Who are you and what are you currently working on?
Hey! Thanks for having me on Geniuslink! My name is Chelsea Clarke, I’m a business strategist and business broker. I teach affiliate marketing and growth-hacking over at https://academy.herpaperroute.com/ and help investors and bloggers buy and sell websites over at https://blogsforsale.co.
I’m currently working on organizing a virtual summit for entrepreneurs called Brave At Business. It’s coming out in November 2020, and features live workshops with business and marketing leaders.
How did you get started in affiliate marketing? What keeps you excited about it?
I started learning about affiliate marketing a few years ago, when I was researching creative ways to grow an ecommerce business. I had a background in corporate marketing and loved coming up with growth strategies, but I was bored with my own store, and with having to commit to selling just one type of product. As soon as I discovered affiliate marketing I was hooked! Promoting other people’s products for a cut of the profits? Never having to provide customer service for the sales? Any niche I like? All the niches I like?! Amazing. Sold. I dedicated a year to learning everything I could about affiliate marketing. I tested strategies, ran campaigns, and created many offers to figure out what worked for me. Since then I have monetized various niche sites with affiliate marketing, and in the past 2 years have earned nearly half a million dollars as an affiliate. What keeps me excited about it is that there is always something new to dig into, a new product to research, a new bonus offer to create. I love the creativity that’s involved, and the fact that you never have to focus your attention on just one thing.
What is one piece of advice you’d give to a newbie affiliate marketer? And what is one piece of advice they should ignore?
If you are a newbie affiliate marketer, just make sure you spend your efforts promoting high-commission affiliate programs. Don’t waste your time on products that only pay a few bucks per sale. And, don’t be afraid to invest a bit of money into PPC ads to promote your links either. If the affiliate program allows PPC bidding, try it out! As far as what advice to ignore, I would say ignore anyone who tells you that “it takes a long time to make good money with affiliate marketing.” No it doesn’t. You can make money from day one, you just need to get out there and put your offers in front of your target customer.
What has been your favorite mistake? A mistake that in retrospect led to a great lesson and progress in your affiliate marketing?
When you decide you want to earn your full-time living as an affiliate marketer, you suddenly find yourself having to wear about 100 hats. You need to be a content creator, SEO expert, email marketing pro, product creation pro, web designer, advertising strategist, social media guru, influencer….the list goes on and on. When I was new in the game, I didn’t know that it was bad to have the same content on two or more pages on one website. I had never heard of duplicate content penalties from Google! So there I was (this was about 6 years ago) putting copy from the same review from one blog post, onto a sales page, onto a resources page, all on one domain. Oops! Fortunately I started learning about SEO soon after I started making a mess of that first website, so I was able to clean it up before upsetting Google. But that was a big lesson still. If you are spending anytime creating website content, take an SEO course first!
What is one piece of software or a web service (besides Geniuslink) that allows you to be more effective as an affiliate marketer?
I’m a big fan of Canva, for quickly creating graphics for my affiliate promotions. I use it every day.
How do you continue to educate yourself as an affiliate marketer? What are some of your favorite resources for learning?
My favorite way to stay in the loop with affiliate marketing, beyond my own bubble, is to find industry leaders and then subscribe to their email lists!
If people wanted to connect with you, where should we point them to?
Swing by HerPaperRoute.com for money + entrepreneurship tips, and if you are looking to buy or sell an online business, see my current listings BlogsForSale.co.