Golden Goose Marketing

When people are trying to learn affiliate marketing, they often look to expensive courses and end up spending thousands and thousands of dollars trying to get started.  This a huge mistake.

Don’t get me wrong – affiliate marketing courses can be tremendously helpful when you’re just getting started.  A good course can lay the foundation for everything you will learn as you progress.  Once you have the basics down, though, you need to step away from the courses unless there is a very good reason to purchase another (such as learning about an entirely new discipline within the field).  What a lot of people don’t realize is that they can save thousands of dollars by using their competitors to learn affiliate marketing.

Regardless of what kind of affiliate marketing you want to do, there’s a way to spy on your competitors.

• If you want to learn more about email marketing that works, sign up for newsletters in the niches you hope to promote.
• If you want to do SEO, search the phrases you want to rank for, then use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see the backlinks of the people who are already ranking for those phrases.
• If you want to do PPC, search the phrases you want to bid on and see who is bidding on them and what kind of landing page they’re using.
• If you want to do PPV marketing, install popular toolbars on your computer and check out what the other marketers are doing.

Keen observation goes a long way.  The next time you’re thinking about purchasing an expensive course, ask yourself if you could learn much of the same simply by observing your peers.  If the answer is no, then by all means, buy the course.  If it’s yes, see what you can dig up before you pull out your wallet.