When it comes to business, simple is good. Wouldn’t you agree? That’s my take on it anyway. I’ve recently been pouring through a plethora of information on affiliate marketing…people talking about how to make it big by selling other people’s stuff online. First, I’d argue if you really have anything to offer your audience, it’s simple enough to create your own product anyway and make 5 times as much per sale, but I digress.
Chess is a very simple game, but the strategy is complex and takes a lot of skill to execute. What's the "trick" to winning at chess? There isn't one! Likewise, what's the "trick" to affiliate marketing success? There isn't one! If you want to win, you have to actually do the work.
There’s so much talk out there about how to optimize PPC campaigns and tweak pages to increase opt-ins and, blah, blah, blah. I see the value in paying attention to minutia to a certain extent, but tonight I’m reading this stuff and feeling overwhelmed. It’s amazing to me how hard people will work to avoid work!
Paying attention to all this technical stuff has value, yes. And to a certain extent I even cover some of these things on Next Level Blogger, but here’s the deal…if you’re not paying attention to the big picture; if you’re not spending 99.9% of your attention on the big prize, then all the other minutia is just that…minutia. It all adds up to nothing if you’re not focused on what really matters.
What really matters when it comes to selling online? One word: Trust.
Trust Makes Rockstars
What makes a rockstar? Trust. Real fans pile into a store and buy records when they could easily get the music for free online. Why? Because they respect and trust the artist…they already know they want what the artist is selling. They want it now. They want the real thing. They’re already sold.
No “magic marketing formula” or “overnight business system” causes this kind of behavior.
Bottom line…if you don’t have trust, then you will always be fighting for the sale. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized your page is, dude! It doesn’t matter how good your SEO is 
If you don’t have trust, then you will always be trying to find the “secret” to making your business work more smoothly. Trust is the ultimate business lubricant…it’s makes everything easier. Here’s the catch…it takes a while to earn it. But it’s worth it. Trust changes everything.
With trust on your side, you go from fighting for the $10 sale to being handed multiple $1000 sales without having to lift a finger. With trust you go from schlepping to find business to having business come to you, without even having to solicit it. How do you get trust? By being there and creating value for people over time. Your hard work does NOT go unnoticed. Call it karma…or whatever the heck you want to call it. Trust-building beats link-building any day of the week. This is a really important point:
- If you think you’re responding to email inquiries and giving advice for free, you’re not. You’re building trust.
- If you think that unwarranted, unfair refund you’re processing is a loss, it’s not. You’re building trust.
- If you think all that time you spent with a client is lost because they ended up buying with another vendor, it’s not. You’re building trust.
Trust is your ultimate asset. Trust takes time to build, but all the good work you do over time adds up. It really does. That said, I want to offer you my uber-simple, proven system for a grotesque level of affiliate marketing success.
My approach to affiliate marketing:
- Build trust.
- Tell the people who trust you what to buy.
- Collect checks.
Works like a charm baby!
I’d love anyone to find a hole in this approach. It’s bullet-proof. Problem is, it takes time and work. Do you have a problem with that…or are you going to do what it takes? Play it to win!
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