I've made millions online - ask me anything!

[limitup]

Can you give an example of this......I mean a good example of one you have personally seen out there?

I'll probably never mention any of my own sites for obvious reasons, but there are examples of this everywhere. Go to the Clickbank marketplace and pick a category. Look for the product with the highest gravity score. 98 out of 100 times that is currently the most profitable overall offer in that niche (at least in regards to all the other clickbank offers).

Another way to see this in action would be to use one of the various PPC spy tools. Track the ads for a certain keyword for awhile. If you see the same ads in the top spots for months at a time it's almost guaranteed that those are the sites generating the highest customer LTVs. Not always, but almost always.

 

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[limitup]

Congrats on doing so well with aff. marketing and persisting to never give up in that industry. I come from that background myself and know what you're dealing with. Some crazy numbers have been and are still being made by the best of the best affiliates and lead arbitragers like yourself.

Yeah, there are guys that do a helluva lot more than me. It's all relative. I'm just burnt, and I've decided I'm going to try to focus on more fastlane and more meaningful projects going forward.

Btw, you sound like one of the old timers I knew from when I was really into the Wickedfire forums. Were you a regular there under a different name by chance? (I was ImagesAndWords there).

Yeah I used to lurk at wickedfire. Mainly just for the entertainment value. The noise there is so ridiculous, it stopped being a useful forum a long time ago. Berto's exodus is what reminded me I should spend more time here instead.

There's a group of guys over there who work and skype together and all that, but I was never part of the "in crowd" over there. I'm honestly not much of a networker, more of a lone wolf. That's the other thing you'd never guess about me. I have literally never been to a single affiliate summit, leadscon, or ANY type of internet/affiliate marketing conference EVER.

See that's the other thing about creating GREAT freakin' offers. Affiliates and partners just come to you automatically because they can make so much money promoting your stuff. I've never had to do the whole JV circle jerk thing - instead I often have people begging me to run my offers.

 

[everelusive]

"Make a great offer" - excuse my ignorance making something more complicated than it is, but in the affiliate world is this something that has a high payout per sale and is in an active market?

If theres more, can one point me to the right direction of what this really means, perhaps an example?

 

[limitup]

"Make a great offer" - excuse my ignorance making something more complicated than it is, but in the affiliate world is this something that has a high payout per sale and is in an active market?

If theres more, can one point me to the right direction of what this really means, perhaps an example?

Doesn't matter if you're promoting affiliate products, your own products, or generating leads for that matter. A great offer is simply that, a great offer. Something that's hard for your target prospect to resist. Say you're promoting some nutritional supplement...

A boring crappy offer is "xyz product costs $39 for a months supply, click here to order".

A better offer would be "you can try xyz product for free, just pay $6.95 for shipping and handling. If you want to continue receiving xyz supplement, just do nothing and we'll bill you the low low price of just $39 a month."

A great offer might be "we're so sure you'll freakin' love xyz that we're going to send it to you absolutely free. you don't even have to pay for shipping. just enter your credit card so we know you're a real person, but don't worry - we won't charge you a penny today. try xyz for 30 days and if you love it as much as we think you will just do nothing and next month we'll charge you the low low monthly price of just $39 blah blah blah".

If you're selling any kind of software or web-based service, a great offer generally involves some kind of free trial, rather than just asking people to pay upfront and trust your word that it's great. See what I mean? If you make a great offer like this and your product is actually any good, everything else will usually just fall into place.

Just look at the offers you're making, and try to make them better. To the point where you don't really even have to "sell" them anything. Try to make your offers a no-brainer for the end user.

Don't get me wrong, copywriting can make or break an offer - but only if the offer isn't great. I generally create offers so "great" that I don't need to hire 5-figure copywriters in order to hard sell the customer. With some of my offers the copy literally doesn't matter because the offer is so good.

Combine a great offer WITH awesome copy and now you're cooking with fire. I've had conversion rates over 10% with a $47 product because I know how to make a great offer, whereas most people are lucky to see 1-2% conversions. And this is with cold traffic.

Another way people do this with info products is to just tack on crazy amounts of "free bonuses". You wouldn't think it would work as well as it does, but sometimes you can literally overwhelm the user with bonuses to the point where they feel like they'd be stupid not to take advantage of whatever you're offering.

You know the ones I'm talking about - "this bonus is valued at $97, this bonus #2 is valued at $150, blah blah blah but it's all yours free if you take action today". This stuff works, and works especially well if the bonuses are actually valuable and have real value and you don't just give them PLR crap "valued at $97".

Here's another example of a pretty great offer I've been seeing a lot of lately. People are doing webinars and only charging after the fact. You register for the webinar with a credit card, then you get to consume the entire webinar/content. If you don't think it's worth whatever is being charged, you just send an email and tell them not to charge you. All else being equal, this is a great offer that will almost always convert better than if you just said "click here to pay $97 and register for the webinar" or whatever.

The underlying concept is that if you make a great offer, everything else matters that much less. People go crazy split-testing one color headline vs. another and other little things trying to get an extra few percent boost in their conversion rate. This is all fine and dandy, but by taking a standard normal offer and turning it into a "great" offer, you can literally double or triple your conversion rates overnight.

 

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[Hong King Kong]

Great thread, thanks for sharing all this info!

As someone in AM as well, I was wondering what was the process of creating your first offer? Did AM make that process easier since you had better connections or skills?

What were some ways to make affiliates flock to your offer besides giving a higher payout?

 

[bringitnow28329]

Well I do not have the capital to spend $50k+ a month on PPC. Most of the people that are competing are penny stock promoters and they are pushing out scam products and or free penny stock picks (aka pump and dump scams.) These people get paid several thousands to several million dollars just to send one email out on a penny stock and that is why they can afford to spend $100k or even more per month on PPC. I am a real profit trader, not one of these so called guru's that they claims they make money but actually do not, and instead sell some worthless trading robot or Forex get rich quick scam.

What you need to do is figure out why you can't compete at $5 - $15 a click when your competitors apparently can.

I can actually tell you why - it's because you don't have a high enough customer LTV (and may not know what that is)

If I were in your shoes I'd focus on optimizing my offer and increasing my conversions, and also perhaps some additional monetization of existing customers, so that I COULD afford to pay as much as my biggest competitor for traffic (and hopefully more!)

 

[limitup]

Well I do not have the capital to spend $50k+ a month on PPC. Most of the people that are competing are penny stock promoters and they are pushing out scam products and or free penny stock picks (aka pump and dump scams.) These people get paid several thousands to several million dollars just to send one email out on a penny stock and that is why they can afford to spend $100k or even more per month on PPC. I am a real profit trader, not one of these so called guru's that they claims they make money but actually do not, and instead sell some worthless trading robot or Forex get rich quick scam.

Yeah dealing with unethical competitors can be a real bummer when they drive up ad costs. If these kinds of sites are dominating PPC for the keywords you need you might want to look for traffic elsewhere, because it may be impossible to compete with that. There's just not much you can do if the PPC platforms are allowing unethical advertisers to drive up costs in your niche, unfortunately ...

Maybe get what you can out of the PPC and work on developing an affiliate program, do media buys, develop partnerships with other legit sites in your niche, etc. for traffic.

Any one of these things can send you more traffic than Google can anyway.

 

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[limitup]

Great thread, thanks for sharing all this info!

As someone in AM as well, I was wondering what was the process of creating your first offer? Did AM make that process easier since you had better connections or skills?

My first product was awesome. I was browsing bizbuysell and saw an info product based site for sale. There were all their revenue and other numbers in plain site, and their URL. I couldn't believe they were making so much money with such a crappy site and crappy offer.

Long story short I basically copied what they were doing, put my own twist on it and created what I thought was a better product, and then I aggressively recruited their affiliates and partners. I made a small fortune on that one.

The "copycat" technique is by far the safest way to get started. I'm not talking about blatantly ripping off someone's landing pages, and their product verbatim. But there's nothing wrong with modeling what someone else is already doing successfully, and just "creating a better mousetrap."

What were some ways to make affiliates flock to your offer besides giving a higher payout?

For the most part, unless you're talking about someone you have a relationship with, affiliates only care about EPC and that's it. Affiliates will flock to the offers in their niche with the highest EPCs. Period. End of story. Whenever you see a "top 5" or "top 10" review site for example, the products are "ranked" by EPC in descending order 99% of the time.

 

[bane]

G'day limitup - thanks for doing this!

Question 1: I am trying to get profitable with list building and selling my own and affiliate products. Could you please recommend to me some paid resources that will really help me to nail Email Marketing? I can drive targeted traffic and build squeezes etc, just need more help with when to promote, how many emails to send, building the relationship etc - thank you

Question 2: If your goal was to teach someone how to make their first $100 profit within ~160 hours (aka 1 working month) what path would you set them on? e.g. Direct linking with dating CPA offers on Facebook? Or Biz Op CPA offers on PPV? or Micro Niches sites etc etc - thank you

Thank you for your time man!

 

[bernieshawn]

How did you make your own offers when promoting strictly other people's products as an affiliate (and nothing of your own)? Was it just adding bonuses or did you do other stuff too to make your offer better than everyone else's?

 

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[21elnegocio]

Have you ever had an ecomerce ? if yes what is a profitable niche ? What would you suggest to find a profitable product?

 

[1PercentStreet]

Have you ever had an ecomerce ? if yes what is a profitable niche ? What would you suggest to find a profitable product?

Read the thread, you'll find the answer.

 

[Edgars]

I can actually tell you why - it's because you don't have a high enough customer LTV (and may not know what that is)

Basically he could make customer LTV bigger by successfully selling those same customers training seminars, upsells, basically valuable products over time. Right? Just making sure.

As my math goes - if you pay $15 for someone who spends $15 it's just breaking even. If you spend 15$ for someone who spends $1500 that's a better deal.

Basically the bigger question from me would be about the same thing. What are some ways you would suggest to use to make customer LTV bigger besides OTOs and online/offline seminars, if any?

Also, thank you about the thread! For me the value you're adding is priceless.

 

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[neptune]

Awesome. Thanks for doing this!

I work as an online marketing manager for two of the biggest pet supplement (one sells dog supplements, another sells horse supplements) companies in the UK. I have just graduated and I really want to start my own information marketing business. I have two questions for you and I would appreciate if you could help me out.

1) Could you give some examples of sub-niches within a weight loss niche? E.g. Fat loss for soon-to-be brides, how to lose arm fat, how to lose back fat, fat loss for pregnant women. I'm really passionate about health and fitness and now in addition to getting a BA Politics with Econ. degree, I'm working on becoming a certified nutritionist. Fitness is my passion and I would love to have a business that helps other people to get in shape and that nets me around $5,000 per month.

2) What do you think about B2B markets? Specifically, because I work in the pet industry, I see how much money independent pet stores are leaving on the table and I would love to offer them consulting / information products that would teach them how to use the type of marketing that we use at our company to grow their sales online

I currently look after three sites: one is doing around $2mm in sales, another one around $250k and we have just launched another one that in a year went from $0 to over $100k in sales. We have launched the third site in May, 2012 and we went from zero to over six figures with the help of AdWords and hardcore optimization. Nothing else. No magazine ads. No Facebook ads. No print ads. Nada.

I'm always happy with what I have achieved in life and I don't usually complain, but the success of the third site was the result of my efforts. Over the past twelve months not a single person within the company had look into our AdWords account, analyze keywords, optimized ad groups or did anything else to help to improve the sales.

I don't know whether this is because I come from an immigrant background (Eastern European) or because I have just graduated, but I would love to leave, start my own consulting business and help other independent pet retailers succeed online.

 

[Berto]

Yeah I used to lurk at wickedfire. Mainly just for the entertainment value. The noise there is so ridiculous, it stopped being a useful forum a long time ago. Berto's exodus is what reminded me I should spend more time here instead.

WHOA there! Saw this thread on MJ's Facebook, didn't expect to see my name in it...

Anyway, my question to you: How exactly does one go about "losing millions", as you put it in your first post?

After going red for a few hundo, couldn't you put the brakes on? Any words of caution to prevent this again? Or was it just from buying too much 'stuff'?

Let's catch up soon. We have a slightly similar path, except mine is at 10% the size of yours

 

[Jake]

I'd love to see this thread pinned to the homepage as one of the top 15 most viewed threads ever. If it doesn't happen, it won't be my fault I can promise you that!

Congrats! You've made the list :eusa_clap:

 

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[limitup]

Question 1: I am trying to get profitable with list building and selling my own and affiliate products. Could you please recommend to me some paid resources that will really help me to nail Email Marketing? I can drive targeted traffic and build squeezes etc, just need more help with when to promote, how many emails to send, building the relationship etc - thank you

Sounds like you have the "hard" part covered, so you should be all set. The underlying idea is to provide value so that people actually look forward to opening your emails. It's actually not hard to do in most niches since most marketers are just sending out crap and pitching products every day.

There are no correct answers, you can make almost anything work in terms of email timing. I know people who mail their lists a few times a month, a few times every DAY, and everything inbetween.

Generally speaking you want to provide more content than you do pitches. So a 2:1 ratio would look like this - content -> content -> pitch -> content -> content -> pitch etc. You can also combine content and a soft pitch in the same email. I don't know what your niche or business model looks like but the "formula for success" is always the same. Provide VALUE and everything else usually falls into place.

Frank Kern sold a product called List Control which covers all this exact stuff and it's pretty good. Maybe see if you can get your hands on a copy ...

Question 2: If your goal was to teach someone how to make their first $100 profit within ~160 hours (aka 1 working month) what path would you set them on? e.g. Direct linking with dating CPA offers on Facebook? Or Biz Op CPA offers on PPV? or Micro Niches sites etc etc - thank you

Sorry I really don't like this kind of question. There are too many variables involved and there's really no way to answer it without more information. If a person was actually in this situation and gave me all the details (their background, experience, how much money they have to invest, their short- and long-term goals, etc.) then I'd do my best to help, but otherwise this type of thing is just mental masturbation.

 

[TK1]

I'd be lying if I haven't contemplated where I might be if I had "given in" and tried to build a real business. Several of my projects over the years definitely had the potential to be 10x bigger had I chosen to do this. I could just never get myself to do it.

Welcome over here, nice thread, thanks for your time

I've been in this situation you describe, too. It's a nice feeling selling on the net some digital products etc. and I loved being free as not to have employees and I could always switch off the PC and spend a day with my girl etc.

But:

One day it was somehow enough. It wasn't a real business, but just moneyhunting, although many parts of it - mostly the marketing/selling part - made a lot of fun.

I can recommend you starting something "real" and pick an industry / business model, that is exciting to you beyond just the money part. From my current experience nothing beats the feeling doing something all day long in your own business what you enjoy and have the feeling it really matters and is not just a moneymaker.

I like the term "Start with WHY"...so many people just start because of the money etc., but starting a business because you want to change something or the problem you try to tackle REALLY means something to you, that is a whole different feeling.

 

[limitup]

How did you make your own offers when promoting strictly other people's products as an affiliate (and nothing of your own)? Was it just adding bonuses or did you do other stuff too to make your offer better than everyone else's?

Just so we're clear when I say I created my own offers as an affiliate I mean I created an offer that other affiliates could promote for me. So here's an example that I'm sure you've seen in the biz opp space ... a home business "matchup" offer.

You go through your favorite affiliate networks and you find 5-10 decent biz opp offers that pay you anywhere from $1-2 per lead when someone enters their name and email. Ideally you want to find as many as possible, and as many different types of offers as you can.

Then you create a simple site of your own where people can get "matched" with a biz opp that's right for them. On your landing page you ask for their name and email, and 2 or 3 survey questions such as "are you looking for something part-time or full-time?", "how much can you afford to invest to get started?", and maybe another relevant question based on the offers you've chosen.

Then when someone comes to your site and enters their info, your system will "match" them with say 3 biz opps that you're promoting, based on their answers. Obviously the more offers you have to work with the better the "match" will be for them.

So now you need traffic, and that's where other affiliates come in. You now setup your own affiliate program or put your new offer on the affiliate networks and your offer is simple. Just like the others, you offer $1-2 per lead, when someone submits the form on your landing page.

Once you optimize your little funnel you should be able to get each user that submits the form to signup for at least 2 of the offers you match them with. Assuming all the offers pay the same, and you pay the same as well just to keep the numbers simple, you've now doubled your money every time someone fills out your little home business survey.

You'll also be building a large mailing list, essentially for "free". So you can make a bunch more money promoting stuff to the list over time.

This is what I call affiliate arbitrage. It works GREAT.

I've done it numerous times over the years and made tons of money doing this. Both in the biz opp and other niches. In fact, I'm sure some of you guys out there have signed up for some of my offers like this.

 

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[Milkanic]

I have a physical product I created and eCommerce store that I want to build an affiliate army around. The affiliate payout would be 10-20% ($2-$20) per sale. I'm mostly looking at bloggers in the personal development/fitness/business space vs. long sales copy one page offer type ads.

I'm currently looking at ShareASale to set this up but was wondering if you had any input.

Any recommendations on an affiliate network to set this up on?
Any recommendations where to post this offer to get affiliates to sign up?

 

[limitup]

Basically he could make customer LTV bigger by successfully selling those same customers training seminars, upsells, basically valuable products over time. Right? Just making sure.

As my math goes - if you pay $15 for someone who spends $15 it's just breaking even. If you spend 15$ for someone who spends $1500 that's a better deal.

Basically the bigger question from me would be about the same thing. What are some ways you would suggest to use to make customer LTV bigger besides OTOs and online/offline seminars, if any?

I think I was going a little too fast with so many replies yesterday, so I'll clarify a bit on this one because it comes up a lot...

If you find that you can't compete with your competitors in the traffic "marketplace" - meaning you can't seem to afford the prices they are paying for ads - it just means you need to work on strengthening your offer and/or your monetization.

Obviously one thing you can do to combat this is to work on increasing your conversions via split-testing. If you increase your conversions this will obviously allow you to pay more for advertising and better compete in the marketplace. Try split-testing both little and "big" stuff - everything from the headline on your landing page, to the entire offer like I've talked about earlier in this thread. Improving your offer from good to great can literally double your conversions overnight.

Then there's the monetization of your users or customers. Basically you want to try to squeeze every penny out of your customers as possible, but you obviously have to be cool about it, continue to provide real value, and not be obnoxious about it.

At the point of sale you have upsells, downsells, OTOs, and all that jazz.

After the sale you should continue to monetize your users/customers by promoting other stuff that can truly help them. This could be more of your own products, other peoples' products, or usually a combination of both.

In terms of your own products, generally the best way to maximize your customer LTV is by having a suite of related products with escalating prices. For example, you get people in the door with a low-cost $27 info product. Then you sell them maybe a $97 product, then a $297 product, all the way up to a $997 or $1997 product, high-end coaching or seminars, etc.

Yeah it's a lot of work, but this is how you can even afford to lose money on the front end to acquire lots and lots of customers. If you know your average customer is worth $482 you can afford to spend a lot more to acquire customers than your competitor who only sells a $97 course for example.

 

[limitup]

1) Could you give some examples of sub-niches within a weight loss niche? E.g. Fat loss for soon-to-be brides, how to lose arm fat, how to lose back fat, fat loss for pregnant women. I'm really passionate about health and fitness and now in addition to getting a BA Politics with Econ. degree, I'm working on becoming a certified nutritionist. Fitness is my passion and I would love to have a business that helps other people to get in shape and that nets me around $5,000 per month.

I think that's great - I too am very passionate about health and fitness. Just one of the reasons I hate being in front of computers so much. I have to say I don't really understand your question though, because it seems like you've answered it yourself. You asked for examples of sub-niches related to weight loss, then you named 4 great examples lol

2) What do you think about B2B markets? Specifically, because I work in the pet industry, I see how much money independent pet stores are leaving on the table and I would love to offer them consulting / information products that would teach them how to use the type of marketing that we use at our company to grow their sales online

B2B can be great because as long as you can provide something of value that helps a business increase their bottom line, they will have no problem paying you very well for it. Your idea of offering consulting or info products to help them improve their marketing is a GREAT idea. Of course, I would focus on the info products and not so much the consulting. If you do consulting I would strongly encourage you to only do it with some kind of revenue/profit sharing agreement in place otherwise you're selling yourself short.

I'm always happy with what I have achieved in life and I don't usually complain, but the success of the third site was the result of my efforts. Over the past twelve months not a single person within the company had look into our AdWords account, analyze keywords, optimized ad groups or did anything else to help to improve the sales.

Is the glass half empty or half full? Another way to look at it is that you got to learn and develop all of these great skills using someone else's money. Nothing wrong with that. Now just go do it for yourself!

 

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[limitup]

WHOA there! Saw this thread on MJ's Facebook, didn't expect to see my name in it...

Anyway, my question to you: How exactly does one go about "losing millions", as you put it in your first post?

After going red for a few hundo, couldn't you put the brakes on? Any words of caution to prevent this again? Or was it just from buying too much 'stuff'?

Let's catch up soon. We have a slightly similar path, except mine is at 10% the size of yours

Yeah man, I've lurked over at WF for years. Never really contributed much because that forum is a joke. I would just pop in from time to time for the entertainment value lol. I'll hit you up in a bit when this AMA settles down a bit.

I've easily "lost" or wasted at least 3-4 mil. Should have clarified that most of this wasn't related to my online ventures though. I've actually been very fortunate online and have never lost more than $25-50k on a few small "failed" projects here and there - usually stuff I'd spend money developing and then end up scrapping before it's done just because I decided to work on something else instead.

I was basically just a bonehead and lost a bunch of money offline. I invested and lost a bunch on an offline business I had no business getting involved with, I invested and lost a bunch on a land development deal that I got into right before the market crashed, and I wasted a crapload of money buying toys, houses, etc.

Got it all out of my system though and still have some left, so it's all good. Sure learned a lot about what's important in life, and what REALLY makes me happy.

For the longest time I thought it was money and material stuff ...

 

[bernieshawn]

Any recommendations on an affiliate network to set this up on?
Any recommendations where to post this offer to get affiliates to sign up?

Also, how much do you have to put up in order to get affiliate networks to run your offer? Don't they require a pretty significant deposit?

Thanks for this awesome thread!

 

[limitup]

I can recommend you starting something "real" and pick an industry / business model, that is exciting to you beyond just the money part. From my current experience nothing beats the feeling doing something all day long in your own business what you enjoy and have the feeling it really matters and is not just a moneymaker.

I like the term "Start with WHY"...so many people just start because of the money etc., but starting a business because you want to change something or the problem you try to tackle REALLY means something to you, that is a whole different feeling.

You're right. As I mentioned in a previous post, everything I've done online was always just about the money. Now that I'm not broke and practically homeless, I'm struggling to stay motivated. Time for something new.

If you can combine your business with your passions that's a no-brainer. For some people their passion really is "just" business and making money, so for them it's easy. For the rest of us maybe not so much. Unfortunately there just doesn't seem to be much money in businesses related to my passions, but I haven't given up yet.

At the very least I want to start working on projects that are more meaningful or provide more real value.

 

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[limitup]

I have a physical product I created and eCommerce store that I want to build an affiliate army around. The affiliate payout would be 10-20% ($2-$20) per sale. I'm mostly looking at bloggers in the personal development/fitness/business space vs. long sales copy one page offer type ads.

I'm currently looking at ShareASale to set this up but was wondering if you had any input.

Any recommendations on an affiliate network to set this up on?
Any recommendations where to post this offer to get affiliates to sign up?

Sorry I have ZERO experience with physical products or ecommerce sites. Literally zero.

In terms of your affiliate program, just know that there is little to no loyalty among affiliates. They will promote whatever makes them the most money at any given time. If any of your competitors have affiliate programs I would promote their offer as a test and see how it converts compared to yours, etc. To have a successful affiliate program in a highly-competitive market your offer needs to generate EPCs that are at least close to or better than your competitors. If your offer doesn't stack up, I'd work on improving your conversion rates and your customer monetization before worrying too much about getting affiliates. The last thing you want to do is have some big affiliates test your offer and then bail because it doesn't generate competitive EPCs for them. Most likely they'll never be back. As they say, you only have one chance to make a first impression ...

 

[biggeemac]

OMG....dude.....my brain is literally cooked. I'm just a daytime windows techie, with a GREAT product that is JUST STARTING to take the world by storm, a shitty website with two visitors in the last month (my wife and I), who knows the extreme basic concepts of affiliate marketing but doesnt know WTF upsells, downsells, OTOs, and most of the other terms being thrown around are....I may as well be looking at trading options for the first time. My a$$ is toast as far as im concerned after reading all this.

Sorry, just had to share how this thread is making me feel. Others are excited because they have been in affiliate marketing for a while and are up on their game. Me.....just a newb with OCD, but dammit, I KNOW I have a kickass product. Now, if I can just get that third or forth person to visit our site.

:sigh:

 

[limitup]

Also, how much do you have to put up in order to get affiliate networks to run your offer? Don't they require a pretty significant deposit?

Thanks for this awesome thread!

Yes and no. But generally yes, especially these days. In my case I developed enough relationships over the years that I was able to get my offers on various networks without having to put up much money if any, because people in the industry knew and trusted me. Believe it or not, I've actually had affiliate networks BEG and even pay ME to run my offers. But generally speaking you're right if you don't have a track record and no one knows who you are. If it's a problem for you, another option is to just run your own affiliate program using something like hasoffers and just go and recruit your own affiliates. This can actually be preferable in a lot of cases because you can pick and choose who you want to promote your offer. Once you put your offer on a network you lose a lot of control over who promotes your offer, and how they do it.

 

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[limitup]

OMG....dude.....my brain is literally cooked. I'm just a daytime windows techie, with a GREAT product that is JUST STARTING to take the world by storm, a shitty website with two visitors in the last month (my wife and I), who knows the extreme basic concepts of affiliate marketing but doesnt know WTF upsells, downsells, OTOs, and most of the other terms being thrown around are....I may as well be looking at trading options for the first time. My a$$ is toast as far as im concerned after reading all this.

Sorry, just had to share how this thread is making me feel. Others are excited because they have been in affiliate marketing for a while and are up on their game. Me.....just a newb with OCD, but dammit, I KNOW I have a kickass product. Now, if I can just get that third or forth person to visit our site.

:sigh:

LOL don't stress bro. My first "home run" was a little $39.95 info product that I sold over 25,000 units of. No upsells, no downsells, no OTOs, and hardly even any followup emails pitching them on anything else. I pocketed around 500k in 1 year with this one little product. And this was 10 years ago when I knew almost nothing. Of course, 10 years ago all of this stuff was easier to do - but to this day I know people who make significant amounts of money with single product sites/offers.

If your product is great, and you execute, you'll be fine.

 

[biggeemac]

Mine is physical product......can the same theories apply ?