A Post I Disagree With
I read this post yesterday and immediately disagreed with it. Since my opinion differs from Amit’s, I’ll post my take on the subject of his article. It was written by Amit from Super Affiliate Mindset, and was about how to get started as an affiliate.
It must have been an act of God that I saw the article because I never really look at his blog. To be honest all of his “Check out my new cherry oak $5 million dollar desks, they’re so expensive!” posts borderline make me vomit. But for some reason I was compelled to see what he’d been writing about lately, and found this article.
So here’s the article in a nutshell : the best way to get started as an affiliate is to direct link Clickbank products. Here are the reasons why I disagree with this…
1) I don’t like Clickbank at all, and don’t think it’s the best place to learn. Most Clickbank products are just long sales pages selling a crappy eBook or product. There’s a few okay offers on CB, and I know one of Amit’s biggest offer is a Clickbank product (I’ll be nice and won’t mention it). Perhaps that’s why he recommends them…but I don’t. I’ve tried direct linking Clickbank products like Balloon Twisting, Kidney Stones, and Marriage Books…all of them have flopped. There are much better networks with solid affiliate offers to learn on.
2) I don’t like direct linking either. Amit says it himself, “This is by no means a long term business strategy, but it’s the FASTEST way to learn Adwords, and direct marketing, for that matter.” Let me ask you this question, are you in the industry for tomorrow, or for the next ten years? Let’s say you set up a CB direct link campaign and it’s making $20 profit/day. Yayy that’s great but in two weeks it gets slapped and now it’s a dud. It’s okay, we used it to learn and now we can go set up an insurance offer that’s going to do great in the long term…not. You’ll learn how to direct link Clickbank products, that’s what you’ll learn. I’ll agree that you’ll also learn the basics of writing adcopy, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes.
The best way to start is to learn it all. If you design a landing page and promote an offer, you still have to get that Adwords traffic to it. You’ll learn keyword selection and ad copy writing, but your experience will go far beyond that. You’ll learn the ins-and-outs of designing a website to market directly to your visitor, learn the quality score system (that everybody hates), and learn how to promote offers with generally a much higher conversion rate and opportunity to scale.
3) On starting the campaign, Amit says :
Launch your campaign on Adwords with a starting bid of 0.20. Closely monitor your campaign. (1) if you’re getting virtually zero traffic, up your bids. (2) If your getting lots of traffic ( > 500 clicks) and zero sales, you’ve probably got a dud, move on (3) If your getting traffic and consistent sales, you’ve got a winner, now you need to optimize and make it profitable!
If you want crappy position, crappy CTR, and then a slap in the face from Google, I recommend starting all your bids at $0.20. You’ll get a decent position for 20 cents on keywords that get 0.01 searches/day and no traffic.
4) Once of the reasons it seems Amit recommends direct linking is because…
Building a website is probably the biggest hurdle many affiliates face when getting started in this business, that is, unless your a professional web designer! I know it was a HUGE hurdle for me, it took me weeks to learn enough html to make a simple webpage with tables that didn’t look like a 5 year old threw it together!
So…get a professional web designer to build you a page? Most super affiliates don’t do design anyways, they have a designer their work for them. I actually design most of my pages (but not all), but it took a few months of getting used to html and more importantly Photoshop. Don’t have $100 to get a landing page designed for you? It’s time to start thinking about opportunity costs. I’ll quote a book I’m reading right now (I’ll tell you what book it is when I expand on it in a future post) that offers some good advice,
The poor often live frugally, not realizing that time is more important than money. The rich realize that time is more valuable than money because with time you can make money, but with money you cannot make time. They understand the principal of opportunity cost and do not hesitate to spend $1,000 for someone to paint their house if during that time they can make $3,000 working at what they do best.
Great quote right there. In the time it takes you to either learn how to design good landing page (months), or first learn how to direct link CB products (weeks/months) to save up some cash, you could make 10x as much by paying the designer to make a page for $100, and then build up a long term campaign. Time for me to say it again : you can’t be afraid to spend money as an affiliate marketer.
I don’t really feel like writing any more about this as I’ve made my point. Direct linking Clickbank products is not the best way to get started in affiliate marketing. Read up some material, research an offer, set up a landing page, spend some money, TEST TEST TEST and then SCALE.
Let me know your thoughts on it all.
See you at Affiliate Summit.
I visit Amit’s blog regularly, and you are right, there is very little value to someone like me, who is trying to learn affiliate marketing. Yes, there are some archived posts of his that teach you, but lately, it is just a waste of time.
“The poor often live frugally, not realizing that time is more important than money. The rich realize that time is more valuable than money because with time you can make money, but with money you cannot make time. They understand the principal of opportunity cost and do not hesitate to spend $1,000 for someone to paint their house if during that time they can make $3,000 working at what they do best.”
I have also read this book. I found a lot of insightful knowledge from that book and apply that daily to my business.
is the book 4HWW?
hey paul, I completely agree with you. Starting with clickbank is the worst thing you can do, because they have such a large amount of crappy offers. Ebooks and landing pages that say ‘Buy NOW’ or “Check our testimonials”, the whole landing page is filled with stupid tags and yellow created marks. Anyway, I’m also a bit new to affiliate marketing, but I defenitily will give it a try for the next coming months. Though I’m very busy with my university and college, money making online, creating websites, the whole online community, that’s my passion. I can’t do without, and never will. The only thing that is holding me down are my parents, because they want me to graduate at the university. But I appreciate that, because if I fail making money online, I still have the best opportunity be become rich with my business study. Anyway, good thing you’re posting your opinion and be objective, rather than duplicating their content on your own blog.
Nice read,
Bye
Here we Go
I have found positions 1-3 to be best for CTR and it has aloud me to bid down big time. I actually started my clicks out very low and got a POOR CTR level and now I had to bid super high to get my ctr back, so I can start bidding down and eventually go into a profit state.
But hey every one has there opinion and I think Amit has a great blog and you do to, but out of my all honesty I’m not a super affiliate by any means, but I am very good with organic search and have a very good background when it comes to search marketing and I would have to say I would create landing pages and not direct link for many reasons.
If ClickBank is so bad what are some other affiliate networks that offer better deals than CJ?
Incentaclick, Neverblue, Copeac, CPA Empire…
Most people reading Amit’s post will get excited and end up spending money and wonder why it didn’t work. Sorry to say, affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as direct linking.
I agree.
I think the best way to succeed is to just do it and most likely fail at first.
It might take you a dozen campaigns that fail during the leanring curve, but if you are persistant eventually you are going to get it… the right way.
See yall at ASW
Thank you. I will check these out. The thing is, I’m just starting with affiliate business but there is lots of contrary information on the web it’s difficult to orientate.
No it’s not. Since Paul doesn’t want to give out the title, I’ll refrain from saying what it is here.
I have to disagree with you here…
Failure causes discouragement. Success makes one confident and motivated (even if success is small). If newbs fail horribly right out of the gate, they are more likely to quit. If they see even mild success it will keep them motivated!
Yeah definitely stay in college. I’m in college now. I manage my campaigns in between classes. It’s really not hard at all, and has actually improved my performance with PPC since I can’t sit around all day hit refresh. I’m forced to let campaigns run their course and hasty decisions are cut out completely. If that makes any sense.
Amit sometimes makes me wonder. This stuff would have worked 4 years ago… and in fact did work. But today with click prices continuing to go up and Google with its “refined” quality guidelines – Amit’s advise just isn’t as viable.
I will say this though – I have a few direct linking campaigns bringing in decent coin on yahoo. Apply some intelligent insight and you can pretty much weed out the crap and get a bit of an edge on what will convert for you.
Here is what I think has happened. Amit probably gets 1000 emails a day for people asking how to make money online, and what his steps do is allow people to see some results for their affiliate marketing efforts.
His process is easy and would probably earn the affiliate a few dollars, not necesarily profit, but would allow them to see some results.
I heard Amit is all beefed up now and a real meathead and loose canon now that he is all muscular. Has anyone seen him lately that can verify?
Dont forget.. Tracking, Tracking, Tracking.
It’s pretty easy actually with simple PHP. I can do more with simple php scripts than i can with those stupid confusing tracking programs. That way you know if you have a good ad/keyword in a bad bunch. Or if your lucky, the opposite.
I’m actually quite interested to know what Amit runs at Clickbank – I have a gut feeling he is the bigwig running all of the huge “work from home” type offers (“TypeFromHome” and all that crap)… who knows.
Agreed, I just jumped into AdWords, and started doing PPC, I’ve been logging my studies on a blog… Harder than I thought. I am almost* breaking even, haha.
Maybe post some more articles or something on how you keyword research :D and write ad copy, difficult, I have horrible word usage, lol. I picked up a book though =]
I’m glad you wrote this article. I read that article yesterday. I signed up for ClickBank as well. I didn’t like them as well.
At the point I still learning about how to create a good landing page. So, in point, I don’t want to pay someone when I have absolutely no idea what a good one looks like or what a good one is comprised of. Currently, I’m trying to use a blog page as a landing page just so I can use other pages for other keywords. I don’t even know if this is a good idea. Any thoughts?
I sort of look at this issue in a different light. Yes, direct linking (Clickbank,Other merchants) is not the best way to learn how to build an internet business.
However, as a newbie their main issue is not having the confidence that money can be made online by them personally.
So if they can experiment by throwing up some adword campaigns promoting clickbank products(direct linking) they are bound to make some sales here and there. That is a huge confidence builder.
From that point on they will have the confidence to invest $1000 in landing pages and building an actual business.
Awesome post! I learned a lot Paul.
-David
How do you get into affiliate networks without an established site? I do web design, graphics, pretty much everything, so I’m not worried about creating pages, but how can I build a site if I don’t know what offers they have available? I don’t have any functioning sites up at the moment.
Yeeeeah a newbie question, but that’s the only thing holding me back right now. I know if I send an application they will probably reject it unless I have a decent site going now. Anyone who can answer, it would be appreciated.
OMG: “Obscure little niches work great with direct linking though, as long as they has a decent sales page and a viable market.”
Obscure little niches are obscure because they are mostly worth sh#t! Now the 20 cents bid… WTF?! I had not even started in affiliate marketing and i know(because i had spent already a nice chunk of time and money on some EDUCATION, but the most and BEST part came FREE :) that his advice is DEATH for any new person in this business.
My word to you Paul: keep up the GOOD work and DON’T GET CROOKED!
BTW, i REALLY liked some of the Amit’s info but there is alway some stuff that can go wrong.. I can only hope that he starts to give folks again some good information because if he continues to give this shitty info he will not educate people the wrong way but could also cause that the folks that listen his every word to loose money that could be essential to their day to day livelihood.
Good luck to everyone who is starting out!
There is a super affiliate who make over $200,000/per month promoting ClickBank products, and he prefers CB over AZ, MB, CJ and other networks. Amit & Paul are both super affiliates so who is right? At this point it’s a matter of opinion and both are confident in their positions. I think Amit’s coming case study will prove whether or not his advice will work.
I have to disagree with you both.
Success and failure is handled differently with different people. Sometimes, initial failure and success can not be determined or chosen and must be experienced first hand (you can not choose every detail of the hand you’re dealt). Some people can not face failure and will quit, others will not. Minor success or achievement is great but can not always be controlled, otherwise everyone would opt for the success route. Ultimately it is up to the person to make the correct choices and how they wish to proceed (and handle failures that come with the territory along the way).
It’s really not opinion at all.
Amit’s post should really be called “how to learn to setup a campaign in Adwords and direct link to a clickbank product”, because those are the only two things you learn.
While what Paul suggests, will show you the concepts you need in the long run and will eventually have to master if you want to even have a chance in this industry. Especially working with adwords, direct linking is out of the picture unless by some godly coincidence clickbank’s landing page happens to have perfect content for your keywords and perfect internal linking structure – never.
Have fun.
In my opinion, Amit is showing an easy way to get started with affiliate marketing, that doesn’t require all the hustle to create a landing page, etc. Personally I don’t like all that e-books on clickbank. And I’m a strong believer that you should learn to do things yourself if you have nothing better to do (opportunity cost as Paul said-I think it was the second thing that I learned in collage after “Cost”)
Hello Paul
Your posts are always very informative. I stumbled across your blog not so long ago but I immediately realised how much knowledge you have put in it for your readers. Thanks mate.
Just one thing from the above post, if you don’t mind advising. You mentioned about keywords and that bid should not be a straight $2 for all the keywords, what would be your recommended strategy.
Thanks Paul, Keep up the great work.
And i just remembered where this is from… But i’ll follow your lead as well
Hi paul/Sup3n0va,
As I commented on Amit’s blog, direct linking is the worst advice i can give someone, while dealing affiliate programs.
About ClickBank… I don’t know if it’s the best way to start, but that’s how I started, and I’m doing really, really well with clickbank. I started only 2 month ago and I’m already break even with ROI more that 200%.
However, if you think there are better ways to start affiliate marketing, please share them. I write affiliate marketing blog for newbies in hebrew (cause I’m newbie), and I’m recommending there to use CB, cause as I said it works excellent for me, but I’d be happy to hear more ways 4 newbies to start, cause I want to give my users valuable information.
Thanks.
haha.. admit it you read this blog daily even though it makes you vomit
I totally agree!
When I was starting off about 4 months ago, I tried direct linking with both Clickbank products and other products on NeverBlueAds. All ten campaigns I tried tanks, and I only make $60 revenue after spending $1000.
Now after slowing down a bit and making landing pages, I’m making a steady $30 per day profit. Meager, I know. But it’s a start. And I’ll slowly raise, as I also have a full time job to contend with.
Quick question for you though. Do you promote just one offer per page/site, or do you do a review type site with several similar offers?
Thanks!
hey what’s wrong with hitting refresh? :p
nice going! I love hearing about people making their first $. Keep it up
Hi Paul,
Interesting perspective, you have a lot of good points. Please keep in mind that my advice is for a “strapped for cash affiliate” who can’t start bidding $5 a click or afford to build a landing page for every niche he’s testing out.
The idea that bidding high to start with will somehow give you a better quality score is BS, that’s from Google not from me. Check out Geordie Carswell’s recent posts. The benefit of bidding high is that you build history FASTER.
Also, doing direct linking does not mean you will automatically get slapped. It depends on the merchant site. To this day there are super affiliates who’s entire business is direct linking, no joke.
Do yourself a favor and don’t try to sound like you’re THE authority on PPC because you’re making big money now. Once you start thinking that way you stop learning. Seriously man…I know I still have a lot to learn.
That being said, you have a great blog, congrats on your success. :)
An online buddy of mine told me not long ago that he was able to make about $ 300 per day in revenue through Adwords using only ‘redirects’ without any problems. That surprised me a bit!