Clueless Affiliate

Affiliate Marketing and Stock Market Investing

Stock Market

As the stock market is imploding today, I was thinking about affiliate marketing and how similar it is to stock market investing. I’ve been around the stock market for about 15 years, 7 of which I spent professionally as a institutional stock broker.

I have seen enough boom/bust since then in the stock market so have a good understanding of what does and doesn’t work and as I was sitting here today watching the market follow apart, I figured I would write a quick post in how it relates so much to affiliate marketing.

First off in both internet marketing and stock investing you have to have real money invested to learn. Sure you can paper trade stock or read endless newbie internet marketing products but until you actually are doing, it is tough to truly learn. Where you have real money on the line then you are completely focused and hopefully learn what doesn’t work real fast.

In stock investing, the best rule you can ever learn is CUT YOUR LOSSES and NEVER average down on a losing position. The same rule essentially applies to affiliate marketing in that if an ad or campaign isnt converting make changes to it or shut it down, but don’t throw more money at it. Learn what isn’t working and learn from it. In stock BEFORE making a trade know exactly where you stop loss will be to limit downside and evaluate if the trade is proper risk/reward, and for affiliate marketing know your Pay-per-click or keyword competition before entering a campaign or building a website.

LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES AND DON”T REPEAT THEM. Seriously don’t kept redoing the same mistakes. Track your trades and review every single one. It is much easier to review a trade later after you don’t have money in it and emotions involved. Same with internet marketing, review what works and track it. (I’m still working on this myself regarding effectively tracking my ads).

Avoid the herd mentality and people opinions. If you are investing, then stop watching CNBC, reading stock chart boards, and listening to everyones opinions. Study what has worked in the past as the stock market will repeat and focus on what has been tested to work (like understanding chart patterns). In stock trading, go where the volume is and follow the trends – don’t fight the trend or bottom fish for crappy stocks that used to former highfliers.(The stock market isn’t stupid, more times than not a crappy stock will stay crappy and there is a reason that it went from $100 a share to $.80cents a share. Same applies to affiliate marketing, stop listening to every guru and crappy newbie product. In affiliate marketing like with paid traffic don’t try to reinvent the wheel, follow the money. Why waste endless money and time trying to see if a market converts when you could just go into a market that is already known to perform well like dieting/make money/dating. FOLLOW THE MONEY $$$$ But it is still up to you to be create and think outside the box.

Don’t buy a stock after every magazine or analyst is touting it as you are probably buying at the top and dont try to build a niche website and expect to compete for a highly competitive keywords like “Weight Loss”….Otherwise you will lose money…

Overall, people come to stock market trading and affiliate marketing for 1 thing usually…..TO MAKE BIG MONEY$$$$….but generally a small percentage actually make a good living at it and those are the ones that work hard at it and don’t expect easy riches with no work. You have to always be learning and evolving.

Just do it. Learn from your mistakes and don’t repeat the same mistakes. Study the most successful players in trading or campaigns/ads in affiliate marketing and see why they are successful. Stay humble and don’t live off of glory of past trades or past successful affiliate marketing campaigns, because failure can always be around the corner.

PS – If you got this far on this post, those red arrows in the chart above are where I went short the Nasdaq…..all the signs were there of a potential top if you knew what to look for……It’s been a good week in the market for me