Affiliate Marketing

hmm…here is a random bedtime thought. So, I have been trying to get affiliate marketing to work for me and I’ll be honest, it’s a very slow start. I have no followers on Pinterest, it’s so difficult to get any traffic going, sure this month I have 70 clicks to all my links, but I kept wondering why so little? Is it because I am Canadian and most products only Canadians have access to and a lot of traffic comes from the states? I thought my pins were pretty and visually appealing. I am creative, so I thought I would be okay at this, but I am not even doing okay. I’ve got one sale since November? I know, I have to be doing something wrong. Today, is the day I figured it out. I was doing it wrong, because I had no idea I could just easily put a link in by giving it a title such as Beautiful Bestsellers and they create an HTML, which I can use and it will bring whoever to my store front.

Copy and paste it, put it in my website and bam it brings all the traffic to me. So maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all this time? Who knows? I can only find out through trial and error. The Pinterest guru’s are usually misleading on how they make so much money, their secret is that they make people take a course! They are getting money through the course.

Then, there is still getting traffic to your blog and Vocal.Media is not an ordinary blog site, it’s where writers can flourish and grow by entering challenges and getting creative with ways to win these challenges. Being a writer is hard and vocal media makes it easier, because you find motivation to write about something you care about.

The reason that I am frustrated is because affiliate marketing does not work, there is no way to drive traffic ethically. There is no way to make enough pins to sell stuff. There are many competitors out there who have better pins. No “guru” will tell you that it is much harder than it seems, that everything requires work. They always call it “easy money” or “make money while you sleep” but when you have a full time job and you want affiliate marketing to work…I wish you luck because it is hard.

The dumb part is that all the people who do this literally give you all the same tips “make your pins attractive to click” and “find a niche”. You can do all those things and still fail.

I’ve decided to step back a little from affiliate marketing and try selling some shirts on Etsy instead. I feel like it might be more profitable and the probability of this might just work out better as all my ideas are original other than some of the quotes I’ve used for my shirt designs. My other designs like a butterfly, sunflower shirt I think is pretty for the right person.

I feel that my shirts are mostly funny:

Like “it’s called selective participation not lazy” I personally think that’s funny. They are very plain though and maybe that’s why they are not ideal. I feel that this can definitely work. I’ve known about a few people who have Etsy shops who sell stationary and other stuff and it’s going well for them. Wouldn’t it be nice to replace at least one income? I want to stay at home with the eventual children I plan on having, but life in Canada on one income is very difficult with the inflation rate and it seems to be going up. I want to try and if it goes well I could still retire at a decent age with enough income to get by. I’ve always lived with “just enough” but if can make more happen then why not?

What are your thoughts on it?