What’s more, this gives you a much more stable way to become full-time as an internet marketer and it means there’s no risk and nothing to be afraid of. Want to ‘quit the rat race’ and stop working eight hours a day in a job you hate? That doesn’t have to mean suddenly quitting and storming out and leaving yourself with no steady income!
Instead, all you have to do is to set up a small amount of income through affiliate marketing to make a little bit more cash… and then to grow this income steadily over time to the point where you’re making a lot of money. Only once you’re earning a very stable income do you then consider quitting your day job and going ‘full time’ as someone who works online. You could even try earning money fully online on a ‘trial basis’ to begin with, or you could reduce your work to be part time – or do a job that you enjoy even if it doesn’t bring in as much cash. There’s zero risk, nothing to be afraid of and everything to potentially gain!
Lifestyle Design and the Digital Nomad
Keeping your ‘ultimate goal’ in mind as an affiliate marketer is also important for other reasons. A lot of people who start working online will do so because they want to change the world and to be a famous entrepreneur. A lot of people start out wanting to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
But often, those same people would find that achieving that would actually be unfulfilling. If you’re trying to get to a place where you’re doing less work, then setting up a huge international business actually isn’t the answer. It’s also clearly not the quickest way to make it happen.
As an affiliate marketer, you will be making money by taking an existing business model and product and selling it to people. You categorically are not changing the world and thus you won’t be a famous entrepreneur. You might build some recognition as an influencer in your niche if you build a mailing list, but you certainly are not Mark Zuckerberg – it’s important that you’re okay with that before you go ahead.
Actually though, this is what many of us actually want when we set out to start earning more money. Think about the things that would actually make you happy:
* More time with your family
* Less financial stress
* More money to travel and see the world
* The ability to get up when you want/to lie in bed
* More time to spend enjoying hobbies/working on your passion projects
Now if you think of these points as being your actual goals – suddenly it doesn’t make sense to take on more responsibilities as the head of the next start-up. ‘Success’ in the traditional sense is not actually the fastest route to freedom and security. Affiliate marketing on the other hand cuts all the excess that comes from running a business and just gives you the freedom and the income.
This is what’s known as lifestyle design. Lifestyle design was originally popularized by Tim Ferriss in the book The Four Hour Workweek and it describes the process of choosing a career and income to suit the kind of lifestyle you want. Instead of fitting your life around the job you do and deciding how much you travel and where to live on that basis, you instead choose your career to support the lifestyle you want.
You don’t actually need to be rich to live in a sunny country – you just need to be able to work remotely. And you could probably afford to travel more if you weren’t paying for an expensive commute every day to work! Lifestyle design means prioritizing the things you want out of life and this is made very possible when you work online in any capacity.
And the natural extension of lifestyle design? For those who love to travel and see other countries, that would be to become a ‘digital nomad’. A digital nomad is someone who doesn’t have any single address and instead travels the world, working online as they do. If you work online as a digital nomad then you won’t need an office and you’ll be able to work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Combine this with the fact that you’ll be earning passive income and there’s nothing to stop you from travelling around the world and working in cafes or on beaches as an affiliate marketer.
Who is Affiliate Marketing For
With all that in mind, affiliate marketing is perfect for anyone who wants to support their current lifestyle with supplementary income and anyone who eventually wants to quit the rat race and start living a far more relaxed and flexible lifestyle. This isn’t about creating the next big thing or being a technological marvel – it’s about taking the fastest and most efficient route to secure a stable passive income.
It doesn’t give you riches overnight and it does require work to begin with. But you can start to benefit right away by working for just a few hours in the evenings and after a couple of years you’ll be earning big bucks if you do everything right.
And in terms of the actual ‘day to day’, you’ll spend most of your time looking for products, posting and designing adverts, looking at the performance of your campaigns, writing e-mails and posting blog posts. You’ll also work on social media a fair amount and may occasionally want to outsource some tasks to designers and writers. This does of course meaning spending a fair amount of time in front of the computer and as you won’t have a boss, you’ll need to be self-motivated and disciplined to make sure you don’t spend all that time on YouTube looking at videos of cats.
The skills you’ll need for this are relatively few. Having a good understanding for business will help a lot but we’ll go over a lot of that as it relates specifically to internet marketing in this book. Likewise, it’s very useful to be able to write at least fairly well. You’ll be doing most of your marketing via the written word, so this is a highly useful skill. As long as you have the basics though, we’ll look at how to make your writing more persuasive here.
Finally, you’ll benefit from having some basic skills with regards to IT. You don’t need to know how to program or to understand complex networks – you just need to have the basic technical knowhow to find your way around web-apps and social media. As long as you’re able to use a computer to a basic level, the rest should be fairly self-explanatory.
So if you can tick those boxes and if you know what you want, then you’re ready to start earning money as an affiliate marketer.
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