Today I want to talk about the two essential elements every online business must have in order to ensure survival, no matter what the world throws our way. As some of you already know, I have been an online business owner since 2002, and have faced many challenges over the years. In fact, I wasn’t able to quit my day job until 2015. It took me 13 years of learning the ropes, adapting, scaling and doing a bunch of different things along the way in order to get to a point where I was comfortable enough to say I’m going to leave a corporate paying job and do this full time online.
Over those years, I’ve also faced many challenges that are probably common among many affiliate marketers, especially because I focus a lot on affiliate marketing.
I’ve tested hundreds, and probably almost close to a thousand, campaigns over the years. These have been different offers, different traffic sources, and different landing pages. A bunch of work is involved in just finding campaigns that work. And once I find a campaign, it feels really good when you have a campaign that’s profitable and scalable and is running. But we’re constantly facing curveballs as affiliate marketers, especially as time goes on and more people come into the industry.
I’m not I’m not here to say I feel that marketing isn’t great because it absolutely is. I love it! I make a lot of money from it, and I’m not alone. A lot of people make a lot of money from it, trust me. And every day I see more people taking training and learning and getting this working for them. But at some point, every affiliate marketer moves to the next level.
Once you find something that’s really scalable and really working well, you’re going to find that certain unexpected challenges can occur. Maybe the ad network doesn’t pay you or maybe the advertiser pulls the offer. Maybe you lose cap on the offer, or more competition comes in and takes your traffic away. The traffic source might even deny all your ads, for no particular reason.
All of these are things that we face as online marketers. So if you don’t have these two skills I’m going to talk about right now, then when these things happen, you can literally just go bankrupt or broke immediately and have zero income.
So how do we protect ourselves from this? Well, we need two main skill sets, and they are adaptability and diversity. We need the ability to adapt and we need the ability to diversify our business. So I’m going to talk about both of them quickly and how I adapt and diversify my business in order to ensure that when major things happen, especially right now in the world where everything is kind of on hold.
A lot of the offers that worked well in the past just aren’t running right now. People don’t have the budgets. They don’t have the staff to manage these offers. They can’t sell anything because things can’t be shipped from certain areas. A lot of affiliates are hurting if they didn’t diversify.
Adaptability
In order to adapt you need to keep current with what is happening every single day in the industry. In order to do that, you need to be part of groups. You need to network with people. For example, I go to conferences all the time. I get people’s contacts and then we talk privately through Skype or Telegram.
There are forums dedicated to general and online marketing groups. There’s a Facebook ad buyers’ group. That’s another great place to be. There are affiliate marketing Facebook groups and there are newsletters that you can subscribe to. I read one every single morning called Stacked Marketer. You can sign up for it by going to DayJobHacks.com/stacked.
Every morning they’re going to send you updates pertaining to the entire industry of online business, basically focusing on everything from stocks to where to buy traffic, traffic strategies, what’s happening with lawsuits, etc.
For example, this morning I read an article about how Facebook is cracking down on a specific cloaking company. This kind of information helps keep you ahead of the curve. If you become stagnant and stop learning, then you’re probably going to collapse when bad things happen.
Diversification
Now let’s talk about diversity. Diversity is key, especially now when there is so much uncertainty happening in the world. A couple of my affiliate campaigns had to pause. I lost cap on some offers I was running, and I had to pause them. But because I’ve diversified my company, I wasn’t crippled by that impact. My business is still running. I’m still running campaigns.
In fact, I saw an opportunity to run other offers, and the only way I was able to do that was to be able to keep ahead of the curve and understand where the industry is going. To do that I’ve been part of many affiliate networks. So be part of different CPA affiliate networks or affiliate networks in general, and you’re going to get newsletters that will highlight what’s happening on their networks.
If you’re part of many networks this gives you the ability to quickly adapt when things go awry on your main network. I recommend signing up to multiple networks and having them in your back pocket in case something goes wrong with your original campaigns.
You can quickly adapt and find new offers and new strategies from the newsletters you receive from your multiple networks. It serves two purpose. First, it gives you the ability to adapt. At the same time, you’re getting newsletters from these networks, packed with information on what’s happening in the industry. So that is one strategy to diversify.
The next thing I think affiliate marketers should be doing is to find something that really works before you try to diversify. A lot of people are just trying to diversify before even having success on one project.
The key is to find something that works and focus on it to make it work really well before you start to diversify. The best way to diversify is to try a completely different website, and niche, so you have multiple websites in your portfolio.
Maybe you have a site dedicated to diet. Maybe you have one about fishing, or literally anything. Whatever you’re selling, you can have multiple different websites and these would be different parts of your portfolio.
Or you could start diversifying the structure of your business instead of just being an affiliate. You could also be a product owner in addition to being an affiliate marketer. That’s what I do. I have PowerhouseAffiliate.com, my membership training platform where people can join and be part of a community and learn about affiliate marketing.
There are a lot of people that want to learn affiliate marketing and have success. And a lot of people are making a ton of money with affiliate marketing. But later on, once people start making a lot of money with the affiliate marketing, they want to diversify more. And that’s where you can start creating products. You can maybe build your own store, build your own training site, build your own training course. These are ways to diversify.
So, for example, if my affiliate campaigns all collapsed tomorrow, people still want to learn how to make money online. People still want to learn certain skills and in whatever niche. If I was running a training course on anything right now, a lot of people are stuck in their homes are looking for information. They’re looking for training schooling and educational content.
So if you have content on many websites, you’re still making money. That is how I’ve chosen to diversify. I have a couple of websites that make money through AdSense. Then I have an e-mail list that’s constantly being built. I have a training site. That is a product that I own. But at the same time, my main focus is affiliate marketing and the ability to adapt quickly through trying new offers.
I personally find affiliate marketing is one of the most fun ways to make money. It’s such a rush when you see success from buying traffic to a landing page and then see the conversions come out the other end. It’s the fastest way to make money and the most fun. But at the same time, we always have to remember that diversification and adaptability are key to our success.
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