My New Project – Starting Out As A Beginner Again In Affiliate Marketing

January 11, 2023

I’ve been a full-time affiliate marketer since 2004 and affiliate marketing has changed hugely since those early days.

Things that were easy then are hard now.

Squeeze pages / Landing pages /Opt-in pages and Email lists and marketing didn’t exist.

Neither did YouTube, which only arrived in 2005, and Google didn’t own it at that time.

Facebook was still a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

And WordPress was still a few years away.

Amazon.com had only just launched as an online book store.

Marketing was raw and edgy and a brand new frontier.

Now I look at the sophistication of marketing tools, tactics, strategies and methodologies.

In some ways, it’s much easier to get started as an affiliate than ever…but in other ways it’s a lot harder.

There are a lot more affiliate marketers around today for a start, with their numbers being bolstered in recent years due to the pandemic, and having to make more money each month just to cover bills and living costs.

So that got me to wondering what it would be like if I were to start again, from scratch, using free tools and having a very small budget to work with.

Yes, I have years of accumulated knowledge so that would give me a real advantage, but I decided to use marketing strategies I haven’t used before (or I’ve used very little and not effectively) so I’d be as new to them as the next guy.

I’ve actually started to document this journey, warts and all, over on my other website – Email List Building Techniques – because list building and email marketing will be at the core of this project.

I ignored list building completely, for years, because I thought it was too much hard work and was too hard.

That was a huge mistake.

And it’s one I’m not going to repeat with this project.

Since this is a spare-time experiment, I’m only going to be able to devote a couple of hours for a few days a week to it.

I imagine that lots of people would only have similar free time what with fulltime jobs, families, commitments and all the other stuff life throws at us.

I’ve added a Day Number into the title of my posts that cover my experience in this venture.

These are the days where I got some work done, and not days elapsed since I began this project on January 4th (2023).

So Day 2 refers to the second day of work done and not January 6th (2 days from January 4th).

So keep that in mind if you decide to read the posts documenting my journey as a brand new marketer (I’ll update this post with new links as I publish additional posts)…