How To Learn Affiliate Marketing

In this post you’ll find a few strategies to speed up your affiliate marketing learning curve.

Affiliate marketing is for many who enter the online business world, the first thing that gives them the taste of financial independence. The freedom they gain as well as the money the make, open the doors to other ventures that result in more freedom and more money which eventually give them the opportunity to choose whether to keep their day jobs or not.

The big problem with affiliate marketing and business in general, is that it takes more than just the desire to be successful to be successful. Just like most things worth doing /having in life, it requires some serious learning, which can take an indeterminate time to accumulate. This is the reason why as the number of people giving the any form of online marketing a chance, a similar number tends to quit soon after a few failed attempts.

How to learn affiliate marketing?

Learning is about one simple thing: repetition. This is true for any discipline you try to master, whether physical or purely cognitive. The problem with affiliate marketing is that unlike math of physics, there are many opinions about the right way to do things. In math a validated theory remains valid on the place it was first validated and it remains valid in pretty much any part of the world. 1+1 =2 anywhere. With marketing however, it’s more complicated. As John Wanamaker once said:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

A part of why it might be a little more difficult to grasp what works on affiliate marketing, is that some tactics or strategies might be niche dependent. A strategy that you apply to sell cars might fail completely if you’re trying to sell diapers, but above all, the biggest problem is that most of the online material on affiliate marketing is useless. So, you not only end up with teachings that might be niche dependent, but also some that are just useless, and you have to be able to figure out which is which.

The general aspects of learning

Although learning affiliate marketing can take you some time, there are a few things you can do to shorten your learning curve; and it all starts with your brain and body.

1. Repetition

Repetition as the old saying goes, is the mother of learning. Reach has shown that in order to master a subject one has to review the material over and over again, in increasing intervals of time. With enough repetitions you can get to commit what you learned to long term memory, and this is a stepping stone to mastery.

2. Improve brain health

The brain is the one thing that will help you master what you’re trying to master. So, it’s no wonder that it should also be a priority for you to more than take care of it, to figure a way to improve it. A few ways you can do so are: a good diet, exercise, as well as through the new and trendy use of nootropics.

3. Improve health

This comes as obvious to many, but it’s always good to talk about it. Without a healthy body there can be no learning and surely no mastery of any kind. So, in order to make sure you learn as quickly as you can. It’s always a good idea to make sure you’re healthy by consulting a doctor, and if not to fix it.

Learning about affiliate marketing specifically

After you have your brain all optimized for learning, then the next step is to, well… dig into it :). There are many ways you can learn affiliate marketing and any form of marking in general. Below are 3 of my favorite.

1. Look for mentor

Mentors are probably the best way one can acquire knowledge out there. The reason for this might be counter-intuitive from many, since textbooks will generally teach you all there is to learn verbose. Mentors are simply learning curve shortcuts. Although books can teach pretty much the same, they will not tell you what are the most important things, nor about the few and not public tricks of the field, that only experience can teach. The more you learn about a subject, the more learning shortcuts you find. In essence, you learn a better way to learn and master it, and mentors, assuming they are good at what they do, can help you with that.

2. Sign up for courses

The big problem with mentors is that the better they are at their craft, the more unavailable they are to the public. One way to go around this you can either read their books or take their courses.

So, in order to learn more about and master affiliate marking, a good strategy is to watch as many seminars and take as many courses as possible. As mentioned above, when it comes to online marketing it can be difficult to tell whether the “killer strategy” we are being introduced to really is of any value. So to go over that, while enjoying the benefits of taking courses, all you have to is to test what you learned in the same way a scientist tests his hypothesis. If the results are positive you keep it and build up your knowledge base on it, and if not you throw it away. Eventually you’ll stumble into that “golden nugget” that changes everything.

The same can be applied to books.

3. Read more books abut marketing in general

To many, just like myself, reading is one of those things that either takes a long time or it straight out boring. We live in a time in which we are more used to quickly skim blog posts in the search for the answer we’re looking for and to move on when we don’t find it. This is OK to do it with a 500-1000 world long piece of content. When it comes to books, which can have anywhere from a few dozen pages to up to a few thousand, skimming can be very difficult. Often we need to read most of, if not all of the book to get something meaningful from it.

The big problem is that we gain more by reading books than we do by reading blog posts in the search results of google. Blog posts can certainly teach you a lot, but they more often than not pale in comparison to books. So, what do you do, when like many you’re not a fan of reading, but you have to in order to be successful? The answer is: audio books.

I found this option a few years ago and there is no telling on the number of ways it has improved my learning speed. I went from reading maybe a book or two a year, to an average of 5 a month. The beauty of it is not only that the content is the same, but also that you get to depending on the app you’re using, to speed up the narration to up to 3x as fast. Before that, I stumbled into speed reading which is in simple. A technique that helps you read somewhere around 1000 words per minute if not more. The big problem is that even with some tutoring, this is more easily said than done.

According to professionals on the field, to attain such a feat you have to silence your mind’s voice and read only with your eyes. The theory says that when you vocalize what you read, you’re able to read only as quick as you can speak. Many spend weeks if not months trying to do that, and most of them fail(me included :)).

Listening instead of reading

Your listening speed on the other hand, can improve in a matter of minutes of listening in an increased speed.Here you get the time to complete a book shortened to half if not more.

I buy and read my books through the amazon’s audible app, and I strongly advise you to give it a try.

With this nailed down, reading more books about marketing and books in general becomes easier. Assuming you do this and you read about the same number of books as me(5 a month), you get to learn the opinions of five different top marketing minds every single month. The good thing is that you can apply this strategy to any field/discipline you want to master.

Summary

In summary, learning about affiliate marketing is not as difficult as you might think. With the right teachers and some patience you can go very, very far.

It is all about knowledge and experience 😉