The Affiliate Cash Code

What is Affiliate Marketing?
People who have been searching for a way to make money on the Internet have undoubtedly stumbled upon 'affiliate marketing.' But just what is 'affiliate marketing'?
Simply put, it is a way of making money online selling other people's products. These can be physical or digital products. Digital products are simply products that are, after being paid for, delivered via a download from a website (a protected member's site). These products range from a multitude of niches, from weight loss, to playing the guitar, to affiliate marketing itself. An affiliate marketeer makes money promoting these products (being an affiliate). He markets these affiliate products and gets paid for each sale. I have been doing research about affiliate marketing, and to summarise what I gathered to you my in the simplest possible way, this is how it works:
1. Set up a website to promote a digital product (lets say an e-Book about how to lose weight fast).
2. Include a link to the order page for the weight loss eBook (this link is tracked so that the merchant knows which affiliate it belongs to).
3. When the web surfer who clicked on your link makes a purchase, you keep a percentage of the sale price as commission. For digital products the commission is usually more than 50% or 70%.
4. Sit back, relax, and wait for the next web surfing person to chance about your site promoting the affiliate product.
Whoaaa! Sounds like an easy way to make some spare cash right? WRONG!

Many Things to Keep in Mind
1. Traffic - Where is your traffic going to come from? You might have a great website with great resources about losing weight. You have a page that 'reviews' a certain weight loss e-book, praising it for how effective it is, along with convincing 'testimonials' from past 'satisfied customers' giving it 10-star ratings. And then you include an affiliate link to the product. But without any traffic or any way for people to know about your website, you will NOT be making any sales.
2. Are you promoting the CORRECT kind of product? Different products sell differently - some sell well, some sell badly. If you were promoting a lousy product right from the start, your chances of making sales are diminished.
3. Alright, lets say you manage to get some traffic to your site. The average 'conversion rate' for most products is 1 - 2%. Which means, for every 100 visitors that goes to your website, only 1 or 2 will buy. And this 1% conversion rate only includes those who went to your website looking for specific information about the topic they were looking for.
As you can see, the main obstacle to what seems like a wonderful system lies in a lack of TRAFFIC. No traffic = no sales = no commissions, as simple as that. Ironically, there are tonnes of people promoting products (E-Books/videos) about how to be successful as an affiliate marketeer. Yes - these are affiliate products that teach you to promote affiliate products. Apparently, this is a very popular niche. It's like writing a book on how to get rich, and then the author of this book gets rich because he sells so many books teaching people how to get rich. Pretty ironic eh?

The Affiliate Code
A good example of this is The Affiliate Code.
The Affiliate Code is developed by Michael Jones, a self-proclaimed affiliate marketeer who has made millions of dollars promoting affiliate products. The Affiliate Code is a package consisting of 8 lesson modules, properly structured explaining how affiliate marketing works, right now to choosing a niche and live campaign setups of how to make money online. I have personally bought it and spent a few nights going through the materials, and I would say it is quite extensive.
The golden question - is The Affiliate Code worth $77? Yes and no. It would be VERY worth it if, at the point of purchasing this product, you were:
1. Totally or near-clueless about how affiliate marketing works and how to get started.
2. Do not know anything about autoresponders and email marketing techniques.
3. Do not know anything about Google AdWords / PPC marketing.
4. Do not know anything about getting a domain name / setting up a website
5. Do not know anything about driving traffic to your website.
6. Do not know what is a squeeze page / opt-in page.
7. Do not know what 'list-building' is.
8. Visual 'conditioning' techniques to make visitors buy.
9. Basic article-marketing and 'deep-linking' SEO techniques.

If you do not know part 1 and at least 4 other points from 2 - 9, then yes, there is an 80% chance that you will find the materials in The Affiliate Code worth the money. The videos are very well-made and give a good introduction to affiliate marketing, choosing a niche, choosing keywords, finding affiliate products to promote, setting up landing/squeeze/opt-in pages, along with live demonstrations on how to get your first affiliate site up and running. But that's about it. If you are moderately knowledgeable about affiliate marketing, this is not for you. After watching the entire course, it doesn't take rocket science to realise that what Michael Jones teaches in this package is just scraping the surface of things (just like most or all of the affiliate products out there teaching affiliate marketing I'm sure). However, everyone starts somewhere, and if you are looking to get started, The Affiliate Code is worth spending $77 on. From the basics you learn here, you can then move on to set up your first affiliate site, and do lots of extensive research and testing. I can bet my life that pretty much every other product out there that promises that you can make 60k a month (impossible for newbies) from affiliate marketing is based on the same contents as The Affiliate Code. I'm not saying that these other products are copycats, but I've come to realise that affiliate marketing is pretty much entirely about points 1 - 9. It's just getting traffic to your site that is the hard part, and this, I am researching myself too. So, my advice is not to waste money on any other product once you have bought The Affiliate Code. Pretty much everything else teaches the same thing, with rehashed material here and there.
I know this for a fact, because I went on to purchase Copy Paste Systems, another affiliate marketing learning package. What I'm trying to say is - just buy either one of the many affiliate marketing training packages out there, not more, because you will be looking at the same thing on almost all of them. According to statistics, The Affiliate Code and Copy Paste Systems are two of the most popular products out there, so you are probably safer purchasing either one of them.
Nathan has been writing online making money topics for a number of years. He also owns a website about Heavy Duty Staplers [http://www.heavydutystaplers.org] and Duo Fast Stapler
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