The Advantage Industry Experts Have over Affiliate Marketers
The unspoken promise of affiliate marketing is that you can generate multiple streams of income by creating a handful of websites in niches you know little about. This isn’t entirely true. A few affiliate marketers make it to the top ranks, but most don’t. Some generate decent income with the help of affiliate marketing tools, but they still have to work hard on multiple projects to make it happen.
Industry experts don’t have to spread their efforts; they can focus only on their expertise and quickly dominate their niche. Their experience is what allows them to be successful in a single niche.
Industry experts know their market inside and out, and have the following advantages:
- They don’t always need to hire an outside expert to write their copy.
- They don’t need to outsource small tasks they don’t understand.
- Experts produce unmistakable quality, sincerity, and depth of content.
- The value they provide is sustainable because it comes from authentic experience.
- Experts have enough knowledge to produce thorough, transparent content. For example, Healthy Hemp Oil published an informative guide for buying CBD oil. The guide highlights the importance of knowing how much CBD is in each dose, which is something not all manufacturers disclose. However, this information is essential. An affiliate marketer pushing products just to make sales wouldn’t be able to create copy with this level of knowledge.
- Experts can publish rough content and it will still be more effective than an affiliate marketer’s content crafted with inexperience.
- Experts know how to select the right products to sell so they won’t have to hop from product to product frequently.
- Industry experts don’t need to worry about getting cut off from their income source for being sneaky with someone else’s product.
Industry experts know their market well enough to avoid big mistakes
When you’re on the inside, you know more than just who your market is. You know who you shouldn’t market certain services to. Industry experts (with solid ethics) would never market services that carry unseen risks to consumers unqualified to address those risks.
For example, an affiliate marketer who sells webhosting from a parent company may not have the experience necessary to market to the correct audience. This short sightedness could end in disaster.
For example, let’s say an affiliate marketer decides to market shared hosting accounts to WordPress bloggers. At first glance, it seems like the perfect target market. What blogger doesn’t need affordable hosting? However, there’s one big reason not to market shared hosting to WordPress bloggers: unseen security holes.
The average shared hosting plan comes with an application called QuickInstall that allows the user to install WordPress with just a few clicks. Once the installation is complete, the user is given their login credentials and they’re good to go. Or so it seems.
The missing steps nobody knows they need to take
A WordPress website created with QuickInstall presents two major security flaws. First, the database user’s password and the administrator’s password are automatically created and are identical. The average blogger won’t even know because the only way to find out is by opening the configuration file.
The second problem is the QuickInstall software leaves the authentication keys in the wp-config.php file blank. Having no authentication keys is like leaving the vault door open at a bank and vacating the building. Again, the average blogger won’t know they need to generate unique keys and paste them into the configuration file. They also won’t know these keys need to be periodically regenerated.
“Authentication cookies cannot be destroyed until they expire, explains Code Seekah, “If an attacker gets their hands on a user cookie that has its expiration timestamp value set to 10 years in the future, as long as a subset of authentication keys and salts remain the same along with the password, they can attain login state without a password whenever they like for years to come.”
On the flip side, an IT industry expert will promote hosted solutions for WordPress and other blogging platforms because they know hosted solutions take care of the security for the user. They’re more expensive, but they know it’s the right product for the market they’re targeting.
If you’re going to get into affiliate marketing, it’s a wise move to pick one industry and commit to learning it in-depth. You won’t become an expert in a month, but staying dedicated makes it an eventual possibility.