MJ Demarco needs to clear the air on affiliate marketing once and for all.

[Coalission]

I swear if I read about one more successful affiliate marketer who made over a gazillion dollars generating leads and now for whatever reason wants to create a new product from scratch and thinks that is what "The Fastlane" is about, I'll blow my brains out.

First of all, let's make one thing clear, MJ DeMarco made a fortune in affiliate marketing. Now of course, he didn't make a fortune generating leads for fly-by-night companies and being the middle-man of the middle-man of the middle-man, or sending every single one of his leads to a single limousine company. He created a brand with Limos.com, but that was an affiliate site, just like many other million and billion dollar companies whose business is distribution are. He didn't go out and try to create a limo company and drive limos around, he connected customers to businesses, or businesses to businesses and took his cut. That is the goddamn definition of affiliate marketing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

So if you've become a beast at generating leads but are tired of the ups and downs, build your brand and transition into something that uses your strengths and is scalable! Affiliate marketing = generating leads! Ignore the people who aren't knowledgeable about the subject and force it down your throat that affiliate marketing equals dealing with some shady affiliate network or making people fill out forms for payday loans. That is but one tiny sliver of the whole affiliate marketing/lead generation industry, in the way buying pump and dump penny stocks is a tiny sliver of the investing world.

Affiliate marketing = generating leads for hundreds or thousands of businesses, as opposed to generating leads for your own one business. @MJ DeMarco made his money with the first, and whether he now wants to say what he did with Limos.com isn't Fastlane, or people are just misinterpreting what he says and all he means is that you need to build your brand and not have your whole business depend on one company is irrelevant.

When you taste success generating leads and hit your first speed bump, stop being a lazy a$$ Slowlaner who can't deal with the cutthroat business world and now just throw your hands up and say "See, I knew it, affiliate marketing is so hard and risky and so blah blah F*cking blah". You will hit speed bumps no matter which route you take, but if you already generated over 6 figures being a freakin' rockstar generating leads, don't come here all ashamed of yourself because you think you were doing something to be looked down upon.

In reality, you kicked a$$ at doing the exact same thing the owner of this site and the author of this book did, you just haven't created your brand and haven't made the leap into turning your lead generating business into a scalable and self-sustainable one, and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't have a goddamn clue what they're talking about, so don't throw all your work and talent away because they failed at making the transition and don't think you're capable of doing it either. Take your skills, take your experience at being a lead-gen monster, and build a brand just like the very author of TMF did.

 

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[MitchC]

Great post.

For what it's worth I just want to chime in and add that he was solving a need, people who wanted to book Limos in different cities found it hard to find companies to book them with so he made it easy. Is there something you find hard to buy?

 

[smarty]

I swear if I read about one more successful affiliate marketer who made over a gazillion dollars generating leads and now for whatever reason wants to create a new product from scratch and thinks that is what "The Fastlane" is about, I'll blow my brains out.

Calm your tits down dear

 

[Coalission]

Calm your tits down dear

I had to make it ranty enough to use the red tag lol

 

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[DurianGray]

I agree with @Coalission

Affiliate marketing should be encouraged since it gives you the skills of marketing. The hardest part of the business in my opinion is the sales and marketing and less so of the product. Once you learn how to sell someone else's product, selling your own isn't that much more difficult. I see all these posts about kids wanting to start an e-commerce store or a SAS product or something else. What you have to realize is that if you don't have the marketing skills, it is going to be a lot tougher. If you have the marketing chops, you should easily pre sell something online before even having the product. That allows you to also test the market and stop before having to go through the task of creating something useless. I personally made the mistake of building an e-commerce store before I realized that marketing would be a pain in the a$$ since it was a weapon/paraphernalia/gray area.

A lot of folks here dabbled in affiliate marketing at some point in their past and I would say that it was an important learning point in their entrepreneurial journey. Once I looked into affiliate marketing, I learned how to advertise, market research, optimize, scale, and manage a team. Those are transferable skills. For a lot of talk about the "process", discouraging affiliate marketing is a large mistake if you want to start a online business. Once I learned affiliate marketing, I felt a huge piece of the puzzle suddenly fit together as I continue to build my online career.

 

[Shades]

Your making money so why do you care?

I think peoples problem with AM is your control. You have none. And it would seem hard to impossible to separate yourself from the "business" and still have it go on making money for you while your not investing your time into it.

I think a difference is MJ could have affiliates like you out promoting his business or product that was Limos.com. So you could go out there and drive a bunch of traffic to his site and get paid well for it. But your building his brand. Your making him money while he doesnt have to be the one out there doing that marketing. And at any time he could either change affiliate terms or terminate the program completely.

So while AM may be great for learning how to market while also potentially paying you well for your efforts, I still have a hard time saying its a actual business in the way I think of a business. Its more of a hustle and and can be a great one. I think its awesome what you are doing. And as you said, if you can go build your own brand now with your marketing knowledge it could lead to great things. But selling things for other people is different then building a brand and sustainable business with systems in place that can allow it to function without the need for your time to make money.

 

[Coalission]

Your making money so why do you care?

I care because every other day I see so much wasted talent and potential from people that failed to pivot at the first bit of adversity, because they've been brainwashed into believing their lead-gen skills are useless and a leadgen business can't be "fastlane", and it isn't MJ doing it. MJ disagrees because he did it the lead-gen way.

I think peoples problem with AM is your control. You have none. And it would seem hard to impossible to separate yourself from the "business" and still have it go on making money for you while your not investing your time into it.

It would seem hard for you because you haven't really put much thought into it. It wasn't a problem for MJ with Limos.com. Did he notice that hole in the market and try to build his own limo company and try to scale it nationwide? Do I need to go down the list of million/billion dollar companies that don't sell their own inventions, and instead just connect buyer with seller? Ever heard of Walmart?

I think a difference is MJ could have affiliates like you out promoting his business or product that was Limos.com. So you could go out there and drive a bunch of traffic to his site and get paid well for it. But your building his brand. Your making him money while he doesnt have to be the one out there doing that marketing. And at any time he could either change affiliate terms or terminate the program completely.

And MJ was "building" the brand of the limo companies that he would send referrals to, except he wasn't sending all of his leads to one limo company, so what one limo company did or didn't do was irrelevant, his brand was built because people went through HIM.

So while AM may be great for learning how to market while also potentially paying you well for your efforts, I still have a hard time saying its a actual business in the way I think of a business. Its more of a hustle and and can be a great one.

It can be a hustle, or it can eventually become Kayak or RetailMeNot. You can say that about pretty much any business model.

But selling things for other people is different then building a brand and sustainable business with systems in place that can allow it to function without the need for your time to make money.

Actually, it isn't different at all. A business whose sole purpose is to connect buyer and seller with added value in between is the EPITOME of fastlane. Alibaba, anyone? I can spit these businesses out all day, because there are so many of them. Kayak is the one that most fascinates me, when you actually go to the site and realize it's valued at over a billion dollars I believe. They are sitting back saying "Yeah, you create your airline and reservation management systems and lawsuits and customer service and all those headaches, we'll be over here sitting back funneling traffic to you hands-free while we focus on marketing, and you'll give me a cut for every referral".

You can go to their site and look for a reservation, and they will literally just pop up Expedia windows, Hotwire windows, etc. It's brilliant, they provide value by having people avoid going to every one of the sites, but according to some people here, it's not real fastlane. They have to build the airline, otherwise they are just building Delta's brand.

My point is, Limos.com wasn't a product, it was an affiliate site, a tool that connected buyer with seller while taking a percentage for referrals. Being a "connector" is the epitome of "Fastlane", MJ knows it and that's why he went that route. I'm not sure where the disconnect is now and why people are all on this "invention" bandwagon. You want to be an inventor, that's fine, that's one way of going about it and maybe your product hits it big, but it isn't the only way.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

It really doesn't matter what I say... your mind is made up.

And at this point, I'm a little confused as to why you care so much.

How people interpret "Fastlane" is not my responsibility, nor yours. By your definition(s), pretty much everything is "affiliate marketing"-- even Google and this forum (which creates leads for my book). Oh, if only the creation of two-sided marketplaces was as easy as signing up for some program and placing paid ads.

A business whose sole purpose is to connect buyer and seller with added value in between is the EPITOME of fastlane.

Value creation is indeed, Fastlane. Look at that, we agree.

because they've been brainwashed into believing their lead-gen skills are useless and a leadgen business can't be "fastlane"

I never said this. Lead gen is an awesome business to be in. And doubly an awesome skill to have. The challenge is owning your marketplace and getting paid direct. The creation of a two-sided marketplace pretty much doubles the executional challenges involved. Not only must 1 market be executed, you must execute on 2. Anytime one can aggregate two disparate markets together, value is created.

Anyway, I'm not going to get into debates about what I said or didn't say, nor will I debate syntaxical definitions of business models. It's clear you have an agenda and your mind is made up. When I look skyward, the air is clear.

 

[Coalission]

I never said this.

I know you don't want to debate, but I'll just clear this up:

they've been brainwashed into believing their lead-gen skills are useless and a leadgen business can't be "fastlane", and it isn't MJ doing it.

I just want it to be clear I said that you AREN'T the one doing it, it is that people may be misinterpreting your opinion on the model itself and have now decided unless you are self-publishing or inventing, you are not "fastlane", when in fact those are probably some of the slowest ways to build wealth, barring some black swan event.

It isn't a syntaxical debate either, the business model is fully defined and you know the model well because that's the route you took. There are challenges in every business model, and "getting paid direct" is a laughably easy one to get past, and not being able to transition into a sustainable, scalable model speaks about the shortcomings of the businessperson, not on the limitations of the business model itself.

Anyone can name me a business model, and I'll find a person that will turn it into a hustle and then quit at it with the first sign of resistance they face and try to go on to the next hustle.

 

[biophase]

Affiliate marketing gets paid via commissions. Commission rates that are not controlled by you. Your webpages just lead someone to somebody else's webpage. You do not take payment, not interact with the customer.

There is no brand created by most affiliate marketing because the transaction moves to another brand's website. I say most because I do know Kayak does not take payments and you get taken to another company's website. MJs business closer to kayak's in that people remember the name and come to it to search for what they need. MJs did not create 1000 lead gen pages and then run traffic through them.

I don't ever see alibaba, kayak, orbitz or these companies doing squeeze pages. Why? Because they are not affiliate marketing companies. But guess what, I bet this one is (http://insanely cheapflights.com)

 

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[Red]

Affiliate marketing gets paid via commissions. Commission rates that are not controlled by you. Your webpages just lead someone to somebody else's webpage.

This.

 

[Coalission]

Affiliate marketing gets paid via commissions. Commission rates that are not controlled by you. Your webpages just lead someone to somebody else's webpage. You do not take payment, not interact with the customer.

Neither do a lot of companies with 9 or 10 figure valuations, and a ton of other under the radar ones valued at 7 or 8.

There is no brand created by most affiliate marketing because the transaction moves to another brand's website. I say most because I do know Kayak does not take payments and you get taken to another company's website. MJs business closer to kayak's in that people remember the name and come to it to search for what they need. MJs did not create 1000 lead gen pages and then run traffic through them.

If I bought the domain Shoes.com back in the beginning of the internet I probably wouldn't need to either, what is your point?

I don't ever see alibaba, kayak, orbitz or these companies doing squeeze pages. Why? Because they are not affiliate marketing companies. But guess what, I bet this one is (http://insanely cheap flights.com)

That's because they don't need to, they are already very well recognized and branded, but I'd be surprised if they didn't split test landing pages in their early days.

You guys can keep building these strawman arguments and picking the lowest common denominator affiliate to use as an example for the industry as a whole, or wait for the next one hit wonder affiliate who wasn't creative enough to transition his knowledge into a sustainable distribution business to make an AMA so now he's finding a new gig, but I'll be here educating people on affiliate marketing as a completely viable path to the Fastlane with the right mindset, without having to give examples of failed authors and 60 year old failed inventors to make my point.

 

[Red]

 

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[biophase]

You guys can keep building these strawman arguments and picking the lowest common denominator affiliate to use as an example for the industry as a whole, or wait for the next one hit wonder affiliate who wasn't creative enough to transition his knowledge into a sustainable distribution business to make an AMA so now he's finding a new gig, but I'll be here educating people on affiliate marketing as a completely viable path to the Fastlane with the right mindset, without having to give examples of failed authors and 60 year old failed inventors to make my point.

Ok, you keep on doing that.

 

[theag]

 

[Dervyx]

I definitely agree. Most people think that there is one way to achieving success in affiliate marketing. Most popular being creating a blog, writing a content, driving traffic, putting a link to a retailer and collecting commission but it's much more than that.

I would say these are examples of a perfect affiliate marketing model:

zillow.com - site that lists real estate. Connects a buyer(someone who is looking to buy or rent a house) with a seller (real estate agents).
skyscanner.com - same as zillow but instead of houses, their product is airline tickets.
thisiswhyimbroke.com - lists cool gadgets and collects commission from Amazon. Doesn't even need to drive traffic to the website as social media takes care of that (people love to share cool stuff). I remember reading interview with a founder a few months back when he said that he makes $20000 a month from this.

 

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[Maxjohan]

Just because you have an affiliate program. Doesn't mean that the affiliates are your bread and butter. I read a few years ago that Ebay doesn't generate a lot of sales through their affiliate program. Ebay pays out $70 million or so a year to affiliates.

He created a brand with Limos.com, but that was an affiliate site, just like many other million and billion dollar companies whose business is distribution are.

 

[Maxjohan]

thisiswhyimbroke.com - lists cool gadgets and collects commission from Amazon. Doesn't even need to drive traffic to the website as social media takes care of that (people love to share cool stuff). I remember reading interview with a founder a few months back when he said that he makes $20000 a month from this.

No doubt, that affiliate marketing can build you a cool little nest egg, if done right. Pretty cool site, actually.

 

[Vigilante]

Lead generation platforms and affiliate marketing are two totally different beasts. Think of affiliate marketing like a channel for a lead generation business to use. A lead generation platform might use affiliate marketing as one means of generating income. However, the affiliate marketer in this scenario (and ALL scenarios) is dispensable, but the lead generation platform is the core business.

Affiliate marketing is the ultimate in violating the commandment of control. It can, has, and likely will dry up, overnight, again and again. There is absolutely zero control for the affiliate marketer who is at the mercy of everyone from Google, to the core business and several others.

However, from the looks of this thread, I just wasted 90 seconds.

 

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[The-J]

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.

The difference between lead gen and affiliate marketing mainly deals with how leads are sold. A lead gen platform sells the leads directly on a per-lead basis. Affiliates get paid a commission per lead. Sounds the same? It's not. Why? Because the affiliate has 0 control over the commission.

I'm glad you want to promote affiliate marketing as a way to learn how to sell, how to run campaigns, how to buy media, and how to generate leads for any company: your own or someone else's. All valuable skills. But affiliate marketing != lead generation. Two different colored peas in the same pod.

If you are an affiliate, you are a performance-compensated sales person. There are affiliates clearing several hundred thousand per month, several million per month even. But they're the rare beasts, and usually they end up starting their own business anyway.

 

[Coalission]

Lead generation platforms and affiliate marketing are two totally different beasts. Think of affiliate marketing like a channel for a lead generation business to use. A lead generation platform might use affiliate marketing as one means of generating income. However, the affiliate marketer in this scenario (and ALL scenarios) is dispensable, but the lead generation platform is the core business.

Affiliate marketing is the ultimate in violating the commandment of control. It can, has, and likely will dry up, overnight, again and again. There is absolutely zero control for the affiliate marketer who is at the mercy of everyone from Google, to the core business and several others.

However, from the looks of this thread, I just wasted 90 seconds.

You sound like you're making stuff up as you go along to fit your argument. Just the mere fact you mention the affiliate marketer is at the mercy of Google tells me everything I need to know about your knowledge on the subject. An affiliate marketer IS a lead generation platform, and they both get a cut of the business, the difference is that a small-minded affiliate will remain small and never leverage his knowledge, data and assets into creating a more automated lead generation platform.

Has nothing to do with Google, that is just a traffic source. You're welcome for making ME waste 90 seconds educating you.

The difference between lead gen and affiliate marketing mainly deals with how leads are sold. A lead gen platform sells the leads directly on a per-lead basis. Affiliates get paid a commission per lead. Sounds the same? It's not. Why? Because the affiliate has 0 control over the commission.

I'm glad you want to promote affiliate marketing as a way to learn how to sell, how to run campaigns, how to buy media, and how to generate leads for any company: your own or someone else's. All valuable skills. But affiliate marketing != lead generation. Two different colored peas in the same pod.

If you are an affiliate, you are a performance-compensated sales person. There are affiliates clearing several hundred thousand per month, several million per month even. But they're the rare beasts, and usually they end up starting their own business anyway.

Nope, as an affiliate you generate leads, plain and simple. There's no way around it, it is what it is. The objective is to eventually grow and create your own lead generation platform, among a bunch of other shit you can do related to the knowledge you already have.

It really is sad how little business savvy some people have when it comes to things like this. If someone came to you and told you he was making a killing making iPhone apps, but eventually competition got the better of him and competitors flooded the market, what would your advice be? Give up apps, it's a tough racket, go sling Kindle books instead and forget all the knowledge and data you gathered in the app industry?

Common sense says to stick to the industry you know inside out, but figure out the weaknesses of your previous approach, and come back bigger and stronger with something more sustainable, plug the leaks. Instead here you get people that can't market their way out of a paper bag telling people that have printed money to go do something else now. Give me a break.

 

[smarty]

This is the type of thread I must unsubscribe immediately & run for my life. Enough time wasting.

 

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[GuestUser113]

This is the type of thread I must unsubscribe immediately & run for my life. Enough time wasting.

You get a little bit dumber in the process from reading it all.

 

[socaldude]

Yup, the private equity group that bought out Limos.com for a multi-million dollar valuation did nothing but buy an affiliate website.

The transaction and due diligence was so easy he just emailed over a username and password.

 

[Coalission]

You get a little bit dumber in the process from reading it all.

It's easy to be condescending, and it takes no talent to shit up any thread you appear in with sarcasm, so I'm not impressed. Eventually you'll fully recover from being bullied as a child and can start contributing or ignoring if you have nothing meaningful to say. In the meantime, you can keep picking on 15 year olds here: https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/what-else-left.55425/

Yup, the private equity group that bought out Limos.com for a multi-million dollar valuation did nothing but buy an affiliate website.

Exactly.

 

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[GuestUser113]

It's easy to be condescending, and it takes no talent to shit up any thread you appear in with sarcasm, so I'm not impressed. Eventually you'll fully recover from being bullied as a child and can start contributing or ignoring if you have nothing meaningful to say. In the meantime, you can keep picking on 15 year olds here: https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/what-else-left.55425/

I don't have to shit up a thread. You are doing a bang up job now.

p.s

I am just allergic to bullshit.

 

[Shades]

I care because every other day I see so much wasted talent and potential from people that failed to pivot at the first bit of adversity, because they've been brainwashed into believing their lead-gen skills are useless and a leadgen business can't be "fastlane", and it isn't MJ doing it. MJ disagrees because he did it the lead-gen way.



It would seem hard for you because you haven't really put much thought into it. It wasn't a problem for MJ with Limos.com. Did he notice that hole in the market and try to build his own limo company and try to scale it nationwide? Do I need to go down the list of million/billion dollar companies that don't sell their own inventions, and instead just connect buyer with seller? Ever heard of Walmart?



And MJ was "building" the brand of the limo companies that he would send referrals to, except he wasn't sending all of his leads to one limo company, so what one limo company did or didn't do was irrelevant, his brand was built because people went through HIM.



It can be a hustle, or it can eventually become Kayak or RetailMeNot. You can say that about pretty much any business model.



Actually, it isn't different at all. A business whose sole purpose is to connect buyer and seller with added value in between is the EPITOME of fastlane. Alibaba, anyone? I can spit these businesses out all day, because there are so many of them. Kayak is the one that most fascinates me, when you actually go to the site and realize it's valued at over a billion dollars I believe. They are sitting back saying "Yeah, you create your airline and reservation management systems and lawsuits and customer service and all those headaches, we'll be over here sitting back funneling traffic to you hands-free while we focus on marketing, and you'll give me a cut for every referral".

You can go to their site and look for a reservation, and they will literally just pop up Expedia windows, Hotwire windows, etc. It's brilliant, they provide value by having people avoid going to every one of the sites, but according to some people here, it's not real fastlane. They have to build the airline, otherwise they are just building Delta's brand.

My point is, Limos.com wasn't a product, it was an affiliate site, a tool that connected buyer with seller while taking a percentage for referrals. Being a "connector" is the epitome of "Fastlane", MJ knows it and that's why he went that route. I'm not sure where the disconnect is now and why people are all on this "invention" bandwagon. You want to be an inventor, that's fine, that's one way of going about it and maybe your product hits it big, but it isn't the only way.

I guess the difference between what you do and some of these sites you think you are similar to is that they are offering a market something of value. You are bringing no value to anyone with AM. Your selling someone elses thing of value. They are the ones potentially sitting on the beach somewhere while you make sure money is still running into their account. You have nothing to sell to a bigger company. What is the end game to the AM business?

 

[Shades]

Neither do a lot of companies with 9 or 10 figure valuations, and a ton of other under the radar ones valued at 7 or 8.



If I bought the domain Shoes.com back in the beginning of the internet I probably wouldn't need to either, what is your point?



That's because they don't need to, they are already very well recognized and branded, but I'd be surprised if they didn't split test landing pages in their early days.

You guys can keep building these strawman arguments and picking the lowest common denominator affiliate to use as an example for the industry as a whole, or wait for the next one hit wonder affiliate who wasn't creative enough to transition his knowledge into a sustainable distribution business to make an AMA so now he's finding a new gig, but I'll be here educating people on affiliate marketing as a completely viable path to the Fastlane with the right mindset, without having to give examples of failed authors and 60 year old failed inventors to make my point.

I gotta be honest, it seems right now like you are someone who has started making good money in the last year or so and its kinda F*ckin with your head. Stay humble.

 

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[LeftBench]

Take all this passion towards arguing your point and use it towards making money

 

[Vigilante]

I swear if I read about one more successful affiliate marketer who made over a gazillion dollars generating leads and now for whatever reason wants to create a new product from scratch and thinks that is what "The Fastlane" is about, I'll blow my brains out.

First of all, let's make one thing clear, MJ DeMarco made a fortune in affiliate marketing. Now of course, he didn't make a fortune generating leads for fly-by-night companies and being the middle-man of the middle-man of the middle-man, or sending every single one of his leads to a single limousine company. He created a brand with Limos.com, but that was an affiliate site, just like many other million and billion dollar companies whose business is distribution are. He didn't go out and try to create a limo company and drive limos around, he connected customers to businesses, or businesses to businesses and took his cut. That is the goddamn definition of affiliate marketing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

So if you've become a beast at generating leads but are tired of the ups and downs, build your brand and transition into something that uses your strengths and is scalable! Affiliate marketing = generating leads! Ignore the people who aren't knowledgeable about the subject and force it down your throat that affiliate marketing equals dealing with some shady affiliate network or making people fill out forms for payday loans. That is but one tiny sliver of the whole affiliate marketing/lead generation industry, in the way buying pump and dump penny stocks is a tiny sliver of the investing world.

Affiliate marketing = generating leads for hundreds or thousands of businesses, as opposed to generating leads for your own one business. @MJ DeMarco made his money with the first, and whether he now wants to say what he did with Limos.com isn't Fastlane, or people are just misinterpreting what he says and all he means is that you need to build your brand and not have your whole business depend on one company is irrelevant.

When you taste success generating leads and hit your first speed bump, stop being a lazy a$$ Slowlaner who can't deal with the cutthroat business world and now just throw your hands up and say "See, I knew it, affiliate marketing is so hard and risky and so blah blah F*cking blah". You will hit speed bumps no matter which route you take, but if you already generated over 6 figures being a freakin' rockstar generating leads, don't come here all ashamed of yourself because you think you were doing something to be looked down upon.

In reality, you kicked a$$ at doing the exact same thing the owner of this site and the author of this book did, you just haven't created your brand and haven't made the leap into turning your lead generating business into a scalable and self-sustainable one, and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't have a goddamn clue what they're talking about, so don't throw all your work and talent away because they failed at making the transition and don't think you're capable of doing it either. Take your skills, take your experience at being a lead-gen monster, and build a brand just like the very author of TMF did.