hey guys i'm doing this video today for all those people out there wondering if they should buy an
affiliate marketing course or not and the answer is no not right now anyway now i do promote one
affiliate marketing course on my channel and that's a course that's tailored towards amazon
because amazon is its own animal and if you want amazon to be your main affiliate partner then yes
get the course but if not watch this video because when i first got started in the blogging game
i did not have a lot of money so i had to be really toys about the things that i could buy
when it came to affiliate marketing i did not feel that i needed to buy a course
because a lot of the answers were already out there for free and that's how i've been able to
make six figures with affiliate marketing for the last three years without ever taking a course now
have i ever got an affiliate marketing course yes but i just did that recently and i'm always trying
to continuously learn so that's why i'm doing that and i actually can afford it now so that's
why i'm doing it and i got debbie gardner's ebook i know i'm always talking about debbie gardner but
she's like my blogging mentor and she created this ebook called 73 secret hacks to earn more money
with affiliate marketing so i bought that and it is really good so i do see value in buying courses
and ebooks but i know everyone cannot afford a course right now so if you can't this video is
for you on how to learn affiliate marketing for free so first thing i did was look at the people
who were boasting about how much they were making in affiliate marketing what i would do is i would
go to their websites and read their articles to see how they were referring different products
and services just to understand their strategy the answers are already out there for free for
us to see it for example i would google how i make money using affiliate marketing and just
to see what comes up in the search results so for example you see this guy right here he's saying
how i make money with affiliate marketing and he makes a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year
so i'm going to click on this article because i want to learn from him see what he's talking about
and just scrolling down this article right here i see it's you can see how long it is and it's just
value-packed look they have all these different affiliate programs and the commission rate
for each so this is an awesome article right here and he even shows you all the ways that
different people are making money with affiliate marketing so see you didn't pay a dime and now you
know all the different ways to make money through affiliate marketing by doing a quick google search
another thing that i did was listen to podcasts i remember listening to michelle schroeder gartner
and she was a very successful or she has a very successful affiliate marketing course
and i never took her course but she gives out some really good information for free
she is the reason that i learned about pretty links which really has been a game changer for me
pretty links is a wordpress plugin and the way it works is when you get involved in affiliate
marketing you're going to learn that you're you are given some very ugly links that look really
scammy now pretty links it makes your links look a lot better let me show you guys a quick example
all right so we're going to use raccoon for an example and this just see right here i've made
over four thousand dollars with this program it's a one that anyone can join so i highly recommend
if you're starting out definitely join racquetin because it's just one of the easiest ones to refer
because i use it myself and i love it and that's why i always promote it all right but what i'm
gonna do is see this is my referral link right here what i want to do is to make this look
a little bit better so i want to go ahead and copy this link and i want to go to my website
and then i'm going to go to pretty links right here and then go to add new and
what i'm doing is just trying to make this link look better so i'm going to call this racquetin
and then i'm going to put my url right here i'm going to go ahead and paste that
and then i'm going to make it look prettier and just say racketin so this is how the this link
is now going to look it's going to say my website name slash and whatever i want to call it but i'm
going to call it wreckating so go ahead and update it and now i can use this link wherever i want
so i can go ahead right here and copy this to my clipboard and then i'm going to show you how
this works i'm just going to go to a new tab and paste it so it looks like trying to mom jobs.com
racketon if i press enter it will automatically take me to rocketing so this is a way that you can
they say like cloak your links just to make them making them look a little bit better the other
good thing about this plugin is that companies change their affiliate networks all the time for
different reasons which is really annoying for us creators because that means wherever you use that
affiliate link you now need to go back and update it because you will no longer earn a commission
if someone clicks on it and makes a purchase and i promote a lot of the same affiliate
products throughout my videos blog articles and social media so if i have an affiliate link that
changed that would mean that i would have to go all those different places and update that link
but with pretty links you don't have to do that i can easily update the link in wordpress with just
a click of a button and it will update every place that i use that link immediately with the new link
now i think this is such a valuable tip that i learned for free from a podcast
so if someone has an affiliate marketing course see where they've been featured because they give
out a lot of good information for free so you can eventually buy their course next thing i would do
is look at my competitors so i would see who is writing the same kind of content that i'm
writing or that i want to write about and i'd look through their blog articles to see what
affiliate partners they're promoting to see if it's a company that i want to promote as well
now one way to know if it's an affiliate link or not is to look in the lower left
hand corner to see what link comes up when you hover over it let me give you an example so
this is an article of mine so if we just hover over right here you can see that's hyperlink
in the lower left hand corner you can see that it has like a different looking spammy kind of
url that's how you can automatically know that that's an affiliate link because it should just
say convertkit.com if it's just directing them to their site if i don't have my special unique link
so this is how i go about to see if different website owners are using affiliate links or not
because you can automatically tell if they are doing it by just looking at the url so for example
if i just scroll down and hover over facebook you see it takes you right down to facebook.com
and that's their url so you know that i have no special relationship with facebook and i'm just
talking about them organically so learn from your competitors about different products and
services that you can promote if you don't know who your competitors are just do a quick google
search for what you want to write about and every site that pops up in the search results those are
your competitors and you guys always want to make sure that you are disclosing that you are using
affiliate links whether you are using them in your blog articles this is how i do it here email
this is how i do it here youtube videos this is how i do it here and last but not least i'm
going to put a shameless plug out there and tell you guys to just look at my video i just did for
affiliate marketing for beginners because i just watched that video again yesterday and i'm like
man this video is really good i give out a lot of good information always for free for you guys now
it's about different free traffic sources that you can use affiliate marketing to make money
and i actually show you how to do it and most importantly i show you guys how to not use your
social security number which is really important so you can head to that video right now because
i think this one was enough to show you why you do not need to buy an affiliate marketing course
right now anyway all right if you guys are still watching this video please please comment and say
i made it in the comment section below just so i know that someone actually stays to the end
of my videos alright thank you guys i love you guys and thanks for watching have a great day