I didn't start out knowing anything.

When Janet and I started creating our Orgone art, we had it in a local boutique for a while.

We thought we knew some basics about having an online presence: the boutique has a website and social media pages, and the owner showed us quite a bit on how to promote goods and services online.

So we took what we were shown and ran with it.

We had our product in Etsy, set up our Facebook pages for the art, and for her hypnosis, and we did what we were told by the boutique owner, and Facebook, would work. We boosted posts.

For anyone serious about building an online presence there's one huge thing you should know; there are better ways to get traffic than boosting a post.

We ran with that cycle for close to a year, with moderate results. Again, Facebook pages and Etsy only.

Sheesh!

Just over a year ago we came across some training that was geared for affiliate marketing (you take someone else's offer and bring traffic to it, earning a commission) and thought that we would be able to translate the tactics over to build *our* businesses.

So I buckled in for the wild ride ahead and dove right in.

In this training I learned all about the tools needed for affiliate marketing, and there are quite a few, depending on where you plan to run your traffic from.

First there's purchasing a domain, hosting the domain, using a site builder, getting tracking links, and an auto-responder service, all before you ever bring an offer to any customers.

So each of those listed above *then* need to be integrated so that they will work together, and that process can take hours to days, depending on your tenacity and the speed of the services making the connections.

Now that all of that is communicating properly, it's time to find an offer.

There are many services or marketplaces that will present a seller's offer for affiliates to sign up to be able to drive traffic and then earn a commission. Navigating those waters can be interesting, as you need to figure out which niche you want to work with.

A "landing page" or "lead-capture page" is what is used to get your potential customer (lead) into your sales funnel.

I had to learn how to integrate all of the above and build out landing pages, then move on to learning how to send traffic to the page. The training I learned had me navigating the swift and ever-changing waters of Facebook advertising.

Let me tell you, boosting a post and running an ad on Facebook are two very different animals!

There are so many rules to learn, as well as creating an entire back-office.

Doing everything right, I still somehow managed to 'break a rule' or two which caused my ad-accounts to get shut down. Appealed the shut-down, got reinstated, repeat until I got locked out.

Build a new one and try, try again.

Within 6 months, starting from a complete novice, I was tutoring others on the entire process, from domain purchase to first Facebook ad.

So, if I was compliant in everything, why did I manage to get my ad account shut down?

It seems that there were issues with my hosting. Good ole Facebook would send out the bots across all links, and my pages weren't there because my hosting sucked.

I got new hosting, and that seemed to help, but it had me back again at getting it all connected.

Once bitten, twice shy, I was extremely cautious about every move I made, so as not to anger the Facebook moderators.

Page-builders, like I said, I've used 3 of them, first one had a good price for a year's service. The second one came with a giant price tag, by comparison, and limited the number of funnels and pages that I could build, unless I wanted to pay triple the price.

Nah, I'll pass.

Then I found my current builder, a friend brought me in before it went public, so I'm getting in at a fantastic time.

For the same price I was paying for my last page-builder, I get my own domain, hosting, tracking links, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

My pages load faster than ever, and everything is drag and drop!

Check out my review here.