Bad information keeps many people from making money online.

People give a half-hearted effort to one form of marketing, get disappointed that it didn’t work, and then cry out to the world that it no longer works…

How many times have you seen one of these headlines:

“Email Marketing Is Dead!”

“SEO No Longer Works Thanks to Google…”

“Content Marketing Has Lost Its Luster…”

Or the big one:

“Affiliate Marketing Is for Scammers!”

When something is proclaimed dead or not working any longer, it’s probably because someone was gaming the system and the system owners plugged the hole.

Ethical marketing always works in the long run.

That’s why Affiliate Marketing has worked for decades and will continue to work for the non-scammers of the world.

But the headlines persist, and the myths and misconceptions flourish.

Let’s talk about the top 5 myths about affiliate marketing today…

1) Affiliate Marketing is easy…

There’s a misconception out there that the newbie online marketer can grab an affiliate link, put it on their Facebook page, and the money will start rolling in.

Not so fast…

Affiliate marketing like any other business model IS a business.

And it should be treated like a business.

While affiliate marketing may be the exact business model you need as a new entrepreneur, it’s important to understand and accept that it is NOT a get-rich-quick scheme.

As with any business, your primary job is to present a solution to a market with a desperate problem. The problem must be so severe that they are willing to pay for that solution quickly.

Is this beginning to sound like work yet? It should.

Affiliate marketing can be VERY rewarding, but it is not easy, especially if you have no business experience. But affiliate marketing can be the best way to learn how to build a business with very low-risk.

Your investment as an affiliate marketer is low because you don’t have any product or delivery costs. Your focus must be on building a market, knowing that market inside out, and learning how to sell.

These are essential skills for any business owner to master.

Driving traffic and measuring conversions to build your marketing list is the primary tool of every affiliate marketer.

2) Affiliate marketing doesn’t work any more…

The days of throwing a link up on the social marketing sites and making a million dollars overnight are gone…if they ever existed.

Social media has heightened the importance of building relationships with your target market, and that can be a slow process.

Your followers and email subscribers must feel a connection with you. If they don’t, they find someone else where that connection is real.

Affiliate marketing not only works with an audience that knows, likes and trusts you, but they will ask for your affiliate link for new products. Sometimes, they feel such a close relationship that they’ll pass around your affiliate link for you.

Affiliate marketing without real relationships (even if they’re automated) is hard, but can be done with a lot of effort.

But affiliate marketing with real connections with an audience that has been nurtured and embraced works like a charm because you’re genuinely looking out for their interests.

3) The competition is too steep in affiliate marketing…

First, let’s agree competition is good.

That means there’s a market for the product. If not, no one else would be trying to sell that product.

Competitors can also become your best traffic source. Using the right tools like iSpionage.com, you can target your competitors, and step in front of their traffic with better offers, Facebook ads, or other techniques.

Sound a little cutthroat?

Nope, it’s just business. Once you become the Big Dog, everyone will target you too.

Your job is to offer better bonuses, better services, better support, and better experience to that market. And by doing that, you’re building a better relationship.

Find out how your competitors are building their audience (keyword research) and jump in there to grab that audience yourself.

Business is about competition, so if that bothers you, you probably need to get a job.

4) The more I promote my affiliate links the more money I’ll make…

Listen, this one is tricky.

In theory, this is true. But there are other considerations like…

Does your message match the right audience? This is where you’ve got to get good at knowing your market including their hopes, dreams and issues.

In the consulting world, they call these the FUDs – Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts.

What is your audience trying to do? And how can the solution you put in front of them solve that issue?

Promote to the right audience and you don’t have to “sell them” often because you become part of their go-to-problem-solver while you’re building a relationship.

Spamming your links to an audience never works.

But offering a solution to a problem always works.

5) Affiliate marketing is high risk and low ROI…

Ok. There is risk in any business endeavor. In affiliate marketing, you could make a lot of sales for a product only to have the product owner go out of business.

That’s always a risk.

And the return on investment could be very low, but only because you’re not making sales.

That usually means you don’t have the right message for the right target market. Conversions are much easier and ROI much higher when you convert prospects to customers.

Opponents of affiliate marketing will jump in here and declare you’d be better off building your own products, selling them online and keeping ALL the money.

Here’s the truth about that:

If you can’t sell someone else’s product and get a good ROI, what makes you think that you could invest a lot of money on your own product and sell THAT to the same target market.

Affiliate marketing is attractive because the risk is extremely low. You don’t have to create a massive infrastructure to support your products. You’re letting someone else take that risk on.

And the low ROI? Wrong.

The potential in affiliate marketing for those people who learn how to build an audience and convert that audience to paying customers is HUGE because it’s a pay-for-performance model!

The more you convert, the more you make and the higher your return.

Of course, like everything else, affiliate marketing only works if you know how to do it correctly.