Post: #1

Contents

1 Introduction
2 Definition
3 Tools
4 Clickbank glossary
5 Direct Linking & Search Engine Advertising
6 Affiliate Marketing with Squeeze Page / Landing Page
7 Feasibility
8 Conclusion, Thoughts and Recommendations

Introduction

This data sheet is dedicated to demystifying Affiliate Marketing - If you always wanted to get into it (maybe you want to be location independent), this will give you a realistic perspective. If you want the easy money, this will discourage you from doing it (if you are interested in knowing the numbers before you dive into it, go to Feasibility and Conclusion).

In general, the market is saturated and volatile. There's a low barrier of entry, which means, that literally everyone can enter the market. Affiliate Marketing is a low hanging fruit. Rules change all the time. Even laws – a lot of Amazon Affiliates have been warned just recently in Germany. No one knows what will be next year – or even in 5 years. So consider the potential lack of sustainability.

I don't consider myself an expert and I don't know it all. This is my experience and opinion; your mileage may differ. If that's the case, you are welcome to add intel.

Definition

Affiliate Marketing is selling and marketing other people’s products. After join an Affiliate program, you get a unique link to the product. This link is directly tied to you, so you get provision for every sale.

There are multiple ways to do Affiliate Marketing

1. Direct Linking. It is obsolete and does not generate leads, but it’s still a useful tool for getting first experience.
2. Landing Pages with Opt in/Squeeze page. By collecting the E-Mail addresses, you are generating leads.
3. Niche site. Product reviews and tests to niches with specific key words.
4. Blogging. Publishing articles about a specific topic and occasionally promoting a product.

There are more Affiliate Networks out there:

Peerfly Affiliate Network
CJ Affiliate Network
Warrior Forum
Amazon Associates

I will focus on ClickBank and Amazon in this datasheet as I am most familiar with them. If you have experience with the others, feel free to add information.

Tools

In my opinion, these tools are necessary to be really successful in the long run. You don’t need them if you start out, or you can use the free trial. Keep in mind that it can become quite costly.

You don’t need to have all the tools, some are basically doing the same or something similar (GetResponse vs Aweber vs ClickFunnel).

AWeber, MailChimp, Constant Contact etc,
E-Mail Marketing platform for sending sequences or broadcasts.

Cbengine
Offers good insight into what’s going on behind the ClickBank Marketplace. Makes searching for parameters and metrics easier.

GetResponse
It's an Auto Responder with the feature of building a Squeeze Page / Landing Page.

Click Magic
Invaluable tool to track what keywords are getting sales / or opt-ins into Mailing lists.

ClickFunnel
It’s a monster of a tool, allowing you to create complete sales funnels for literally everything. Quite expensive.

ClickBank Builder
Allows you to build and host squeeze and landing pages without needing a domain. Costs a lot.

Clickbank instruction

Pick a Product you know and like.

Avg $/Sale. How much money you will make when you make a sell.

Popularity. How many sales the product has and how much money its making. It's not a bad metric, but it's less important than Gravity.

Gravity. It's the most important value for Affiliates. If an Affiliate makes at least one sale, it goes up by one. Gravity ultimately shows how well a product actually is selling.

1) Always pick Gravity bigger than or equal 1, if you are not feeling like gambling.
2) There are different philosophies on how high Gravity usually should be. Some say the higher the better, but in my opinion, it just creates more competition for keywords. Try picking products with max 60-100 gravity in that case. Try to find the sweet spot and works for you – capturing leads always works regardless of Gravity.

Average Rebill Total. If there is a subscription with recurring costs. $$$

Do I have to know the product? Well, if you want to have the moral authority to recommend it, yes. Ask for a free affiliate copy. Dont misuse the return policy, you will get flagged.

Some Vendors offer pretty good affiliate tools, like prepared copies. Use them.

Direct Linking & Search Engine Advertising

With Direct Linking, you directly drive traffic to the product. You should not do this and you will see why. But here is how it generally works.
You buy Ads for specific keywords. Google Adwords are potentially the most lucrative, but Bing Ads are cheaper and you get enough click throughs. Bing Ads and Google Adwords work basically the same way.
It's a complex tool and if you wan't to get into that you have to do some digging on your own. But having an idea how it works is a useful skill. Remember: You won’t do Direct Linking and you soon will know why. It's just useful to know how it works.
Usually I would say it's a good starting point to get some money flowing. But here's the problem:

1) You don't generate leads. Bad!
2) It simply doesn't work, because GoogleAdwords and BingAds suspend you

My account on Bing got banned without further comment, so I can't say what I did wrong. Had some trouble getting back my money. I suspect they don't allow direct linking to other people's funnels. And you need to have a Privacy Policy. Other than that, beats me.
At least on GoogleAdwords, my campaigns were suspended for just that reason. Google doesn't allow you to direct traffic to other people's sales funnels. You got to have your own thing in between! Which completely renders direct linking obsolete and brings us to building your own branding. There's no other way around it!
And here you start to see the issue with AM: Rules change all the time and screw up everything you have going. You are completely dependent on what others do and how your infrastructure changes. Also, make sure to study the Ads policy so you don't get suspended. I personally found it fun to tweak all the values without much investment. Just to see how the markets work. And knowing how to use AdWords is a good skill to have if you want to promote your business, service or product.

Affiliate Marketing with Squeeze Page / Landing Page

You don't just drive traffic to the product landing page. It's considered bad practice. You will lose potential customers forever and miss out on long term income opportunities.

Imagine if you could get the E-Mail addresses of those potential customers. They have demonstrated an interest in a specific area – let's say paleo, for example. So, from now on you collect the E-Mail Addresses and you can pitch to them later – they are leads.

You need a Squeeze Page an (or opt-in page) to generate leads. It's called like that because you squeeze it in between the source of traffic and the product you are promoting. You don't need to consider Gravity anymore, you can still generate leads in a niche.

You offer free, high quality value by E-Mail and occasionally you ask for action (Affiliate Link, Product link).

How many subscribers you need to make good profits will be discussed later.

With a Website and with Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates is an affiliate program by Amazon. You get a provision of 10%, depending on the product. One possibility and example is building a small web page with reviews and tests of products.

Usually, such a website is low (lower) maintenance, after you get it running. You need a Domain (can’t be a trademark obviously), a Hosting service and WordPress.

The goal is to find a good market, which can be summarized in a short keyword. What’s a good market? Well, I’m glad you ask!

- The niche should not be to small and not to big (Check name with AdWords Keyword-Planer)
- Your competition is low, e.g. there are not lot of websites around doing the exactly same
- People want to buy something in that market and are not looking for free stuff
- You can actually write stuff about it
- Amazon offers products when you type in your keyword

Example:
http://thebestespressomachines.org/

I don’t know what the legal situation is in other countries, but in Germany a lot of “test” pages have been warned (which is one step before getting sued), as they don’t really test but just drive traffic to their affiliates. This is a perfect example of changing rules in the Affiliate Marketing business and how it can affect your income.

Feasibility

How many Subscribers do I need? What are the conversion rates?

Usually, aim to get 1 sale for 100 visitors. If you are not getting sales after your 300-400th visitor, ditch the product/landing page. That's just my rule of thumb when looking at the analytics. Everything else is not that easy.

   

(http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/0...rsion-rate)

The stats are as follows: You have E-Mail Open Rates of 20-25%. You have a Click Through Rates of 2-3%.

Now let’s do the math. Imagine you want to reliably get 10 sales every day. Lets assume you are awesome and in the top 25%. You get a conversion rate of 5%. You need 200 high quality visitors.

Let's assume your Click Through Rate is about 2-3%. You need 6000-7000 people clicking on the link in your E-Mail.

Which are 20-25% of the overall recipients. You need a list of ~30000 high quality subscribers.

30k is A LOT. And this assumes that you are in the top 25% (in the Top10% you need half as many subscribers). If you are average, you need 60k+ subscribers. If you have conversion rates of 1% like 25%... 150k+ subscribers.

What are 10 sales? I've checked some high gravity products and they usually range between 10-30$ (some outliers). So, you will get 3000-9000$ each month – if you have daily E-Mail sequences. Getting to that number of subscribers is one thing. Writing enough converting E-Mails with perfect copy writing to fill the E-Mail sequence/broadcasts every day for a long, long time is another. Keep in mind that you can only pitch every 3-4 mails without appearing spammy. 10 sales a week is more sustainable, but won't enable you to become financially independent. You get the idea.

Keep in mind that with increasing subscribers the cost of your Mailing list increases drastically.

And that's the thing with Affiliate Marketing no one is going to tell you. You can decide for yourself if getting tens of thousands of subscribers and supplementing them with a lot of E-Mails is realistic.

Example of what can be expected

What counts as both realistic and successful, in my opinion?

   

This. You will notice that:

1) It's not a lot.
2) It fluctuates.

In my opinion, this will put you ahead of 98% of your Affiliate competitors. For someone from the third world it's a lot. But for you it's first and foremost a lot of daily tweaking, paying Ads, paying for Hosting and tools with a potentially low RoI.

I personally found it fun to do split tests, copywriting and experiment with keywords. For a while. It feels a bit like gambling. Keep in mind that most people don't even get that far.

Learning from Top Affiliate Marketers

These are the mere basics. If you are starting out, you are not going to know what to do. Either you spend months and years experimenting, or you pay for a program or mastermind. Usually, good advice is hidden behind a paywall – other Affiliate Marketers offer their products on how to do Affiliate Marketing. It's a feasible business model - for them. I was thinking about doing my own course on how to do Affiliate Marketing, too. Because it's such a lucrative market.

Don't fall into the trap of Survivorship bias. This means you should not listen exclusively to guys who „made it “. By this I mean high revenue marketers, who could live from their income. Yes, I've seen some impressive revenue. We are talking about 1000$ a day. But here's the thing:

– Those Marketers have been doing it for years. This means they got started when it was easier to become established. In addition to being established, they have a lot of experience about what works and what not.
– They dominate a lot of niches. They dominate keywords and can afford to buy Ads with good keywords. Also, they rank high in Search Engines.
– They have massive E-Mail lists with high quality subscribers. Their broadcasts and E-Mail sequences are on point. Their copywriting is flawless. Chances are you don't even know some of those words when you start out.

Conclusion, Thoughts and Recommendations

I don't say it can't be done. I just say doing something else, investing in something else might be simply a better choice. For example, your own high value information product, service, etc. that you can market yourself. Or let others do the marketing.

By the way, I don't think I will contribute to the saturation of the market by making this guide public (like I said, most of it is behind a pay wall. Maybe some people will even be pissed about it). Quite the opposite. By being upfront about the odds and telling „all those secrets “, Affiliate Marketing will stop looking like a „get rich quick” scheme and attract less people. So, paradoxically, it may become more feasible again at some point.

If you want some coffee money, sure, you can get into it. But you need to be ambitious and can't do it in a half assed way. A lot of people seem to think that's it’s this passive income-ish stuff you can do on the fly. Nope. You should work on it every day and build dozens of campaigns. Step by Step. And you need to put in money to drive traffic, generate leads and pay for tools. Even then there's no guarantee that you will break even. You have seen the math we did regarding the conversion rate!

So, you still want to do it? My advice is common sense: Start with one small thing. 2h a day, every day. Don't put too much money into it at first. Play around a bit, see how it works out. And build it from there. Personally, I put AM on hold for now and focus on other projects, but might come back if I have some time. Currently I'm experimenting with Social Media Marketing and building my own brand.

Post: #2

Thanks for the data sheet.

Post: #3

Great thread, remember me an old post on BHW about the same subject, worth the read

Post: #4

Good post. I have been looking into Internet Marketing recently, it's good to see some balanced information rather than the typical stuff from people trying to sell you a system and telling you how much money you will make.

(01-25-2017 06:32 PM)reciproke Wrote:  in Germany a lot of “test” pages have been warned

By this did you mean websites that test a lot of different products and make recommendations?

Post: #5

(01-26-2017 04:29 AM)blck Wrote:  Great thread, remember me an old post on BHW about the same subject, worth the read

Thanks, that's really interesting. I'm personally for providing value and building a sustainable business, but getting to know black hat marketing is at least a good exercise/thought experiment. Also it enables you to spot Marketing BS others do, which is an excellent thing. Nowadays we are bombarded with information and the UX is designed to grab our attention ruthlessly. By recognizing how our psychology is being used for marketing, we can ultimately regain our control of ourselves.

Quote: By this did you mean websites that test a lot of different products and make recommendations?

Yes. The problem was, there wasn't a testing process at all, despite being called a proper test. I don't know what the situation is in other countries, but it should encourage you to be more careful with the expectations you are selling.

Post: #6

Search Engine Optimization For Websites and Blogs

The best website or blog is of no use if there’s no traffic. We have seen that we can drive traffic by paid ads, but PPC (Pay Per Click) ads can get expensive. Also, you should do a lot of tweaking to ensure that you are getting the most out of it. It is high maintenance.

Another option is getting your website highly ranked by search engines. Highly ranked means: First page. Ideal is first three results. Perfect is first place.

Disadvantage is that you are completely dependent on the algorithms of the search engine. Rules can change. Also, expect to have a lot of competition.

To rank high, the website/blog need to have

- Relevancy. It has the right content and keywords.
- Authority. It has a lot of backlinks.

You gain Relevancy by doing On-Page SEO. This includes everything you can do yourself.

- Meta- and Alt-Tags
- Usage of keywords
- Permalinks
- Internal Structure, Sitemap
- Quality
- Topicality (i.e. at least one quality blog post a week)

You gain Authority by doing Off-Page SEO. This means having a lot of other quality websites having links to your website.

Here it gets a bit tricky. You can comment on other websites while linking back to your website (without appearing spammy). You can write guest articles and promote in Social Media.

However, the golden cow is getting other Website administrators to link to your page. This can only be done by having a good relationship and good content.

Here are some ideas on how to do Link Building:

- Links from your own pages
- Youtube videos
- Comment other blogs without appearing spammy
- Write guest articles
- Social Boomarking

Next level Link Building:

- Interviews with Experts
- Cooperate with other webmasters
- Participation in a forum while having the Link in your profile
- Popularity of website, comments, likes in Social Media etc.


If you use WordPress, you can use a lot of SEO Plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, Broken Link Checker, W3 Total Cache (to increase performance).

Google Analytics is a must have. With it you will get all important stats about your visitors and what SEO measures were successful.

Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console is useful to get an idea how Google treats your website and where you can tweak it. It can be used with your Google Analytics account.

Following the Google Guidelines

The Guidelines are straight forward.

Quote:Basic principles
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don't deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.
Specific guidelines
Avoid the following techniques:
• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google
Follow good practices like these:
• Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears
• Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site
If your site violates one or more of these guidelines, then Google may take manual action against it. Once you have remedied the problem, you can submit your site for reconsideration.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/an...ic=6002025

Post: #7

I appreciate this thread but why are you telling people that they shouldn't expect a large ROI from affiliate marketing?

There are guys in the affiliate/IM/adtech space that earn six figures every month. They aren't even top dogs either.

Top guys are doing six figs per day driving paid traffic and they have investors too.

Obviously you have to work your ass off to get to that level but if you're gonna start a thread on this topic you have to be realistic dude!

Not crazy difficult for people to at least make a few thousand every month ranking for low competition keywords and tracking their shit with ahrefs.

Post: #8

Great thread!!! For anyone questioning if affiliate marketing is real or bullshit last month I brought in about $5300 off a combination of adsense and 3-5 other affiliate programs. I should add its also a side hustle not my day job. I spent from say 2009 through 2013 totally fucking around not having a clue what I'm doing. Last year was the first year I really started having success. It's a long journey not because it takes that logn to make a successful site but b/c for me most of that time was a learning curve learning what works, what doesn't, developing my skills, etc.

In my experience Amazon and eBay and popular sites like that payout way too little to make any real money unless your getting millions of visitors per month.

My average amazon commission is like 0.30 cents to maybe $1.50 where as with other programs I can earn $59 per signup if not more.

Post: #9

(01-26-2017 05:37 PM)jamaicabound Wrote:  Great thread!!! For anyone questioning if affiliate marketing is real or bullshit last month I brought in about $5300 off a combination of adsense and 3-5 other affiliate programs. I should add its also a side hustle not my day job. I spent from say 2009 through 2013 totally fucking around not having a clue what I'm doing. Last year was the first year I really started having success. It's a long journey not because it takes that logn to make a successful site but b/c for me most of that time was a learning curve learning what works, what doesn't, developing my skills, etc.

In my experience Amazon and eBay and popular sites like that payout way too little to make any real money unless your getting millions of visitors per month.

My average amazon commission is like 0.30 cents to maybe $1.50 where as with other programs I can earn $59 per signup if not more.

I'm having my first good year in this space too. 2017 is where it's at.

You're right that it's just a matter of putting in your time and doing the work. Eventually, you just learn what works like any other skill. This is why I say that affiliate stuff isn't hard. You just have to do your time like everyone else.

Post: #10

Good datasheet. I used to study the subject a few years ago, but ultimatedly got bummed when I kept getting spam e-mails with affiliate links, and I didn't want to be a "me too". If you can do it the right way, which you seem to know, then you're a good guy.

Post: #11

(01-27-2017 02:28 AM)Rawmeo Wrote:  Good datasheet. I used to study the subject a few years ago, but ultimatedly got bummed when I kept getting spam e-mails with affiliate links, and I didn't want to be a "me too". If you can do it the right way, which you seem to know, then you're a good guy.

Affiliate Marketing gets a bad rap because of how a handful of fucktards treat it. I also get frustrated when I get 5-7 emails per day from "Mikee from Youtube".

I don't do e-mail lists at all. Most affiliate marketers mouths would probably drop at hearing that as most people say its the holy grail of affiliate marketing.

I create helpful content and subtly drop links. For example, dont write a post about the top 10 blenders thats fucking stupid. Don't write a post ranting about how the nutribullet has a 20 speed motor and 4 laser cut blades.

Instead you write a post like how I lost 10 pounds juicing, you give some juicing recipes, excercise and diet tips and subtly mention to you do your juicing with the nutrijinja and link to it.

Basically my point is alot of the affiliate marketing I do is adding value and not just getting people to buy stupid shit they don't need or bombarding them with emails.

Post: #12

The most laughable one is the "how to make money online" e-books. The masses of people are too stupid to realize that a method to make money is like a pie - there's limited cash, and the more you share it, the thinner your slice gets. You can be sure that if I had a bulletproof proven method to make money online without effort, I'll keep it for myself and enjoy my pie instead of having to spam the world with it.

The right way to do it (or, at least, one of the right ways) is to write actual content - hire a ghostwriter if you need to - and put an actual link at the end. And try to disguise affiliate links - Google tends to hate people who put blattant aff links in their posts.

Post: #13

The people making real money in affiliate marketing are cloaking paid traffic and running offers in shady niches (casino, nutra, trading, sweeps, utility installs, dating, MMO etc.). It is a very mechanical business that requires a lot technical ability. The people I know making good money (300k+ annually) all have elaborate setups with teams, custom software and strong personal networks in the space. Unless you have aspy tendencies and willing to grind for a long time, possibly losing thousands of dollars before seeing positive ROI, I would recommend doing something else. The people who make money from this are a very particular sort. Also this isn't like the old days, ROI is going down and will remain to do so.

The other people making good money are the authorities with large audiences who earn most of their income from things like web hosting commissions (think Pat Flynn and BoldAndDetermined). This is a longterm play and requires a lot of work upfront before you are able to monetise.

You can make some money from an Amazon affiliate sites but we are talking hundreds to maybe a thousand or two a month, not really much for the effort it takes. The only way for this to make real money is to figure out a system to build/acquire/rank these sites at scale.

There are outliers companies that have more creative models that work on the affiliate model(ie. http://fakespot.com/ which detects fake Amazon reviews and then recommends you a better product with an affiliate link.) but these businesses actually require you to come up with a unique idea and have the ability to execute.

Post: #14

Thanks for this sheet and the mentioned link @blck. I found the info on psychological triggers very informative.

I remember Roosh's post about new guys coming to pick-up, which he considers lazy. Most young men finding pick-up (including myself) discover it through the efforts of internet marketers. Their materials promote pickup as an easy, effortless and fool-proof way to meet girls. The kind of person who feels attracted to "Discover the SECRET to seducing girls without ever being rejected" ends up on pick-up forums.

By reading the above datasheets, I realised how much I've been influenced by this kind of marketing, since it's such an integral part of self-help writing these days. From sports to entrepreneurship, my thought process has been heavily shaped by those "psychological triggers" that relate to my personal weaknesses.

My personal favourite is the "effortless" fallacy, in which marketing materials promise to deliver you easy ways of making money or a fool-proof way to seduce girls. It hooks right into the disappointed from the end of my teens.

Ironically, I've done great with women and financially the past few years. All by taking the easy way out: spending time looking for the opportunities with the highest payoff instead of putting in a lot of work. In itself is not a bad thing, but if I want to progress to being a boss you need independence - which cannot be done with exploiting great opportunities alone.

Thanks again for posting this sheet. Any recommend reading on psychological triggers would earn you a rep point, if I could give an other one.

Post: #15

I currently got about 5K a month give or take comming in from affiliate markeitng. I kinda do things my own way. I don't do landing pages, I don't do list building or email lists. I mainly do content marketing via niche blogs and forums, youtube instructional videos like how to fix a drone and then link to where they can buy parts, things like that.

My preferred affiliate programs are typically JVZoo, CJ, and then not really networks but individual companies affiliate programs. Once you start driving traffic companies will begin to make you special offers. For example someone with a new software may contact me and say I'll pay you $500 for every blog post or vidieo you make that gets over 5k views in addition to better commissions than the normal affiliate program will pay.

My method is fairly labor intensive. Ultimately I'd like to get better at split testing and running fb or adwords ads to the point where I spent $100 I make $200 and then just continue tos cale up but I havn't been able to get ads to convert well enough to make it worthwhile.

While this can be done quickly ie you can make money from day 1. On some programs I've made $800 my first month. If your starting from scratch I'd expect a year plus before your making fulltime income money. Not that it takes that long to do this stuff but probably first 6 months will be spent just learning what the fuck the point of affiliate marketing is and the skills and tools needed to do it and the next few months actually figuring out good niches, strategies that aren't a time suck and dont pay back in rewards etc.

Post: #16

(01-26-2017 01:28 PM)stefpdt Wrote:  I appreciate this thread but why are you telling people that they shouldn't expect a large ROI from affiliate marketing?

There are guys in the affiliate/IM/adtech space that earn six figures every month. They aren't even top dogs either.

Top guys are doing six figs per day driving paid traffic and they have investors too.

Obviously you have to work your ass off to get to that level but if you're gonna start a thread on this topic you have to be realistic dude!

Not crazy difficult for people to at least make a few thousand every month ranking for low competition keywords and tracking their shit with ahrefs.

I agree dont' undersell affiliate marketing. Most people think there's not money in it b/c most people fail or give up and don't make much. The guys doing 6 figures a month are the 0.0001%. That said I'm not especially skilled at internet stuff. I can't make a good wordpress site, I dont do e-mail marketing, I suck at landing pages but I have my own little strategies that work and I bring in about 5k a month doing this stuff. I don't really use the affiliate programs most people go to such as ebay partner, amazon, etc. Those dont pay shit unless you have millions of hits per month. You need to go after the affiliate programs that pay out higher commissions. Yes its harder to conver but it will be worthwhile when you do.

Post: #17

(01-26-2017 11:51 PM)stefpdt Wrote:  [quote='jamaicabound' pid='1495390' dateline='1485470279']
By reading the above datasheets, I realised how much I've been influenced by this kind of marketing, since it's such an integral part of self-help writing these days. From sports to entrepreneurship, my thought process has been heavily shaped by those "psychological triggers" that relate to my personal weaknesses.

Alot of truth to this. Alex Becker who's a huge marketer and software guy, supposedly making like 300k a month these days started off selling pickup programs.

Post: #18

(02-17-2017 03:51 PM)asdfk Wrote:  Thanks for this sheet and the mentioned link @blck. I found the info on psychological triggers very informative.

I remember Roosh's post about new guys coming to pick-up, which he considers lazy. Most young men finding pick-up (including myself) discover it through the efforts of internet marketers. Their materials promote pickup as an easy, effortless and fool-proof way to meet girls. The kind of person who feels attracted to "Discover the SECRET to seducing girls without ever being rejected" ends up on pick-up forums.

By reading the above datasheets, I realised how much I've been influenced by this kind of marketing, since it's such an integral part of self-help writing these days. From sports to entrepreneurship, my thought process has been heavily shaped by those "psychological triggers" that relate to my personal weaknesses.

My personal favourite is the "effortless" fallacy, in which marketing materials promise to deliver you easy ways of making money or a fool-proof way to seduce girls. It hooks right into the disappointed from the end of my teens.

Ironically, I've done great with women and financially the past few years. All by taking the easy way out: spending time looking for the opportunities with the highest payoff instead of putting in a lot of work. In itself is not a bad thing, but if I want to progress to being a boss you need independence - which cannot be done with exploiting great opportunities alone.

Thanks again for posting this sheet. Any recommend reading on psychological triggers would earn you a rep point, if I could give an other one.

Most of the really great marketing (and pickup) stuff I've read emphasizes the opposite of what you are saying. That it takes massive effort... but that is good since most people won't be willing to do it.

Anyway, a top book about psychological triggers is "Triggers" by Joseph Sugarman.

Post: #19

[/quote]

Most of the really great marketing (and pickup) stuff I've read emphasizes the opposite of what you are saying. That it takes massive effort... but that is good since most people won't be willing to do it.

Anyway, a top book about psychological triggers is "Triggers" by Joseph Sugarman.
[/quote]

While I can't necessarily disagree that it takes massive effort, it does for me, but some people are better at automating processes or hire writers or do things to cut down on the effort/time.

What I would say keeps people out is the fact that results typically aren't instant. Most people aren't going to be willing to work for months seeing little to no results and will give up and say its not worth their time.

I don't always agree with the advice of follow your passion as I don't think it's always a recipe to making money or being successful, however when it comes to blogging, online marketing, etc I think you have to love what your doing because if it's strictly for the money you'll give up because it does take a while to come.

My personal journey I was maybe making $3 a day after a few months, at the time it was enough to fill up my gas tank and buy me a few packs of smokes without having to hit a coinstart machine a couple days before payday so that was a motivator in itself but it was years before I was making any significant money.

Post: #20

(02-17-2017 04:12 PM)jamaicabound Wrote:  

(01-26-2017 01:28 PM)stefpdt Wrote:  I appreciate this thread but why are you telling people that they shouldn't expect a large ROI from affiliate marketing?

There are guys in the affiliate/IM/adtech space that earn six figures every month. They aren't even top dogs either.

Top guys are doing six figs per day driving paid traffic and they have investors too.

Obviously you have to work your ass off to get to that level but if you're gonna start a thread on this topic you have to be realistic dude!

Not crazy difficult for people to at least make a few thousand every month ranking for low competition keywords and tracking their shit with ahrefs.

I agree dont' undersell affiliate marketing. Most people think there's not money in it b/c most people fail or give up and don't make much. The guys doing 6 figures a month are the 0.0001%. That said I'm not especially skilled at internet stuff. I can't make a good wordpress site, I dont do e-mail marketing, I suck at landing pages but I have my own little strategies that work and I bring in about 5k a month doing this stuff. I don't really use the affiliate programs most people go to such as ebay partner, amazon, etc. Those dont pay shit unless you have millions of hits per month. You need to go after the affiliate programs that pay out higher commissions. Yes its harder to conver but it will be worthwhile when you do.

Amazon just chopped affiliate commissions for a lot of categories.

A lot of people are panicking over this. But, as Wall Street Playboys like to say - "Do the opposite."

Competition is probably about to drop off big time.

I'm willing to bet that a bunch of long-tail keywords will be easier to rank for than ever before.

If anyone is considering getting into affiliate marketing, now is probably as easy as it will ever get.

Post: #21

(02-25-2017 02:54 PM)stefpdt Wrote:  Amazon just chopped affiliate commissions for a lot of categories.

A lot of people are panicking over this. But, as Wall Street Playboys like to say - "Do the opposite."

Competition is probably about to drop off big time.

I'm willing to bet that a bunch of long-tail keywords will be easier to rank for than ever before.

If anyone is considering getting into affiliate marketing, now is probably as easy as it will ever get.

Fuck it I'm going in, I already have a lot of the skills needed for this, definitely have the time. See you boys on the other side, if I make it I'll have a report on here.

Post: #22

It took a year for mine to take off to around $250/month.



Though it can definitely be done much quicker seeing how I was on/off about it.

My biggest advice is to write about something you actually care about.

Post: #23

Good thread

Problem with Affiliate marketing is finding legitimate products that pay well.

If I'm looking at a product, I'm looking for at least a $20 pay out.

I'll explain why below.

Best advice is promote products that you use and know.

Learn copywriting and how to write a sales page.

Landing pages still work but I have a tendency to believe blogs convert better than landing pages due to the nature of a blog.

So if you plan to do affiliate marketing I would do it as a blog.

So Here's an idea to get started with.

Find 3-4 legitimate products that actually work with a minimum payout of $20.

Start a blog based on those 3-4 products and write articles around those 3-4 products. This is where it pays to know about SEO and keyword research for google. You want these articles to rank well.

I would write 20 articles related to those 3-4 products. Once you've written those articles start running ads.

This is where it gets tricky because to make money you would have to run ads at $10 a day because your pay out is $20 minus ad cost so you make a profit of $10.

Using $10 a day you need to run ads that get you 100 visitors a day.

You will not be able to get this on google adwords or facebook using CPC as the cost of 100 visitors on those networks is easily over $100.

You will need to use other advertising networks that run on cost per impression or CPM where you pay based on many times they show your ads as opposed to how many times someone clicks on it.

This will be cheaper, but much tougher to get conversions and clicks.

as more people click on your ads and visit your website your search rank goes up in google and you get more people visiting your blog organically so it will increase your conversion.

Hope this helps.

Post: #24

(02-26-2017 12:06 PM)SnowHugger Wrote:  It took a year for mine to take off to around $250/month.



Though it can definitely be done much quicker seeing how I was on/off about it.

My biggest advice is to write about something you actually care about.

Here's an idea for you.

Now that you're getting consistent sales, just sell the product yourself instead of doing it for someone else.

Contact the manufactures buy the product whole sale and put it on amazon.

Link them to your amazon page and keep all the profits.

Post: #25

(02-26-2017 12:28 PM)colblionel Wrote:  Good thread

Problem with Affiliate marketing is finding legitimate products that pay well.

If I'm looking at a product, I'm looking for at least a $20 pay out.

I'll explain why below.

Best advice is promote products that you use and know.

Learn copywriting and how to write a sales page.

Landing pages still work but I have a tendency to believe blogs convert better than landing pages due to the nature of a blog.

So if you plan to do affiliate marketing I would do it as a blog.

So Here's an idea to get started with.

Find 3-4 legitimate products that actually work with a minimum payout of $20.

Start a blog based on those 3-4 products and write articles around those 3-4 products. This is where it pays to know about SEO and keyword research for google. You want these articles to rank well.

I would write 20 articles related to those 3-4 products. Once you've written those articles start running ads.

This is where it gets tricky because to make money you would have to run ads at $10 a day because your pay out is $20 minus ad cost so you make a profit of $10.

Using $10 a day you need to run ads that get you 100 visitors a day.

You will not be able to get this on google adwords or facebook using CPC as the cost of 100 visitors on those networks is easily over $100.

You will need to use other advertising networks that run on cost per impression or CPM where you pay based on many times they show your ads as opposed to how many times someone clicks on it.

This will be cheaper, but much tougher to get conversions and clicks.

as more people click on your ads and visit your website your search rank goes up in google and you get more people visiting your blog organically so it will increase your conversion.

Hope this helps.

How do you track actual sales made at the product supplier's end?

Do you both agree on a software for tracking sales, or do you trust him to report back to you?

Or do you somehow sell direct from your site, and have some kind of wholesaler deal with the supplier?