So you want to get into affiliate marketing...

[brambel]

The monetizing isn't the hardest part, it's getting stable traffic. With a blog, you're usually bound to two traffic streams:

• search traffic
• direct hits / recurring visits

both is very hard to control if you deliver no unique value. If you can place yourself as an authority in your niche, you might have a chance to actually make some money.

The way Pat Flynn and people on wickedfire promote to make money seem , although not Fastlane, as a nice side project (with spare money) to work towards real passive income (better than a job since I'm young and will not be paid very good in employment yet, study at university but even with a degree it won't pay that much, what i want to say is that I consider myself motivated enough to continue spending time to learn how to make money online. I think I have a feeling for this..

Adsense is one of the worst ways to monetize your site. You get a few cent per click and the CTR is usually low.
Promoting affiliate offers will likely make you more money, but you're dependent on the offer owner (scrub, getting kicked off the offer, etc).
Creating your own product (ebook, video course, membership site, gadget, service...) will make you more money and puts you in control.
A great follow-along by Ccarter can be found on Wickedfire (Wickedfire is NSFW and you'll have to register to view the enlightened member section there btw).

Quality and unique content. There are tons of great travel blogs with good content out there. What separates you from the rest?

Thanks, i send a PM. The design needs to get much better but i'm starting to post guest posts on quality websites and everything..

The broader point I want to make is, I need to make money SOMEHOW to be able to live independent, and internet marketing seems like a legit route.. My degree will definitely not allow me to make a lot of money..

 

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[Option]

Thanks for the great info.
I am not into AM but would like to learn about optimization, tracking and split-testing my product-offers and getting traffic with my written unique content.
You mentioned Wickedfire, do you think this is a good place to learn? Just found out about it and liked it, seems to offer much more value then digitalpoint and warriorforum for example.

 

[100k]

LOL... just read through this thread again... I'm such a troll sometimes ... sorry about that. You make some very good points in your original post!

Low entry, no control, time (unless you do SEO with tools)...

Have a good weekend.

 

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[MyDuckets]

Yes, I'm still doing affiliate marketing but for my own offers and not for somebody else.

What processes have used to create your own offers? What types of offers have you created (not the niche but the medium: e books, video courses, etc)

 

[Sean DeSilva]

[duplicate post]

 

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[gstarr]

I agree affiliate marketing is not going to make anyone rich. I've seen so many affiliates think that all they have to do is place a banner ad and the money will come rolling in.

Many times purchasers are just going to go directly to the sales page anyway and bypass clicking on the banner ad. Lots of good information in this thread.

 

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[FastlaneTiger]

Yep, I want to get into AM to raise 5k-10k for capital. I don't see what's wrong with it, it's not my ultimate goal.

 

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[Nosferatu]

Also:



I don't defend it because of how much money I make, I defend it because it makes 100% sense to me to start knowing how to push products first before developing your own, compared to developing first and later trying to figure out how to sell it. If it fails, what was the reason? Was it your product? Was it your marketing? Bah who knows, product scrapped, moving on to inventing the next one. That's a crappy way of doing it.

Here's a video I uploaded, perfect example from someone doing over $12 mil with his OWN products in the survival niche, talking about his process and why he starts running something as an affiliate first, even at this point of his success:

ahh greg davis, mr 50k a day lol -- what's that video from?

 

[Nosferatu]

man this thread is sooo good. lol.

+1 @Vespasian

Well thought out, i agreed with almost everything you said.

you both have some good points, but as an ex-aff marketer myself, i agree with the above

 

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[LightHouse]

Who looks down on it? From what I've seen everyone says it's a great way to learn but not a long term solution.

With fba and importing the focus has always been on creating a brand on Amazon but you still have to play by their rules. Same with kindle books.

 

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[MotiveInMotion]

Would a better alternative be to offer your own affiliate programs, or does that fall under some of the same traps? Seems like you're up more in the food chain of control and you have more leverage

 

[alan3wilson]

I'm new user studying some affiliate marketing but I don't know how much money you would need to scale it up for now. I don't see it as the way for the Fastlane at the moment.
Also what do you think guys of stack that money or marketers like Charles Ngo?

 

[supeyrio]

Just like to highlight that skyscanner was sold for >$1b.. and there are more businesses out there built on the affiliate model.
its not about the tool, its how you use it that matters i suppose?

 

[wavecore]

I see a lot of threads of people who want to get into affiliate marketing. I'm always wondering why that is.
This is the fastlane forum and MJ correctly said: AM is not a fastlane.

I've been an affiliate myself (and an offer owner) and I think I can say that I'm one of the more successful guys. I'm doing well but I know that I had a ton of luck and that I met the right people. The question I ask myself is why do you want to get into affiliate marketing?

If you're looking for a way to make money to fund your fastlane businesses, think about it again.
The vast majority of people end up with a hole in their pocket because they don't manage to get any profitable campaigns. The guys that do run profitable campaigns often end with unstable income streams and usually low or medium 4 figure months. A lot of people heard of "Mr. 50k a day" or any other bullshit guru, flashing their money on instagram and milking the masses. That's not what affiliate marketing looks like.



The entry barrier is ridiculously low
Everybody can steal your campaign, go ask the guys that run adult dating what it's all about these days. Get on a spy / scraper and copy n' paste what you see. Do that with 10 campaigns and 2 will stick, until the banner blindness kicks in or other people outbid you. Spend 6 hours a day copying other peoples campaign and you can make a hundred bucks in profit every day. Trust me, after 2 days of doing this you don't want to see the tits of your girlfriend anymore.

You have absolutely no control
Scrubbing: there are lots of scammy advertisers out there who will scrub you. They'll take 10-30% of your leads / sales and won't report them to you. There is nothing you can do about it and you won't even notice it.

Downtimes / tech: you have absolutely no control outside of your landing page. Payment processor of the offer you're promoting doesn't work? You're the one that pays for the traffic. Database error when people are trying to sign up? No revenue for you buddy. This does sound a bit unlikely until you're running a high volume media buying campaign on 10% ROI and the offer goes down. On the weekend. While you're running with a 24 hour out clause.

Buying traffic nowadays: there was easy money in the acai pill boom 2006-2008, everybody could buy traffic and send it to an advertorial / flog and make a lot of money with this. People were not used to rebills and the conversions were ridiculously high, there was enough money for everybody. Times got harder, lots of offers, verticals and angles are banned now. Doesn't matter if you're buying banners on CNN, Facebook or Adwords. Affiliate marketing got linked to scam and publishers noticed this. Buying traffic for diet pills is very hard now.

Internal campaigns: almost every single offer has their internal campaign team that runs campaigns. It's very cheap to hire a media buyer compared to an affiliate who gets 75-80% of your profit. So a lot of companies cut out the middle man (the affiliate) to cash in more. This happens in all verticals now. New trial or CPS offers are only launched for affiliates when the internal media buying team runs out of good campaigns. Then they'll get all the affiliates on the offer that are doing the split testing and trying out new traffic sources. Then very often this happens: the internal campaign management finds your campaign (spying or checking your referers), copy your whole campaign and scrub you to death. You just paid for their testing and they're laughing. This happens everywhere. Mobile subscription offers, health trials, dating.

Risks: apart from the risk of loss when you're testing new campaigns you have the risk of getting f*cked for deceptive advertising. FTC is breathing down your neck when you're an US-based affiliate. You're competing with hordes of Indians, Thais, etc. who couldn't care less about using logos of TV stations or celebs. Bullet-proof company setups take time and are not cheap. The people who're running uncompliant stuff usually have a higher margin than you and can easily outbid you.

Getting paid: a lot of big networks are getting busted every year. COPEAC, EWA (lol), Ndemandaffiliates, CPAtank and a bunch of others I can't remember. Think of going direct is a better option? Well yeah, if you're not doing thousands of sales every day you won't get any other payment option that net7. Wait until your advertiser loses his MIDs and has his accounts frozen and you'll realize that risk management is a bitch in this industry. I'm owed low 6-figures of two companies that went bankrupt and I'm pretty sure that I won't see a single penny of that.

What it really is: you're just a random online salesman for another company. You're at the bottom of the food chain. You compete with other affiliates, with sketchy advertisers who work against you, traffic networks that have their own marketing department monetizing their inventory and with publishers who don't want to have your ads anymore.



Affiliate marketing is not easy and very time consuming. It's not a business and it's not fastlane. More and more people are trying to get into affiliate marketing every year and everybody is competing with you. I'd strongly advice against getting into AM without the proper contacts and a good amount of cash to play with nowadays.


If you need to fund your fastlane business, please don't get into AM. There are tons of other opportunities that are far better. Maybe this comes off as some rant (and maybe it is one), but I just want to let people know about the not so cool side of the 'ballin' AM world.

 

[wavecore]

That sums it all up.