The affiliate industry is young but old enough to have spawned a few myths. This is probably a developmental process that occurs to all industries. Myths can be powerful, because they can be taken as realities and they tend to connect with formative strata of our psyche. My purpose is not to debunk the myths that have formed but to recognize them so we can give them their due place in our thoughts. In addition to the myths, I will identify some claims commonly made in the industry that can be misleading and confusing to the beginner, as they were for me. These issues apply to even the best affiliate marketing training programs.
Myths of the Profession
Almost every website involved in teaching affiliate marketing, either explicitly or implicitly, presents the image that affiliate marketing is simple. In fact, anybody can do it. Some sites even state that no marketing or technical knowledge is necessary. Some site gurus claim to have dropped out of high school to make millions of dollars. Are you dumb? Then affiliate marketing is for you. For sure, affiliate marketing was much simpler in earlier years. The internet wasn’t as big and the technology was just being developed. But things don’t remain simple and affiliate marketing is no different. However, the idea was useful for selling products and it remains with us. Don’t believe it. One of my first insights was that affiliate marketing is complex and requires considerable knowledge. It is also not free. You must divest yourself of the idea that there are free affiliate marketing training programs. Simple, they don’t exist.
Another idea that lingers from the formative days is that large amounts of money can be made by investing just 1 hour per day in the business. Large amounts of money can be made but affiliate marketing is not a part-time job. I think of these programs as the wealthy affiliate training program. Spending little time with your business is often seen as a sign of success in affiliate marketing. In one program I attended, my coach could never be contacted because he was, as his answering machine said, “playing with his kids.” The tasks that you are given in setting up your business suggest that affiliate marketing takes much more than 1 hour per day.
One important factor that tends not to be discussed, is the quality of services. Automation of functions in affiliate marketing is important. As an affiliate marketer, you interact with large numbers of people. In-person sales is not possible. But when discussing automation in the industry, the implied claim is that the artificial intelligence does it all. This introduces the idea of quality of services. The wiliness of customers to purchase your services depends upon the quality of your services. Artificial intelligence can do many things, but quality always suffers when left entirely to machines. The profession is beginning to discuss the issue of quality of services/product, but it is not yet recognized as the major factor in sales that it really is and will always be. The quantitative advantage of AI tends to crowd out the qualitative importance of quality of services/products. Yet, everything depends on quality of services/products.
Does It Have a Test Drive
I know of only one business in affiliate marketing that offers a test drive. In my opinion, a test drive should be standard practice. A test drive for the beginner is important because of the complexity of the programs and the nature of instructional programs. On thing the profession has not yet admitted is that it is engaged in Vocational Education. As one who is trained in Education, I can say it tells. The concept of teaching as found in the instructional videos and content organization often reveals a simplistic concept of learning. The concepts of teaching and learning that are implicit in the programs matter very much to you, the learner. For example, some programs I have experienced view the teaching process as a simple matter of telling the student how to do the task. The format runs as: first you do this, then you do that, and after that you do something else, etc. These programs conceive of teaching as a one-dimensional, linear process. On such a process, there is no room for individualization, for your particular needs as a learner. Regardless of the promises made, as a learner you need to know if the teaching process employed by the training program meets your needs. Can you learn from the videos they offer. Personally, I find instructional videos on YouTube next to impossible to follow for exactly the reason I just described. Before you invest money, it is important to be able to test drive the program.
Quality of the Community
Another important aspect of an entrepreneurial program is its community. First, is there one and, secondly, are they interactive. The skills that you will be learning are complex and you will need additional input beyond the videos you will be watching. Some programs have a couple of hours each week allotted to questions concerning particular problems the student is having. These sessions are one-one-one with a qualified staff person. But input from other students is an important source of this kind of assistance. It has been an important development in Education to realize that students learn from one another and to use that fact. But such communities don’t just happen. This is one thing you want to check out on your test drive. I was in a community where all posts or comments by students had to be approved by management. If management didn’t like what you had to say, then your comment wasn’t posted. Evidently, management’s concept of a community was a place where people can to praise the program. In fact, that is the only conversations I saw in that community. This is not a format conducive to discussing problems and discovering solutions. The community is an important educational tool, but they don’t just happen. They have to be made to happen. It is management’s responsibility to arrange an environment in which meaningful and educationally significant interactions among students occur.
Warning Signs
I’ve identified four red flags that should be avoided. In my experience, these always signal trouble for the student. First, the skills that are being trained may not be adequately covered. In developing a training program, the first thing you do is identify all the necessary skills required to execute the skill and to analyze those skills into smaller units of behavior. This is called task analysis. The purpose of a task analysis is to identity all the parts of a skill that are critical for its execution. For the training programs I’ve experienced, task analysis appears to be missing. The result of this absence is that the learner has to fill all these gaps. If the gaps are not filled, then learning problems can arise. The second concern is the belief that the skills being taught are simple. All the programs assure the student that their system is simple. People involved in educational programs who are not formally trained in Education, often fall prey to the belief that a particular skill is simple to learn because they have mastered it. Without an adequate task analysis of the skill, the instructor/coach cannot grasp the complexity of the skill, and all skills the instructor/coach knows seem simple. The untrained eye is caught in an illusion of simplicity. In reality, no systems are simple! A third concern is the constant report by the creator of the program that he/she has their own successful site. In fact, the program is a formulation of procedures that worked for its creator. The issue is not whether the program will work; the issue is whether it will work for everyone, specifically you. Scientific research can answer this question, but the research has rarely been conducted by the creators. In lieu of such research, a test drive of a program is necessary. The fourth problem you will encounter in these training programs is the lack of update on training videos, especially for social media uses. Social media constantly changes its procedures and formats for its sites. Thus, the forms and procedures that were used last year may not be applicable this year. Training videos that fail to change the models in their videos become out of sync with what the student sees on his/her screen. The student then has to spend considerable time matching the video to the image presented on his/her screen. Mistakes are inevitably made and learning comes to a stand still. These four concerns are not minor. Personally, I have had to drop out of programs due to them. As with the other concerns, only a test drive of the program will reveal their presence. The creators of the program will never tell you, “Oh, by the way, we never update our training videos.”
A Profession in Transformation
Of course everyone wants to know what are the best affiliate marketing training programs available today? Rather than listing names, this post discusses some issues in identifying the best affiliate marketing training program and suggests some guidelines. As a profession, affiliate marketing is in rapid transformation and that offers a challenge to the training programs. What exactly are the skills an affiliate marketeer needs? This has been the problem of Education for the past 60 years. Future shock has been with us for several generations now and it is only getting worse. It is common now that students will leave the educational system for jobs that did not exist when they were in school. Exactly what skill should be the focus of any training is never certain. We should be slow to point a finger at any training program and, rather, be glad the creator spend the time and energy to create it. However, our responsibility is to be informed consumers.