I read this post yesterday and immediately disagreed with it. Since my opinion differs from Amit’s, I’ll post my take on the subject of his article. It was written by Amit from Super affiliate Mindset, and was about how to get started as an affiliate.

It must have been an act of God that I saw the article because I never really look at his blog. To be honest all of his “Check out my new cherry oak $5 million dollar desks, they’re so expensive!” posts borderline make me vomit. But for some reason I was compelled to see what he’d been writing about lately, and found this article.

So here’s the article in a nutshell : the best way to get started as an affiliate is to direct link Clickbank products. Here are the reasons why I disagree with this…

1) I don’t like Clickbank at all, and don’t think it’s the best place to learn. Most Clickbank products are just long sales pages selling a crappy eBook or product. There’s a few okay offers on CB, and I know one of Amit’s biggest offer is a Clickbank product (I’ll be nice and won’t mention it). Perhaps that’s why he recommends them…but I don’t. I’ve tried direct linking Clickbank products like Balloon Twisting, Kidney Stones, and Marriage Books…all of them have flopped. There are much better networks with solid affiliate offers to learn on.

2) I don’t like direct linking either. Amit says it himself, “This is by no means a long term business strategy, but it’s the FASTEST way to learn Adwords, and direct marketing, for that matter.” Let me ask you this question, are you in the industry for tomorrow, or for the next ten years? Let’s say you set up a CB direct link campaign and it’s making $20 profit/day. Yayy that’s great but in two weeks it gets slapped and now it’s a dud. It’s okay, we used it to learn and now we can go set up an insurance offer that’s going to do great in the long term…not. You’ll learn how to direct link Clickbank products, that’s what you’ll learn. I’ll agree that you’ll also learn the basics of writing adcopy, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes.

The best way to start is to learn it all. If you design a landing page and promote an offer, you still have to get that Adwords traffic to it. You’ll learn keyword selection and ad copy writing, but your experience will go far beyond that. You’ll learn the ins-and-outs of designing a website to market directly to your visitor, learn the quality score system (that everybody hates), and learn how to promote offers with generally a much higher conversion rate and opportunity to scale.

3) On starting the campaign, Amit says :

Launch your campaign on Adwords with a starting bid of 0.20. Closely monitor your campaign. (1) if you’re getting virtually zero traffic, up your bids. (2) If your getting lots of traffic ( &gt 500 clicks) and zero sales, you’ve probably got a dud, move on (3) If your getting traffic and consistent sales, you’ve got a winner, now you need to optimize and make it profitable!

If you want crappy position, crappy CTR, and then a slap in the face from Google, I recommend starting all your bids at $0.20. You’ll get a decent position for 20 cents on keywords that get 0.01 searches/day and no traffic.

4) Once of the reasons it seems Amit recommends direct linking is because…

Building a website is probably the biggest hurdle many affiliates face when getting started in this business, that is, unless your a professional web designer! I know it was a HUGE hurdle for me, it took me weeks to learn enough html to make a simple webpage with tables that didn’t look like a 5 year old threw it together!

So…get a professional web designer to build you a page? Most super affiliates don’t do design anyways, they have a designer their work for them. I actually design most of my pages (but not all), but it took a few months of getting used to html and more importantly Photoshop. Don’t have $100 to get a landing page designed for you? It’s time to start thinking about opportunity costs. I’ll quote a book I’m reading right now (I’ll tell you what book it is when I expand on it in a future post) that offers some good advice,

The poor often live frugally, not realizing that time is more important than money. The rich realize that time is more valuable than money because with time you can make money, but with money you cannot make time. They understand the principal of opportunity cost and do not hesitate to spend $1,000 for someone to paint their house if during that time they can make $3,000 working at what they do best.

Great quote right there. In the time it takes you to either learn how to design good landing page (months), or first learn how to direct link CB products (weeks/months) to save up some cash, you could make 10x as much by paying the designer to make a page for $100, and then build up a long term campaign. Time for me to say it again : you can’t be afraid to spend money as an affiliate marketer.

I don’t really feel like writing any more about this as I’ve made my point. Direct linking Clickbank products is not the best way to get started in affiliate marketing. Read up some material, research an offer, set up a landing page, spend some money, TEST TEST TEST and then SCALE.

Let me know your thoughts on it all.

See you at Affiliate Summit.