Making Your First $1,000 a Month as an Affiliate

Affiliate marketing success, like all success in business, is mostly in the mind. Perhaps 10 to 20% of success lies in actual tactics and strategies.

This is not a positive thinking type article[private_free] [firstname][/private_free], because, quite frankly, I’m not a really big fan of that sort of thing.

Back when I started in affiliate marketing in 2001-2002, I used to not believe people could actually make $10,000+ a month on a recurring, passive basis and never handle any products, fulfillment, shipment, returns, and so forth.

In fact, I still remember thinking “If I could somehow get to $3,000 a month I would be on top of the world.”

Really.

I’m assuming if I felt that way maybe many of you do, too. That’s logical, right? Human psychology has patterns and consistencies.

This is what I mean when I say success in affiliate marketing is mostly in the mind. You see, even though I now know it’s possible to achieve figures of $10,000+ per month (and actually much, much higher), you don’t need to.

I’m not asking you to believe me. What you need to focus on--if you haven’t achieved it already--is how you’re going to get to your first $1,000 a month. That’s a figure most people believe is achievable.

Now, this is where strategy and tactics come into play and avoiding typical pitfalls.

For almost 4 years, I was a certified webmaster for a major online company called SiteSell. You’ve probably even heard of their famous product, Site Built It! I did this as a side gig in addition to building up massive streams of passive income as a pure affiliate marketer.

In those nearly 4 years, I did a lot of consultations for would-be affiliate marketers. I identified several common obstacles that were preventing people from achieving success — even getting to the first $1,000 per month.

One of most deadly of these obstacles was spreading oneself too thin. Let me be very specific[private_free] [firstname][/private_free]. Many of these people thought that they would become more successful by trying to master multiple traffic generation strategies at once: SEO, PPC, article marketing, joint ventures, social media, and all its permutations: authority sites, blogs, mini-sites, twitter, facebook, landing pages, squeeze pages, and so forth.

After I concluded this was, in fact, holding people back from succeeding, I stumbled across a short Youtube video by two other very well known Internet marketing pioneers, Stephen Pierce and Yanik Silver, saying effectively the same thing.

Yanik was saying that the best thing people can do to make money is focus and stick to one thing! That, of course, is just another way of saying: don’t spread yourself too thin.

You can watch that short video here:

So, if you agree with me that you should stick to one core focus until you make some good money online-- let’s define that as your first $1,000 dollars a month--what should that one strategy be?

In my opinion, it should be article marketing to lifetime income programs. I know this is a very powerful strategy because I’ve been doing it for years.

Why article marketing over the other methods? Because PPC is very risky and people usually lose a lot of money fast until they master it, and most people starting out don’t have that kind of money to lose; and SEO, quite frankly, takes a long time and a lot of work before results are achieved.

I know because, again, as a consultant and certified SBI webmaster, I saw firsthand how long web sites take to gain traction.

Article marketing has no monetary risk because it’s a free traffic generation method, and it’s much faster than building up a web site. Article marketing is where the vast majority of affiliates should start and focus on until they break their first $1,000 dollars a month in affiliate marketing.