landing page and the perfect product for the ideal audience. These are a lot of factors
that you’re frankly unlikely to get right the very first time. As a result, it’s not
uncommon to end up sinking huge amounts of money into PPC before you land on a
good set-up with the right targeting, the right ad text, the right product etc.

As for building your own audience, this can often take years before you’re at a point
where you don’t need PPC. If you thought you’d be the top blogger in your niche within
months, then you unfortunately need a reality check. Rather, you can expect it to take
you a year or more to get to this point. And far from doing nothing, this will have to
involve writing regular content and doing lots of promotion – almost to the extent of it
being a full time job. And while you’re doing this, you won’t be getting paid for the work
you’re doing. A lot of us just can’t afford to put such a big investment into something
that isn’t paying out yet.

And when you had gone into this, expecting that you would be a millionaire by month
two, it’s very easy to get disheartened and to just give up.