So you want to get into affiliate marketing...

[Vespasian]

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.

 

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[Coalission]

This thread reminds me of why I now stay away from AM forums despite being an affiliate marketer, and instead came here, to a place where most people hate or failed at affiliate marketing. Everyone on those forums has such a limited view of what affiliate marketing actually is, it's either adult dating or diet pills, and the fact that they lump in affiliate networks with affiliate marketing means they have no hustle to go out and get business, and instead will just rely on a network to come serve them offers on a silver platter along with the other hundred bozos running the same shit.

Once you step outside of that world, you realize AM can be so many things, you can develop your OWN book of business, and it can indeed be fastlane but it'll never be with the mentality most affiliates have. Of course if you're stuck in the mindset of most affiliates on forums, you might as well have a job if you're gonna let affiliate managers crack the whip. Affiliate networks are like temp agencies. If you lack the hustle to go out and get business yourself, they'll do it for you and take their cut on the backend and do whatever trickery they can.

The advice I always give to people who want to get into "affiliate" marketing, is to get into marketing. Learn all the aspects of marketing that would help you learn to sell your own product, your own brand, and once you've developed a good skill set, you can practice using other people's product. Let them sweat inventory, customer service, refunds, etc. while you just bring revenue and make money. Now you can take all that data you've gathered and you can implement those skills into your own business. Why is it one or the other? Why would all affiliates have to worry about the FTC? Why would I need to worry about "hordes of Indians, Thais, etc. who couldn't care less about using logos of TV stations or celebs" unless that is the only way you think you can sell, and you actively CHOOSE to offer the same scammy products they do?

All the stuff described in the OP about affiliate marketing is just one small subset of it. That is to affiliate marketing as payday loans are to lending. It's much bigger than your struggles with the FTC or spy tools, and much bigger than your sitting around praying the next Google update doesn't destroy your business.

 

[Mr Green]

@Vespasian, you do bring up some valid points. Some people do think you can just walk in AM and become an overnight millionaire (which is highly unlikely). However, I did want to give an alternative perspective to some of your points.

I see a lot of threads of people who want to get into affiliate marketing. I'm always wondering why

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 won't want to see your girlfriend anymore.

Affiliate marketing is more than adult dating. As an experienced affiliate I've survived because I've always focused on giving myself an edge. You can gain an edge by getting a unique deal on the offer you promote, getting a unique deal from the traffic source you are buying from, hiring a team, automating processes, having a unique optimising system, the list goes on. People can spy on my campaigns, and try to copy them as much they want but they still won't compete at an even playing field with me.

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.

The are some scammy advertisers out there, true. But there are also very reputable advertisers too. The beauty of affiliate marketing is you are your own boss, YOU decide who you work with.

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.

I go back to my previous point, you get to chose who you work with. Plenty of times advertisers have paid me out of their own pockets when they have had a tech issue.

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.

"Adapt or Die" is a quote thrown around a lot in affiliate marketing. We aren't in 2006-2008 anymore, we are now in 2014 where there is now more traffic and more products to push than ever before. Mobile traffic is HUGE now, it didn't even exist in 2006.

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.

"almost every single offer has their internal campaign team that runs campaigns". I'm sorry but this is flat out false. Some advertisers have an internal media buy team, but a lot don't.

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.

Once again affiliate marketing isn't just about running deceptive landing pages to rebill offers.

There is a BOAT LOAD of money to be made without promote rebills, without running deceptive landing pages.

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.

EWA, Ndemand and CPAtank were ALL owned by the same owner. The owner was extremely immature, and if you did research about him you would of seen he and his companies were very high risk. There are plenty of solid affiliate networks that are backed by mega multi million dollar companies. Avazu, Glispa, Matomy, Papaya Mobile...I'm just getting started!

With all that being said I do agree with Vespasian that generally people look at affiliate marketing in the wrong light. They think it's super easy, low risk, no work needed, just going to make millions over night.

I know most people on fastlaneforum have got the heads screwed on right. Most will realize to make money with anything you have to put in work, you have to put effort in just like any other business.

If you treat affiliate marketing like a proper business...not a part time hobby then it's an extremely attractive opportunity.

I can give you a million excuses why not to start affiliate marketing.

I can also find you a tonne of 20 something year old affiliate millionaires. (I recently wrote about 3 on blog.stackthatmoney.com)

 

[Coalission]

Also:

if you're making $50K/mo doing it, it's easy to see why one would.

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:

 

[Nosferatu]

lol - you both have made great points for AF and against it - i think both of you are pretty smart. forum is lucky to have guys with such experience. cheers.

 

[Vespasian]

Incorrect, if you produce a shitload of revenue for a company, you are not "replaceable", simply because affiliates that can push big revenue numbers are not a dime a dozen.

You're generating 250k USD a month in affiliate payments, what do you think will happen if I use my competitive intelligence tools and reverse engineer your campaign? Do you have direct deals with traffic sources? Cool, I can pay more than you. I see which ads you're running, I'll just copy them and your whole flow. How do you want to prevent that? You can not. I can copy you, other affs can copy you. My CLV is 5x higher than your payout. Go figure. It costs me 4.5k USD to hire a media buyer who can handle a dozen internal campaigns (plus adspend ofc). By doing this I can improve my profit by 100k a month. Even if I were not greedy I would still try to move more and more traffic to the internal dep as affiliates usually get paid net 7, but the payment processors pay out net30 to net45 (not taking into account all the 180 day rolling reserves you have to deal with).

On the other hand, many products and offers out there are immediately replaceable. You have no control if your #1 distributor decides he doesn't like your margin, or you don't convert as well as you used to. He says buh bye, and your revenue numbers drop 60% overnight.

Sure, but that's the reason why every offer owner runs internal traffic as well, which a) is stable and b) is usually way more profitable than affiliate traffic. If an affiliate decides to drop out I'll just get one of the media buyers to copy and paste his campaign. Worked in the past, will work in the future. In times of WRW, Socialadspy, similarweb.com and so on it is very easy to replace you and your campaigns.
Overhead in our case is very limited as almost everything is automated, so I couldn't care less about missing out on 10k revenue a day. People usually overestimate the overhead costs as they don't understand how crucial it is to optimize the whole backend once you scale.

Go ahead and build your own business first, work on your MVP, and try to sell it directly if you can. If you really think that involves less risk than selling products in that space first and gathering data BEFORE you develop your own product, than you really don't know what you're talking about. Oh wait, you do because you did affiliate marketing first and THEN developed your own product, so you did exactly what I always recommend

I have the feeling that you have no idea what an MVP really is (hint: it's used to keep your costs down to a minimum while allowing you to gather data and recoup part of your investment). We came up with a completely new product and had zero competition when we launched. We did some marketing research with surveys in the beginning, then banged out a small quantity of products and launched with a super minimal backend. There were no working campaigns prior the launch and we did not optimize traffic sources, banners or landing pages in the first two months as we were busy scaling and building a proper backend, all while being very, very profitable.

but now that you have your own product you want to act like affiliate marketing is your red-headed stepchild when you probably owe 95% of your success to it. Give me a break.

I'll give you your break the minute you start reading my F*cking posts. Do I really have to repeat myself a third time? I'm glad that I got into affiliate marketing as it made me tons of money, but I know hundreds of affiliates personally that started with a few thousand bucks in their pocket and left with zero, or even worse, with debt on their credit cards because affiliate marketing is hard and it is not for everybody. What does affiliate marketing look like for most people who are new to the industry? Bling bling, guru, yadda yadda, 50k a day, get comissionz and fat checks. All you have to do is set up a nice site and buy some traffic. You know what I'm talking about. We both know that affiliate marketing is hard and challenging, but most people who decide to jump into it simply don't.

I think that a bit of background information like the one I gave in my opener will help beginners approach affiliate marketing the right way. I've seen too many people lose a lot of money because they had a wrong idea what affiliate marketing really is as everybody is only talking about how much money they made in a day, but nobody talks about all the dark nights spent hustling 15 hours in front of the computer not knowing if your campaign you're working on will pay for the adspend or not.

I don't even understand your point. Competition doesn't magically go away when you build your own service, but your overhead certainly goes up.

Of course not. The profit margins of your own offer / service will most certainly outweigh your CPA you receive as an affiliate. What does that mean? More money in the bank, easier to build a successful campaign as your max CPA is higher.

Same thing, building your own offers doesn't mean competition goes away.

See above.

Incorrect, my main offer pays 50% front-end, 25% backend, lifetime. There are plenty of offers out there like that one.

Hah, I had to laugh when I read that line.
And you think that your advertiser will track everything properly? This little line shows us two things: a) you have no idea how a large part of the industry works (on an advertiser level) and b) you are very naive. You give up control and let other people decide your outcome.

You are making more dough now because you did affiliate marketing and learned what you learned. "Build your own business and learn the marketing by selling your own stuff" sounds nice and powerful, but 95% fail that way, because they spend all their energy creating a product and then don't know what to do once they have it.

Please remind yourself that I was speaking about launching with a MVP. Let me quote the definition for you:

• Be able to test a product hypothesis with minimal resources
• Accelerate learning
• Reduce wasted engineering hours
• Get the product to early customers as soon as possible

I agree, if you spend 5k USD and 90% on your business the probability of your business failing will increase, but that was not what I was talking about.

If you flip it around and learn to market proven products first, all it takes after that is developing a product and inserting it into your proven funnel.

Are we talking about building a business that innovates or imitates? Sure, if you want to build a business just to compete with the guy you just generated sales for, go ahead do it and see what happens. Prepare for fighting an uphill battle.

You have two choices.
1) You become an affiliate and promote what everybody promotes. You're like a door-to-door salesman that is competing with 5 other guys working the same street as you. Prepare to lose your money if your campaigns do not work. You will end up with nothing as you have not built any assets. You don't learn much as you still don't know how to sell or how to interpret the markets needs correctly.

2) You work on your own business, put a MVP on the market and promote it directly. If your campaign fails you will lose money, that's no surprise, but the chances of your campaign succeeding are higher as the optimization is easier. More revenue / profit means increased max CPA = easier to optimize. It is a huge difference to optimize for $20 CPA or for $30. If it does not work out as planned you always have the option of selling your asset (product, brand, blueprint) to someone in the same industry.

There's no debating this, but we can go back and forth as long as you'd like.

You hopefully see that your approach is somewhat flawed. If not, that's fine.

You are actually proof of exactly what I have been saying all along, learn the ropes by marketing as an affiliate first, then use that knowledge to grow your own product/service.

Just because a few guys win the lottery every year doesn't mean that it's the best way to make a lot of money. Your logic is flawed.

Coalission, let me quote you:
"A lot of people, including MJ himself, has a negative view on affiliate marketing, something I do and am very proud of."
And that is the problem here. You are arguing with me because you feel offended by my experience. Affiliate marketing works for you, that's great and you should enjoy it (and scale it), but you should also step back for a minute and see the bigger picture of what we are doing. Most affiliates fail miserably because they enter the industry under false pretenses. They think it's easy money and a quick way to riches. Both of us know that that's not the whole story and I think I gave a good opinion on the state of the industry you won't read that often in forums.

If you think I'm full of shit and it's the other way round, I can live with that, but please don't expect me putting in more time in participating in a virtual pissing match that this thread became after page one. Sorry to disappoint you, MJ, hope you already finished your popcorn!

 

[Coalission]

Doesn't really matter if you're with a network or going direct. At the end of the day you are a replaceable salesperson to the company.

Incorrect, if you produce a shitload of revenue for a company, you are not "replaceable", simply because affiliates that can push big revenue numbers are not a dime a dozen. On the other hand, many products and offers out there are immediately replaceable. You have no control if your #1 distributor decides he doesn't like your margin, or you don't convert as well as you used to. He says buh bye, and your revenue numbers drop 60% overnight.

I think we both can agree that using affiliate marketing as a way to get more money to invest in your business will fail 9 out of 10 times.
I say there is a better way: build your own business, work on a MVP, go sell it directly. Less risk, more profit, gathering valuable data that's relevant if you want to grow your business.

Irrelevant. Using some book you're writing to make you rich, or coming up with some service or inventing a product to make you rich will also fail 9 out of 10 times. Go ahead and build your own business first, work on your MVP, and try to sell it directly if you can. If you really think that involves less risk than selling products in that space first and gathering data BEFORE you develop your own product, than you really don't know what you're talking about. Oh wait, you do because you did affiliate marketing first and THEN developed your own product, so you did exactly what I always recommend, but now that you have your own product you want to act like affiliate marketing is your red-headed stepchild when you probably owe 95% of your success to it. Give me a break.

Because they are impacting your business, even if you sell vibrating toothbrushes that you've built in your barn behind the house. Deceptive advertising = greater margins = increased click prices. And you are the one that has to deal with it, no matter what you promote, no matter how your landing page looks like. If you are an affiliate you are a) competing with those guys and b) you have the same or even a lower CPA / CPS. Ok, you can not change a) but you can build your own service / offer which will definitely increase your revenue and profit.

I don't even understand your point. Competition doesn't magically go away when you build your own service, but your overhead certainly goes up.

The point is that the increased competition and increased ruthlessness of affiliates are driving up your click prices, as long as you're not in a super targeted niche.
What do you think will happen if somebody starts copying your campaign that you're running for another company? If you are not promoting your own business, you are basically F*cked.

Same thing, building your own offers doesn't mean competition goes away.

Almost 80% of recurring users (2 or more orders) do not have any affiliate ID when ordering, thus no affiliate will get a cut of that sale. Cookie lifetime is set to 14 days by the way. Just think about it for a minute: an affiliate has a blog / lander where he reviews a consumable product X. He ends up buying it. After 2 months he decides to reorder. No affiliate will be paid for the multiple order. That's how offer owners make money.

Incorrect, my main offer pays 50% front-end, 25% backend, lifetime. There are plenty of offers out there like that one.

Well, this is called Fastlane Forum for a reason. If you read the book you'll surely remember the commandments of a fastlane business and you'll clearly see that affiliate marketing itself (I'm not talking about having your own product / service because that's more than just aff marketing) violates 3 out of the 5: entry, control and time. The entry barrier is a small webspace and a few bucks for advertising, if you are an affiliate you have no control as you're just the salesguy for the company and it's generally impossible to outsource, even if you have real, proper employees. There is no quick and easy exit as it's hard to sell your campaigns for a reasonable price except if you have a nice, established web project you could flip off.
---
At the end of the day I couldn't give two F*cks about people failing in the affiliate space. I made enough money and I've seen the truth... and now I'm making even more dough (while in control, building an asset and having people manage my stuff while I travel).
Summary: if you want to promote products / services of other people to fund your business, don't do it. Build your own business and learn the marketing by selling your own stuff.

Disagree with most of this. You are making more dough now because you did affiliate marketing and learned what you learned. "Build your own business and learn the marketing by selling your own stuff" sounds nice and powerful, but 95% fail that way, because they spend all their energy creating a product and then don't know what to do once they have it. If you flip it around and learn to market proven products first, all it takes after that is developing a product and inserting it into your proven funnel. There's no debating this, but we can go back and forth as long as you'd like. You are actually proof of exactly what I have been saying all along, learn the ropes by marketing as an affiliate first, then use that knowledge to grow your own product/service.

I'm looking forward to seeing this thread blow up as Mr. Coalission loves to defend the model, and of course, if you're making $50K/mo doing it, it's easy to see why one would.

lol you knew it was coming

 

[TheSilverSpoon]

My take: the cream always rises to the top. Someone who can run profitable traffic in an intensely competitive vertical will have a tremendous advantage over someone who can't. That person will be able to compete with just about anybody in just about any vertical.

Sure, the guy who can't compete can go niche down and find some smaller markets to play in. But, any sizable market big enough to warrant you being in will eventually develop competition. And if you can't compete you go out of business. Simple as that.

So you can either

1. Play perpetual cat-and-mouse in relatively uncompetitive niches and hope the "big boys" see it as too small to compete or
   
2. Learn how to market in a competitive environment and be able to stand your ground against competitors.

And affiliate marketing is the quickest way to learn how to stand on your own and compete. You live and die by your traffic profitability.

In regards to push/pull marketing: having a product that has pull is great. But what happens when a competitor comes along with an equally great product that is also able to do the push marketing? You get squashed.

It's like all the guys doing import arbitrage. It's a cat-and-mouse game of finding products with markets small enough to still have margin left. All it takes is one large, organized company ordering containers to completely price you out of the game. And then what? Run out and find another small niche product? That's not a sustainable business model. And neither being scared of your competition and hoping that they don't "find" your niche. You need to be able to compete to survive.

 

[Coalission]

Would you feel the need to join a Lamborghini forum and argue the superiority of Ferrari's?

I joined the forum before I knew the owner had some agenda against affiliate marketing, so in my mind, I owned a Murcielago and joined a Lambo forum, only to later find out the community doesn't consider the Murcielago a real Lambo because "reasons".

I don't see people trolling importing and FBA threads saying how you're depending on someone else's product, what if your supplier steals your product, small margins, lots of work, better to make your own product instead of importing, blah blah. It doesn't happen because it's widely recognized that an importing business can eventually lead to something much bigger, and at worst it is a great learning experience. Every time an affiliate thread comes up though, here come all the naysayers with reasons that apply to any business. "I don't recommend affiliate marketing because it's a lot of work and stuff can happen" lol

Do you mind digging into this a little bit? Why do you still have jars of your stuff if you now know how to sell it? From a product perspective, it sounds like you and the other guy had the exact same product - was the reason he was able to pay so much because the mud was a part of a larger funnel for him?
Really like this thread and the opposing perspectives btw.

I've thought about going back and selling the inventory now that I have the means and the knowledge to do it, but I've just been busy with other stuff, and I don't want to go through the whole mud packaging thing again. What a mess. Next time I do something like this, it'll be done right and I'll outsource the fulfillment.

 

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[100k]

Okay, so you don't regret going into AM and you are still doing AM, but you don't want others to get into AM.

Alright buddy.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

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[Vespasian]

[...] the problem is that to make your argument you do the same thing everyone does in their argument against affiliate marketing. You pick the best case scenario as a product owner, where everything went right, and you have a full-fledged business up and running, vs. a low-level, bottom of the barrel, get rich quick affiliate.

I gave an example what happens to the product creator that gets out a MVP and fails getting it off the ground. He probably has an exit option. Affiliates have not. Affiliates face a greater risk.

You don't know product owners/inventors that went through the exact same thing? That's part of getting into business. Most people don't make it. Many lose their shirt, many end up in debt.

I know a lot of people who failed and ended up with huge amounts of debt and they had one thing in common: they did not test the market with a MVP. As long as your product is not super complex you can keep your risk very, very limited.

At the end of the day, to know if this debate has any merit, I'd like to know your opinion on something, otherwise we'll go in circles forever:
Do you think someone who has become successful as an affiliate has a better, worse or the same chance of becoming successful when trying to launch their own product as someone who started from scratch, has never sold a thing, but just wants to make it happen because they have a cool idea?

If you know how to drive traffic, create and optimize campaigns and have relationships to advertising networks, you will definitely have a higher chance to succeed.

If you think the affiliate has the same or a worst chance of succeeding with their own product, then we'll just agree to disagree. If you admit that an affiliate has a better chance of succeeding in the long run, then that proves my point about people trying to lead newbies away from affiliate marketing, when it is something that can better their chances of ultimately succeeding.

Prove your point that I'm trying to lure newbies away because...? I don't give a F*ck about the 90% people that read this thread, hop into affiliate marketing and leave with a hole in their pockets. Why would I? It doesn't affect my bank account in any way. I just think that it would be nice to give people a few reasons to think about the idea of using affiliate marketing as a quick way to fund their real businesses. See what 'FastlaneTiger' posted earlier? That's exactly the mindset that will likely not work.

You have an idea for a business and need funding? Go look elsewhere and don't get into affiliate marketing.

The last part of your sentence lacks any kind of logic. Somehow I feel that the concept of risk / reward is totally unknown to you. I think I've given enough examples why having a unique product in a market with low competition has a higher chance of succeeding than trying to promote a product 50 other affiliates promote to the same audience, probably even on the same traffic sources.

Let's do one last example:
What would you tell the guy that has 500 bucks to his name? Go out there and become an affiliate, setup an account with traffic source X and promote offers A, B and C. If it doesn't work out (because the competition is fierce and you're fighting an uphill battle), save another 500 USD, fully invest it again and if you end up with 200 USD revenue after 1000 USD spend, switch to traffic source Y or think about wether affiliate marketing really is something you should pursue?

F*ck no, tell him to limit his risks and build his asset. I recently met a guy that started his own video course in an unsaturated niche, his investment was 400 USD for a new camera and 50 USD for a theme on themeforest.com. He broke even after his first week by promoting his stuff on relevant forums, the pure profit was invested in Google Adwords (he never used Adwords before, never bought a single click in his life) and is now doing mid 4 figures in pure profits. Without any optimizing, no split testing, nothing. He's now building on various upsells and down sells. That's the way to go. Even if that would've failed, he could've still offered his product for free, collect lead data and then promote other peoples offers. Or sell it to a competitor. The failed affiliate can't sell his campaign that did not work out. 100% risk.

Every time an affiliate thread comes up though, here come all the naysayers with reasons that apply to any business. "I don't recommend affiliate marketing because it's a lot of work and stuff can happen" lol

Yeah, looks like you prefer the 'eyes closed approach'. F*ck the risks! Downsides / Upsides? What is that?
Every business model has its strengths and weaknesses, affiliate marketing has a few more than others, so deal with it. It all boils down to the risk / reward.

Jon pointed you in the right direction. You have issues:

I've just had some success with something that's looked down upon here, and I instead like to present it as a good alternative to people as a stepping stone to whatever their ultimate goal is, instead of making threads like "I made a gazillion dollars with affiliate marketing, here's why you shouldn't do it".

Do you even read the stuff you post?
After reading the two threads you posted ('Why do you guys say affiliate marketing is not fastlane? Look! I'm making a lot of money with it, look at me!' and 'My boss that fired me said I can not make any money but I make more money than him now but my big ego can't handle this') I'm F*cking frustrated that I spent two hours debating with an overly attached emotional boy. If only the slightest negative aspect of affiliate marketing pops up in a thread, you are hopping on your ego train and defend the business model, no matter what. Somebody criticizes affiliate marketing your response is something along the lines of 'that guy knows nothing about the real affiliate marketing' or 'that guy is trolling'.

This is the Fastlane forum. Affiliate marketing is not fastlane. Deal with it.

One thing I've learned from this thread is to always check the other posts that people wrote before taking everything seriously.

 

[Kyle Tully]

I've used affiliate products to test a market/funnel before rolling out my own info product.

If you can break even selling an affiliate product with paid traffic then you can usually make a nice profit when you switch in your own product, assuming your copy is on par with the affiliate product copy.

Doing the same thing now with drop shipping which will then become importing and finally manufacturing.

Few models are inherently good or bad, it's how you use them.

 

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[Vespasian]

I appreciate the feedback, although some of you guys should work on their reading comprehension...

and the fact that they lump in affiliate networks with affiliate marketing means they have no hustle to go out and get business, and instead will just rely on a network to come serve them offers on a silver platter along with the other hundred bozos running the same shit.

Doesn't really matter if you're with a network or going direct. At the end of the day you are a replaceable salesperson to the company.

Once you step outside of that world, you realize AM can be so many things, you can develop your OWN book of business, and it can indeed be fastlane but it'll never be with the mentality most affiliates have.

Absolutely. Knowing how to sell stuff is a valuable asset, no matter what you do.
But that's not the point of this thread. This thread is 'dedicated' to the guys that open threads like 'oh yeh I'm going to go full time AM cuz' it's fastlane' or 'I have 500 USD in my pocket and I'll invest that into affiliate marketing to build a bankroll for my real fastlane biz'. I think we both can agree that using affiliate marketing as a way to get more money to invest in your business will fail 9 out of 10 times.

I say there is a better way: build your own business, work on a MVP, go sell it directly. Less risk, more profit, gathering valuable data that's relevant if you want to grow your business.

Why would all affiliates have to worry about the FTC? Why would I need to worry about "hordes of Indians, Thais, etc. who couldn't care less about using logos of TV stations or celebs" unless that is the only way you think you can sell, and you actively CHOOSE to offer the same scammy products they do?

Because they are impacting your business, even if you sell vibrating toothbrushes that you've built in your barn behind the house. Deceptive advertising = greater margins = increased click prices. And you are the one that has to deal with it, no matter what you promote, no matter how your landing page looks like. If you are an affiliate you are a) competing with those guys and b) you have the same or even a lower CPA / CPS. Ok, you can not change a) but you can build your own service / offer which will definitely increase your revenue and profit.

All the stuff described in the OP about affiliate marketing is just one small subset of it. That is to affiliate marketing as payday loans are to lending. It's much bigger than your struggles with the FTC or spy tools, and much bigger than your sitting around praying the next Google update doesn't destroy your business.

I'm sorry, but you don't get the point. The point is that the increased competition and increased ruthlessness of affiliates are driving up your click prices, as long as you're not in a super targeted niche.

What do you think will happen if somebody starts copying your campaign that you're running for another company? If you are not promoting your own business, you are basically F*cked.


---

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.

Let me fix this for you: I agree affiliate marketing is not going to make everyone rich.

Most affiliates fail and waste time and money. If you don't agree, then you don't know the industry very well.
Affiliate marketing made me over a million in profits and, as I said before, I am glad that I got into it. But please, I wanted to give people some food for thought, the people that think affiliate marketing is a vehicle to get more money to invest or that affiliate marketing is a fast way to riches. When I shared my thoughts there was some sort of a gold rush with lots of newbies trying to get into the industry (and yes, the bad bad 'small subset part' Coalission spoke about).


---

When you say many 'times purchasers go directly to the sales page', do you have any stats/data to back up that claim?

Almost 80% of recurring users (2 or more orders) do not have any affiliate ID when ordering, thus no affiliate will get a cut of that sale. Cookie lifetime is set to 14 days by the way. Just think about it for a minute: an affiliate has a blog / lander where he reviews a consumable product X. He ends up buying it. After 2 months he decides to reorder. No affiliate will be paid for the multiple order. That's how offer owners make money.


---

People here have very limited knowledge on a basic distribution model, because the owner of the site spoke out against what he thought was "affiliate marketing" in Adsense and Amazon lol.

Well, this is called Fastlane Forum for a reason. If you read the book you'll surely remember the commandments of a fastlane business and you'll clearly see that affiliate marketing itself (I'm not talking about having your own product / service because that's more than just aff marketing) violates 3 out of the 5: entry, control and time. The entry barrier is a small webspace and a few bucks for advertising, if you are an affiliate you have no control as you're just the salesguy for the company and it's generally impossible to outsource, even if you have real, proper employees. There is no quick and easy exit as it's hard to sell your campaigns for a reasonable price except if you have a nice, established web project you could flip off.


---


At the end of the day I couldn't give two F*cks about people failing in the affiliate space. I made enough money and I've seen the truth... and now I'm making even more dough (while in control, building an asset and having people manage my stuff while I travel).

Summary: if you want to promote products / services of other people to fund your business, don't do it. Build your own business and learn the marketing by selling your own stuff.

 

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[100k]

Are you doing AM now?

If AM is a bad way of getting money for a fastlane business, then what are the better options? Creating a micro niche blog? Writing a WSO and selling that for $7? Selling crap on ebay?

What about all the knowledge that you gain from doing AM. That's guerilla marketing skills/knowledge you can use later on to fast track your fastlane business!

 

[Hong King Kong]

To give an idea of the lack of control you have,

I've still had an AM campaign running passively bringing in a couple hundred a week. My affiliate manager decides to cut my payout by over 200% out of no where... I have him on skype and he doesnt even bother to shoot a message, instead just sends an email.

Imagine having that as your primary source of income, that could definitely ruin your day!

 

[Coalission]

Affiliate marketing has made countless people very wealthy, to be honest. Placing a banner ad is certainly a small, micro piece of the puzzle.

When you say many 'times purchasers go directly to the sales page', do you have any stats/data to back up that claim?

I've been directly involved in affiliate marketing for years, and it's very powerful. I'll just leave it at that!

People here have very limited knowledge on a basic distribution model, because the owner of the site spoke out against what he thought was "affiliate marketing" in Adsense and Amazon lol.

Not everyone wants to be Dell. Not everyone wants to be Apple. Some people are ok with aiming to be Best Buy. Or Walmart. Or Amazon. Affiliates push product, they generate revenue while assuming very little if any of the backend risk product creators and owners have to assume. Yeah I know I know, Walmart has private label products, but I doubt they care whether it sells or not. Maybe the Walmart founders should have held out on the idea for distribution and instead launched Walmart's line of butters?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

You don't know product owners/inventors that went through the exact same thing? That's part of getting into business. Most people don't make it. Many lose their shirt, many end up in debt.

You're arguing a survivorship bias which is a legit argument. I just think that the survivor bias for AM is far less than someone who honors the 5 Commandments. Perhaps that's what @Vespasian is debating.

Do you think someone who has become successful as an affiliate has a better, worse or the same chance of becoming successful when trying to launch their own product as someone who started from scratch, has never sold a thing, but just wants to make it happen because they have a cool idea?

Absolutely a successful AM dude would have a lot better chance at succeeding at their own gig. I also think that anyone who can succeed at MLM would be a rockstar in the entrepreneur world.

Thread moved to GOLD.

 

[lludwig]

Now following this thread.

While I agree about most of the sentiments, I do think everyone should have some affiliate marketing.

You can create a tighter relationship with your audience. You can't do it all, but others can offer complimentary products to what you do.

You can do this via affiliate products you can't offer or maybe will at someone point but in the meantime can test out using an affiliate. AM is a great way to test out how to monetize your audience.

No business is perfect and AM certainly has its issues. The two primary issues are:

• Relying on others
• Relying on SEO (for most AM)

I sold my blog for $6M. A site that was only on affiliate marketing. I know many others who make 5 and 6 figures monthly just from affiliate marketing. So to say it's not a valid business isn't thinking outside of the box.

Can't everyone do it? Certainly not. But that applies to any business.

Should you only use affiliate marketing as your source of revenue like I did? No, I think that's a mistake for most, but should at least do AM at some level.

You should as a merchant offer an affiliate program for your own products. It's a great way to grow your business from that side as well.

 

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[Vespasian]

Are you doing AM now?

If AM is a bad way of getting money for a fastlane business, then what are the better options? Creating a micro niche blog? Writing a WSO and selling that for $7? Selling crap on ebay?

What about all the knowledge that you gain from doing AM. That's guerilla marketing skills/knowledge you can use later on to fast track your fastlane business!

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

It's impossible to tell people what they should do, I don't know your skillset nor your background or business connections.

I posted in another thread that I made my first money with arbitrage (creating a brand and reselling SEO services with great profit margins). It allowed me to learn everything that's related to a real business: branding, product pricing, dealing with customers, managing a team (this is where I failed hard), defining my market... you will never learn all these things while promoting offers of other people. Plus you don't have an exit strategy. You can't sell your campaigns and if you stop splittesting / creating banners, your campaign will usually die down in a few days or weeks. Either create your own product / service you can sell to a competitor if you're sick of it or create something that is basically hands free.

Most people who get into AM leave with debt / lose their investments. They usually don't stick long enough to learn enough of the selling process that it would be worth the effort. If you want to fund your fastlane business, try to find business models which don't require a big marketing budget, because this is the hardest part: finding the lifetime value of your avg customer. You can only find that out with testing (and a big budget if you rely on paid traffic).

What about all the knowledge that you gain from doing AM. That's guerilla marketing skills/knowledge you can use later on to fast track your fastlane business!

I don't regret getting into AM as I made good money and learned a lot about selling, but I'm not the average affiliate. I had luck, good connections and enough capital to invest into testing campaigns.

 

[jon.a]

Would you feel the need to join a Lamborghini forum and argue the superiority of Ferrari's?

 

[LightHouse]

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?

Get started first before being worried about scaling anything. You can't scale 0.

 

[Puripong]

I have learned this in a hard way. I started affiliate marketing around 8-9 years ago. My main traffics was generated through SEO with a F*cking high competitive keywords (along with one of the hardest niche ever.) At the time my SEO skills was good enough to get my site ranked top 3 for many competitive keywords. Sales started pouring in and I was naive enough to think that world was under my feets after I reached $12,000 a month for a following few months.

I got headaches due to many reversals occur from advertisers. I lost hundreds even thousands for some month but still I think it was ok. I thought I found an excellent model for websites that generate incomes 24 hours a day seven days a week without much effort to put in. My jobs was to monitor and ensure that all sites ranking were in a good shape.

Four years passed - One day I woke up therefore checking to see if everything kept up in a good shape just like a day before. But what I found was my site ranking were fluctuated and so the traffics. A few weeks later I lost 85% of my traffics due to huge algorithm shifted from Google side.

I wish I could have found TMF and read them while I was still able to figure things out before it's too late. But I haven't so the disaster was inevitable. Back to the story - what I had to faced was a crumble on everything I created. I spent thousands of dollar again and again with 3 years to fix things up but it didn't work. It was dying slowly steadily going downhill till zeroed. Everything gone along with my money. I have no control over my traffic sources (Google) and my income sources (advertisers) and I called that "online business" and called myself "online entrepreneur". How retarded I am.

At least I found MJ book and realized after reading for what was happened. I'm starting another business with many obstacles along the way. But yeah at least I got control over my actual business anyway.

 

[tido]

Thank you for this post. I was on the brink of joining the hordes of anonymous affiliate marketers out there. Poring through and absorbing the AMA threads about AM posted here and it seems that everyone have the same sentiment. What was that saysing ...if your car mechanic is talking about doing it, it's time to get out... AM is saturated and full of uncertainties from no control like you've mentioned. This post was what I need to reaffirm my decision to find a different path. Thanks again.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

AM has always seemed like a Greed game to me.

Agreed, money chasing, arbitrage, meh.

Thanks for the great post. It gives me something to refer too whenever someone comes around here wanting to get into the AM game, which BTW, seems weekly. The AM AMA's around here always seem to be from guys who had some success, but are burnt out and come to a realization that its not consistent, stable, or predictable.

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.

Ding ding ding!

 

[100k]

The only reason you should go into AM is to learn how to be a great marketer so that when you create your own products you can generate sales quickly.

For me that is the ONLY reason why I am in AM (oh and also to make some $$$). Anyone that has stuck with AM and has made $100k promoting other peoples products can use the skills he has learned to create his own offers and promote the heck out of them, make millions and build a REAL business with affiliates/a sales force.

:driving:

 

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[Tom.V]

Totally agree, but as others have said the skills gained are worth their weight in gold. The optimization, testing, and tracking skills alone should be in every Fastlaner's toolkit.

 

[theag]

IMO its best to combine both worlds. Build your own high-converting offer (incl backend), make the fulfilment as automated/passive as possible and promote it like an affiliate marketer/media buyer would. Then scale hard. Thats where I'm heading.

Now that I've seen my first success I actually think that the offer creation is the easier part of the equation. I could replicate what I have done in one niche in practically every other niche by using the same process (which I will do ).

Most online business owners can learn A TON from successful affiliates, which is why I regularly check out affiliate blogs, forums, conferences, etc, to improve my marketing. They are always on the cutting-edge, because they need to be.

 

[Vespasian]

Okay, so you don't regret going into AM and you are still doing AM, but you don't want others to get into AM.

Alright buddy.

Sarcasm much?

I don't regret getting into AM as it worked out fine for me, on the other hand I know 50 other guys who failed miserably. I'm not promoting the business of other people now as I have my own offers running, putting me one step up on the food chain. I'm not telling people to stay away from AM, I'm more trying to encourage critical thinking which eventually will prevent a big financial failures and broken dreams.

Hope I made this clear.

 

[Lauryn]

I enjoyed this post. I got into AM when I needed money as a military wife. One of the things I discovered is I was great at content creation, but I either hated the products promoted, didn't like the affiliate companies available (I only like ShareASale, CJ and DragonDoor - Clickbank is okay too)... or I'd have to create the products to promote them.

Money can be made, but the big money does take time and effort. I won't even touch the idea or belief you have to spin 1 article a million times or the "SEO" involved.

It's fun if you want to be creative and learn marketing strategies for offline marketing and consulting, but overall, I didn't see anything profitable until I shifted from the affiliate to the product creator.

 

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[FLYmk]

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.

Affiliate marketing has made countless people very wealthy, to be honest. Placing a banner ad is certainly a small, micro piece of the puzzle.

When you say many 'times purchasers go directly to the sales page', do you have any stats/data to back up that claim?

I've been directly involved in affiliate marketing for years, and it's very powerful. I'll just leave it at that!