Advice to Those Attempting Affiliate Marketing on Twitter
My personal experience and a possibly more profitable alternative.
It is the most cliché side hustle and a couple of months ago I finally decided to give it a shot.
The Beginning
I discovered affiliate marketing on Twitter around April this year. I had heard of it a couple of years ago, but never really gave it much thought as I didn’t have the patience to build an audience. I came across some courses again while mindlessly scrolling through Twitter one night and I thought: “Hey, why not give it a shot!”. I started growing an account solely for affiliate marketing (not the one that’s connected to medium), bought a couple of courses and joined an engagement group.
After buying these products I was able to affiliate for them and promote them on my Twitter. That’s where I started to come across some fundamental and personal ethical issues with the system…
The Issues
The engagement group helped me grow quite quickly, but most of the people following me were also affiliate marketers that had the same courses that everyone else had. Or they were new accounts that had already been approached and sold to by a competitor. I soon found out that it’s pretty hard to sell ice to Eskimos. Now don‘t get me wrong, I was able to make some money but it was quite some work.
It’s also tricky to stand out, especially as a newcomer, because there are already a lot of accounts and what you’ve posted has probably been posted many times before. So, even though the course sellers say that the market isn’t saturated, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is. You see, when there are a bunch of people selling the same products to a very similar audience it’s hard to be unique and not seem spammy. I also found it difficult to compete against large accounts with thousands of followers. Moreover, whenever I confronted someone about tips and the problem of saturation, they would give me a couple of breadcrumbs and eventually just refer me to another course everyone was already promoting.
My Ethical Issue
Most of the courses floating around are courses on how to sell courses. So to actually be able to say in your pitch that this course works you have to sell a couple of copies first. When someone you’re pitching in the DMs asks about how many sales it’s helped you make and you say you’ve made zero, you’ll have a hard time selling to this prospect now. I mean, how can I sell something that I’m not even sure works. I’m not the person that’s going to flat out lie to get a sale.
There Is Perhaps a Better Option
Currently, I’m reading “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters. They talk a lot about competition and that when you’re in a market full of competitors you’re going to have a hard time making money. Instead, you should create something new in a rather untapped space to avoid competition so that you can focus on actually creating a good product that provides value to people.
To summarise, I don’t doubt for one second that people are making good money with affiliate marketing. But, to translate what I wrote above to the digital marketing world, I think it would make a lot more sense to create your own digital product that provides value in its own unique way rather than promoting someone else’s course that already has 100 other promoters.
