As a GDI affiliate, you are a member of the affiliate marketing world. This means that marketing is often the key to your success as an affiliate. However, marketing, much like sales and advertising can get a bad rap for being pushy or annoying. While marketing can be seen as unfriendly sometimes, the work that goes into marketing is anything but. As you build relationships, that’s marketing. When you share news with others interested in GDI, that’s marketing. When you teach others about GDI’s tools and plugins, that’s marketing. Marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming to you or to others. Read our list of marketing myths and get comfortable with earning income in the world of marketing!

Expensive

Many people think the only way to market is to pay for ads or to sign up for expensive email services. While those methods can be productive, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to be a successful marketer. Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to broadcast your marketing messages to many people at once for free, whether you’re promoting GDI or your own business. Creating videos and emails cost nothing more than your time. This is all marketing and it’s all free.

Time Consuming

Marketing does not have to be time consuming. Lots of marketing of GDI can actually be passive–meaning you don’t have to constantly work at it to see results. This kind of passive marketing can be in the form of helpful videos or informative blog posts. This content will live on your .WS website and can attract visitors without you spending hours promoting the content. Simply use the right keywords to drive traffic and link to your content on social media sites and visitors will see your videos and website without you doing extra work.

Confusing

As you can see from the examples above, marketing doesn’t have to be confusing. You don’t need to worry about audience reach and retention or email timing or anything professional marketing firms worry about. You just need to create great content that is valuable to others. Add the right keywords and share in many places and you’re already doing powerful content marketing.

Need to Pay for Ad Space

Before social networks and easy to build websites, this was true. The only way to get your content in front of people was to pay for it. Now that’s not true. Find out where people are spending most of their time online. Is it Facebook? YouTube? Tumblr? Take advantage of these free networks and promote your content on them. You’re essentially sharing an “ad” for your business, but your visitors actually get something out of the “ad” (like learning how to use a plugin) and you didn’t have to pay for people to see it.

Need a Whole Team

GDI offers many opportunities to work with a team and succeed with others. However, you only need one person to start marketing. Identify your strengths, like web design or video editing, for example, and start creating content that uses those strengths. The information you share about web design or the videos you create are both content marketing and can be done by just one person.

Need to be Everywhere

Marketing is all about being where your intended audience is. So before you decide how you are going to market, find out where potential prospects and customers are. Are these people in your town or business community? Consider flyers or attending local meetings. Are these people online? Use social networking and websites to connect with them. There is no need to be any place that your intended audience isn’t.

Anyone Can Do It

This is a partial myth. Many people will attempt affiliate marketing, but some will fail. Often this is the result of  not putting enough time into marketing or cutting corners. If you produce quality content to market with and work on building relationships success is sure to follow.