3 Affiliate Marketing Myths That Keep Entrepreneurs from Making a Profit

It can be surprisingly hard to find genuinely good information about affiliate marketing.

There are good resources out there — like Nichehacks, where this excerpt comes from.

But you'll find tons of awful, confused, and outdated advice floating around out there in forums, blog posts, reddit posts, and more.

So a lot of people hold some inaccurate beliefs and perceptions regarding affiliate marketing.

Even people who've been successful with it.

But a lot of these widespread myths could be standing between you and profits.

They can lead to an attitude of “I can't,” and that's why they're so damaging.

“I can't do affiliate marketing, I'm not a web developer.”

“I can't make money with this niche, I don't know anything about it.”

This is self-defeating, and it's stopped tons of people from trying what would have been a lucrative business idea.

In a recent blog post, Nichehacks puts some of these tired old myths to rest.

1. You Need to Be an Expert in a Niche To Make Money

Maybe you’re right.

But who do you call an expert?

Someone who knows everything or someone who knows more than you?

No one knows everything.

Not even your favorite influencers and authority figures.

To build an audience and make money with niche marketing, you just need to know more than your target audience.

Which is easy.

There’s a famous theory that if you read just 3 books on a subject, you become more knowledgeable about it than most people.

There’s another theory that in order to become an expert at something, you need to spend 10,000 practicing it.

Sounds heavy.

But there’s a better way.

In his book, The First 20 Hours, researcher Josh Kaufman says that while it might take you 10,000 to become an expert at something, it only takes about 20 hours of focused and dedicated learning to become really good at it.

If you spend 20 hours studying the best resources and bloggers in a new niche, you’ll have more than enough information to start your own niche site.

And even if that doesn’t work, know this.

Your primary concern when starting a niche site should be to understand the problems of your audience, research the right keywords, find profitable products and analyze the most popular content already published on that topic.

Being knowledgeable isn’t such a big deal. You can research ANY topic on the web when you sit down to write about it.

I have written a post on how you can create authority content in any niche even if you know nothing about it.

2. You Need to Have Technical IT Skills To Succeed

No sir you don’t.

You can still be a hugely successful niche marketer even if you don’t know how to purchase a web hosting service, register a domain, set up a WordPress website or play with your site’s design and code.

In fact, most of the top marketers outsource all of these administrative tasks to freelancers on Upwork, Fiverr or MicroWorkers. 

You’re a marketer and your job is to identify profitable niche markets and make money by creating useful and actionable content that helps people buy the right products.

Work on your business, not in your business.

Stay focused and don’t get caught up in time-consuming administrative tasks because they can easily suck up all of your time without taking you forward in your business.

3. Google is the Only Traffic Source You Need

We all love SEO because it gives us free traffic.

But with so much happening with Google’s algorithms all the time, it’s unwise to solely depend on search traffic and put all your eggs in one basket especially when there are so many different traffic sources available.

Grow your email list from day 1, build a community using Facebook Groups, encourage readers to share your content social media, publish guest posts, use platforms like Medium and LinkedIn publishing, drive traffic from forums and sites like Quora.

And if you've got the budget, Facebook ads are incredibly powerful.

You can read about twelve more pervasive marketing myths in the full blog post over at Nichehacks.