Yes, I used the plural on internets. Oh yeah, I went there.
The point is to demonstrate that anyone, even if you don’t know that the internets aren’t plural, can learn how to start affiliate marketing.
I provide a more complete beginner’s guide here and here, so be sure to check those out, but in this post I want to focus on helping you get over some of the “scary” aspects of getting started online.
The Biggest Hurdle Is Psychological
The first obstacle you need to overcome is with yourself.
I want to be 100% clear: working online doesn’t require you to have any “technical” knowledge.
You no longer need a geeky 20 year old Harvard dropout to build a website (though if you’re shooting for a $1 billion dollar company you might still want one). All you really need is an interest in writing reliable information about something that someone, somewhere, might want to buy.
If you want to launch a blog and have no technical background, then you can follow this free training to get going.
What You Really Need To Know
Secondly, the thing that you really need to know is really quite simple:
The internet is big.
Mind-numbingly, staggeringly big.
There are people online all the time, from every corner of the planet. They spend most of their time online “consuming media,” which is just marketing-speak for reading blogs, watching videos, looking at pictures, and listening to podcasts.
That means that there is way more traffic out there than you’ve ever imagined. You don’t need to target something that gets 10,000,000 monthly searches/views/clicks in order to be successful. Click here to read more about why competition doesn’t matter.
You just need a tiny, tiny fraction of that.
That’s It
I don’t want to trivialize anything, but if I had to boil things down into two points, that would be it.
Obviously there’s a ton more to learn, but you’ll be able to figure out most of it along the way. There are great beginner courses available for free or cheap, so I recommend you invest your time following one of those programs.
You might also consider reading this post, which provides a clear 6 week plan you can use to get from where you are today to an asset that’s up and running nicely.