Affiliate Marketing is a Business- If You Treat it Like One

There is a running dialogue on just about every marketing forum as to whether or not affiliate marketing is a "real" business.

The fact is this- anything can be a "real" business if you treat it like one, but 90% or more of affiliate marketers are not treating it like a business and in the future will be squeezed out of the market because of it.

Most affiliate marketers are nothing more than traffic brokers. They create a traffic source through PPC, SEO or through their own website and then funnel that traffic to affiliate offers ranging from Clickbank to CPA and more. This is not really a business. If you were to try and sell this business what could you offer…PPC keywords? Yes, perhaps an established website could be sold but the truth of the matter is- if you have no customers then you have no business.

Every lead you send off to an affiliate offer becomes their customer, not yours. Of course, that is part of the affiliate deal but that does not mean that you cannot capture these people as customers before funneling them off somewhere else. If you switch your effort from affiliate marketing to lead capture/relationship building you will not only increase your conversion rates when you DO offer affiliate products, but you now also have the ability to offer other products to your customers later on. These can be other affiliate offerings or your own products.

This is how real money is made.

I have multiple lists of a few thousand people that I can mail whenever I want with a new offer and it is not a one-time deal. They may earn me an income for years to come. Prior to this I was just a "traffic director" that funneled my valuable leads off to someone else’s sites.

If you are currently nothing more than a "traffic director" then you really don’t have a business. If your PPC campaign gets slapped by Google or your traffic source dries up then you are in bad shape. On the other hand, if you’ve built a real list of prospects then even if your original traffic source evaporates you are still in the game.

Something to think about for those affiliates out there that are wondering how to take things to the next level…be a businessperson and not just a traffic broker.

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