Ahh, yes, that one.

Zero experience, never made a website before, you thought FTP was some kind of late night porn channel, and now you want to make money online. You just need to know where to start.

This post goes out to anybody reading who isn’t an affiliate marketer, but simply an everyday guy or girl with a full-time job who wants to make some extra income online. And by that token, I’m suddenly speaking to half of the fucking Internet.

Your first challenge is to sign out of the forums. Stop visiting Warrior Forum, cancel your Digital Point account and don’t even try to digest what you’re reading on WickedFire. Forums will only complicate your objectives.

I swear, The Warrior Forum reminds me of the scene in The Wire where Bubbles tells a crowd of junkies the story of his drug addiction. I sit here listening to another buffoon reel off his Russian novel of “Warrior Advice!!!” and then when he’s finally stopped bashing his keyboard, the other Warriors stand up and cheer…THANKS FOR SHARING! As if his own pandering to the gutter is their new ambition in life.

Shitty ideas put forward by shitty marketers, sodomizing each other with tales of pity, and rubbing the only ego their four cents can afford. But the shit never stops smelling of roses when there’s a retarded “Thanks for sharing!” at the end of it all. Right?

Okay, I’m getting vicious. I don’t mean to hate on the Warrior Forum, but it’s too much of a swamp to help you. If you’re spending all day reading these forums and looking for a magic formula to start making money, you’re wasting your time.

Find something you’re passionate about, something you could sit there and write about every night.

To enjoy success online without delving in to paid advertising, you need to have an asset. To develop an asset, you need to have a website that other people would want to visit. While a select few of us can develop money generating websites based on topics we couldn’t give two shits about, you will nearly always have more success when your project is something you have a genuine passion for.

It’s a simple concept called appealing to your strengths. If you burden yourself with weaknesses by trying to build a website in a niche you’re hopeless with, and can offer no expert opinion on, you’re going to fail. Especially in these early days. Passion is everything.

Whenever I’m guiding people with the “online business bug”, I try to focus on their strengths. If you can find what they’re passionate about, you can guide the mentality away from “MONEY MONEY MONEY” and channel it towards a more positive energy. Such as “what kind of website can I build to appeal to people who share my passion?” My opinion is that if you don’t love what you do enough to do it every day without a single penny of profit, it won’t work. Not if you’re a bumbling technology tard who’s doing this for all the wrong reasons.

It’s so easy to setup a WordPress blog, grab some cheap hosting, and give yourself a web presence. In fact, it’s too easy. WordPress is quite possibly the greatest software ever developed for those who know nothing about coding. But people forget that building a website is like planting a seed. Just because you can see it, that doesn’t mean you’re ever going to make a cent from it. To make money, you need to water it every day with fresh content and spend a lot of fruitless hours wondering when anybody will visit but still chugging along regardless.

I can’t remember who posted this, so I’m sorry I can’t credit you, but one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever seen for making money online was posted on WickedFire last week.

“Pick a topic you love, setup a blog and write about it every night. Come back in six months and I’ll tell you how to make money.”

So, so true. It’s only when you suspend your fixation with the making money part that you’ll begin to prosper and develop quality assets. If I had ever let money dictate my decisions and willingness to work, this blog wouldn’t be here. It’s here because I love writing and I love my job.

Everybody has to start somewhere. So if you’re looking on, a keen bean to make money online, first ask yourself “What is my passion?”

What can you write about every night? What do you have a special talent for that other people would like to have? There’s a niche for fucking everything on the Internet.

The next step is to setup a WordPress blog. Grab yourself a free template that looks nice. It doesn’t have to be professional. Now spend every night contributing something, no matter how big or small, to your site. The snowball effect will slowly gather pace over the months, but ONLY if you keep supplying new fresh content. Most people fail because they give up if their empire of riches hasn’t materialized in the first week.

They’re snobs of their own creations.

Not enough comments? Not enough people reading? Still got zeros in your commission columns? The loser walks away with his tail between his legs and probably spends the rest of the week being angry at life flipping burgers in his day job. It takes time to hit success. And that success might not change your life. Christ, you might only make $100 on the side in a month. But the experience of your journey will become knowledge.

With knowledge, this whole world of making money on the Internet will no longer seem so alien. Some of what you read on this site may slowly begin to make sense.

We all had to start somewhere. But if you want to catch up, you better get your feet wet and start learning fast. There are enough passionate individuals out there to run those who only want to make a quick buck out of town. Focus on your strengths, forget the money objectives and let Father Time and hard work open those doors for you.

We work in one of the most accessible industries imaginable. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re online. And if you’re a good one, your ego has probably exploded to the point where you’re not hard to find. I often wonder why newbies rush to buy ebooks from self appointed gurus when they could speak to those same gurus free of charge in the space of a basic AIM window.

Networking is free knowledge, ladies and gentleman. And yet it’s a subject that divides opinion for many marketers out there. Partly because it’s confused with the trait of time wasting, and those who do anything possible not to have to actually work.

For me, networking isn’t just a case of wanting to learn more about my industry. It’s an element of human interaction that I’ve missed since I jacked in my day job. While it’s pretty rare that you’ll find me piss-arsing my day away with idle chit chat on AIM, I do feel a regular need to speak to new people and to understand different paths that others have taken to find success in affiliate marketing.

But why is it important? Who would choose to spend an hour networking over the important split testing of their latest Facebook campaign?

If you’re the kind of tombraiding CPA urchin who makes his living through the constantly shifting dynamics of traffic arbitrage, then you definitely need to have an ear to the ground. Networking is your way of staying ahead. Much more so than the practical affiliate who develops long term projects with milestones stretching in to 2011 and a disregard for his daily ROI.

It’s tough for me to sit here and preach the importance of developing relationships. The popular word is that if you’ve stuck your weary eyes out of the rabbit hole long enough to engage in a 10 minute conversation on AIM, you’re simply not working hard enough. That’s bullshit. There can be no excuses for not taking a moment to integrate yourself with your peers, to seek out new business and to actually network with other like-minded individuals.

Oh and by the way. Some affiliates seem to preach to the crowd that they work 16 hour days, more or less Monday to Sunday. So they don’t have time to network. That’s real nice. But you do realize that just because you’re plugged in to the Internet and your modem is flashing, it doesn’t mean you’re actually working – right?

If your breakdown of a 16 hour day equates to 3 hours of keyword research followed by a WickedFire binge from lunch through to moonlight, then you’re probably not reaping the benefits that a dumbarse motherfucker “working” 112 hour weeks probably should. Your net working day can be established by subtracting “time spent chasing skirt on Facebook” from “hours spent building out campaigns”.

I am certainly not one to knock the hard working affiliates who strike through their to-do lists whether the wife has gone in to labour or not. It takes commitment and great discipline to stay focused on your goals. But without keeping an eye on your peers, you’ll never know how relevant those goals are to business success. Simply put, we work in an industry that evolves too quickly to be out of the loop.

Christ, I took a two week break not too long ago and the first thing I did upon rebooting my Mac was to Google search “is affiliate marketing still for real?”.

Networking and sharing knowledge means you’ll never have to buy another ebook in your life. Why? Because it puts you in touch with the REAL people of this industry. The people making money every day. The people making money before the lame ebooks have been outsourced for creation.

I like to think of it as a spider building his web. Broadening your horizons and spinning that web might not reveal any immediate benefits. You might even feel like you’re wasting your time while you could be out chasing after riches. I’ve certainly felt that sensation while aimlessly discussing Cheryl Cole’s sex appeal with Andrew Wee in the past. But when a knowledge bomb drops, when tomorrow’s big niche lands, you want to be there to catch it. And if you don’t make an effort to integrate yourself with real affiliate marketers, to reach in to every corner where opportunity might land – well…

You’ll be a hungry spider?

Yeah fuck that anecdote, it’s been a long day.

My point is that somewhere on the horizon, chugging towards your doorstep, is the same kind of gravy train that most of us were too slow to capitalize on in 2008 when it was loaded with acai berries. My excuse for missing out was simple. I didn’t really know about it. And by the time I did know about it, I was too late.

If you can establish working relationships with the right people in the right places, you WILL see that next gravy train coming. Whether you jump on for the ride is probably a matter of how intuitive you are.

The next time you find yourself stargazing at the promises of Mr Guru McBullshitsalot’s latest ebook, stop and think for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of buying a book that this smug bastard dreamed up six months ago when his methods actually worked…you could talk to him now and find out what he’s currently doing?

And there lies the power of networking with real affiliates. You will learn far more by simply being connected with the right people than you will by purchasing their products or reading their blogs. Make an effort to establish actual business relationships. Without them, you’re simply the pawn they’re trying to sell to or the sheep us bloggers like to write to.

“Is there anything we can do to help you scale up the volume?”

Woah woah, hold on a second. What did you just say?

An advertiser… is happy… with my leads? You sure you’ve got the right email? They want me to send more traffic? Dude this is where you’re supposed to halve my payout and tell me to aim for an older demographic before I get shafted off the offer and in to oblivion completely.

It’s actually quite refreshing to be told that the leads you’re sending are backing out for the advertiser. It filled me with a sense of “Oh my god, maybe affiliate marketing CAN last longer than 5 minutes”. It also gave me the warm fuzzy feeling in my balls that what I was doing was actually working for all parties concerned. Clearly I was happy since I was still getting paid. The advertiser was happy with my leads-to-sales ratio. And presumably some creep was happy with his sparkling members’ access to one of the more shadier dating sites on the web. Everybody’s happy.

This is a stark contrast to the emails I used to receive when I started with lead gen offers. Back then, I never really stopped to consider the implications of scraping the barrel for whatever and whoever would be willing to submit my form. All I cared about was the ROI.

Unfortunately, when you’re working with CPA networks, that kind of attitude is probably going to have you jumping from offer to offer, systematically burning your bridges and relying on quick bursts of profit until an advertiser shuts you down. It’s about as stable as a wooden raft on the high seas.

And if this is you, it’s probably a good time to stop and think about why you’re getting shafted on such a consistent basis. Advertisers can be shady little shites, make no mistake about it. They’ll scrub and shave and do everything in their power to make the little man – that’s you – pay for their failure to break even. And in some cases, they can be downright greedy to the point where they’ll dick on you just to top up their Christmas bonuses.

That said, many advertisers have entered the CPA industry looking to play a fair game. They’re willing to pay for quality leads, and they do respect the work of affiliates who deliver the right traffic. It’s important to work WITH the advertiser, even through gritted teeth at times, and avoid burning those bridges that pay for your beach house.

The best way to avoid getting removed from an offer is to stop scraping the barrel. If a dating offer is open to both males and females over the age of 21, how many affiliates take that as a green light to flood the advertiser with 21 year old guys? Sure, the offer description didn’t say you couldn’t send this type of crowd to the offer, but you should probably be taking a little more responsibility and mixing it up with demographics that are more likely to produce sales. It might not matter to you – you’re paid by the lead, right? – but if it doesn’t make somebody money further up the chain, you aren’t going to be promoting it for long.

Another way to boost your “quality score” is to cut the bullshit. Don’t say something is free when the final call to action isn’t going to be free. It took me a while to axe this from my own campaigns, but it’s fundamental. Sell the trial factor to your audience, but don’t mislead the user in to thinking that the whole slice of pie is a no strings attached freebie. That isn’t good marketing.

Cutting out the “FREE” hook may lower your conversions slightly, or even dramatically, but consider this. It’s better to be running at 50% ROI for six months, than it is to be running at 100% ROI for one week.

Another factor that will influence the quality of your leads is the traffic source. Nobody can really explain it with a logical reason. But on some offers, a user clicking through from MSN will be much more likely to convert for the full shabang than a user clicking through from, say, Yahoo.

I’d love to say there’s a way to predict how certain traffic sources are going to perform on a given offer, but it’s close to impossible. I’ve been removed from offers that were backing out excellently on one traffic source, but bombing on another.

The only way to deal with unpredictable traffic quality is to ask for feedback directly from your affiliate manager. I think many marketers are shy of hassling the advertiser for an assessment of their leads. I say shy, it’s probably more like shitting bricks at the thought of doing something so potentially suicidal to their business. Perhaps you’re scared the advertiser will wake from a slumber, check over your stats, and realize you’re blowing a bigger loss than Iceland blows ash. Before you know it, they’ve shut you down and a profitable campaign is dead in the water, right? That’s rarely the case.

Simply asking the advertiser for some feedback on the quality of your leads will show that you’re serious about your job. But it also gives you some tasty knowledge that you can exploit if you’re clever. I managed to get a rough idea of my leads-to-sale ratio on one particular offer. I did a little research, found a program where I could work directly with the advertiser on a CPS basis, and it actually worked out more profitable. The only way I would have bothered to explore this avenue was by finding out that my lead quality was good and that the advertiser was happy.

A happy advertiser generally equates to solid sales. You can take that information and split test in a CPS campaign. If an advertiser is offering you significant pay bumps to provide more volume, the chances are excellent that you’re going to make more money by abandoning CPA altogether and raking in money by the sale.

I don’t think there’s a single affiliate who hasn’t suffered from lead quality issues at some point, or that won’t in the future. But if it’s happening too often, you need to shine a light on why. Jumping from offer to offer will only work for so long.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that if affiliate marketing died tomorrow, you’d still be able to make money for a company? You know, by actually fulfilling the simple premise of connecting the right people to the right products? It’s easy to see why affiliates are often tarred as the lowest level of marketers, even if they’re some of the richest.

Being the delivery guy who delivers empty boxes just isn’t going to last forever.

A couple of years ago, it may have been possible to drag some bum off the street, teach him a trick, show him FTP, and hey presto – you’ve got an affiliate marketer. The barrier to entry was so low, and the competition so light, that anybody with half a mind for selling the bullshit dream could run wild with profit. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case.

You can’t just plug in, profit and piss off anymore. There has to be method to your madness, because other marketers have upped their games to combat the rising costs of saturated traffic sources.

The key to success is no longer to apply some basic newbie guide, but rather to innovate and strike the market before your peers. The biggest money in affiliate marketing goes to the guys and girls who jump on an idea before everybody else. The problem is, there can only be so many ideas to go around. Having to innovate to survive is a scary thought because as we all know, moments of inspiration do not run on tap. They can be days, weeks or in the case of my good friends over at the Warrior Forum – cosmic light years apart.

But what too many marketers don’t realize is just how far one good idea can go.

Imagine being the guy who had that moment of inspiration and decided to submit a Facebook flyer with the simple title “Want A Girlfriend?” all those months ago. If I had to take an educated guess, I’d imagine that he probably targeted his ad to the usual 25-39 crowd in the United States. But because nobody else was cashing in on the same concept, it was easy money.

These days, entering the same market with the same simple concept is a challenge where most will fail emphatically. Those who succeed will have split tested until blue in the face, rinsed through a hundred different creatives, and probably still have trouble sleeping given the delicate margins between profit and loss.

Entering a saturated market means you have to be good at what you do. Damn good. So what’s the most logical business direction you can take?

Judging by some reactions, it would probably be to bitch, moan, and sob that Facebook doesn’t work. All the while glaring enviously at those who still seem to be profiting with the same god damn ads every single day. Isn’t it just a slap in the face?

No, the solution is to stop thinking like 95% of other marketers. If your to-do list reads like a bunch of tips from an affiliate marketing blog, then you’re not thinking far enough outside the box. You’re just one of the many sheep with the same list of ideas and the same half-hearted execution that will ultimately result in failure and more bitching and whining.

When I’m brainstorming new ideas, I like to ask myself – “How can I get rid of a few more competitors? How can I avoid as many other affiliate marketers as possible and still reach my intended audience?”

If I’m taking a dating offer, maybe my targeting doesn’t read like this:

Male
25-34
United States

Because isn’t that what EVERY affiliate marketer will be thinking? You’re instantly competing with not only the established affiliates, but a thousand other newbies who’ve simply thrown up a “test ad” in the most obvious market. Thinking obvious gets you nowhere.

Let me just tell you that the single quickest shortcut you can take in the dating market is to switch that targeting from men to women. I guarantee that you’ll filter out 90% of the newbie slash retarded competition. You’ll still need to do a lot of work to find a winning concept. But it’s a step away from the obvious, a step towards your first untapped market.

Once you start taking those steps, it won’t be long before you’re marketing internationally, in foreign languages, to specific keyword subsets…carving your own niches out of the inventory. Whatever. Just know that if you’re doing your best and your best isn’t profitable, your best is not good enough. So move on and find a market which hasn’t already been raped up the arse by a thousand other affiliates.

If there’s one success story you should be listening to, it’s not that some dude is banking five figures a day on dating ads in April 2010. It’s that the guy who did it FIRST…had the easiest ride.

Do you want to spend the rest of your week scratching the margins, desperate to sustain a minimum CTR, because you know just how banner blind your target audience has become? Well, instead of split testing new titles, perving for 110x80s on Bing…why don’t you take matters in to your own hands? Find a market that every other affiliate and his dog hasn’t stuck his wang in yet.

Brainstorm your ideas, look at them carefully, and do the opposite. If you can stop thinking like 95% of other affiliate marketers, you’ll find yourself reaching markets that are still willing to listen to your bullshit.

Living in London, I invariably find myself in bars full of yuppy tossers and “touch base” talking clowns who’ve let the Christmas bonus go too far to their heads. Affiliate marketing is still such a young industry and it’s very rare that we get the respect we deserve for the hours we put in. But this is probably because affiliate marketers generally represent a very young demographic of businessmen and entrepreneurs. The business studies curriculum hasn’t yet had to suggest that we exist.

I was reading in the comments to the last post that much of the arrogance and drama in affiliate marketing can be attributed to a young crowd with more money than it knows what to do with. While we’re blessed with great opportunities, we have to find the discipline to ensure that they lead to long term success. For many marketers in their early 20s, like me, this is one of the biggest hurdles you’re going to face.

I think it’s great that a young generation has broken out from the academic ranks and found a successful alternative to degrees and 9-5s. Let’s be honest. Most of us in this business are stubborn individuals who want to succeed or fail on our own merit. I never enjoyed working for anybody other than myself. I think most affiliates are the same.

Thanks to the Internet, we’ve got the perfect platform to show those skills in an arena where you can’t be discriminated against because you can’t be seen. Only the output of your creativity is there to be judged. That was the huge appeal of the industry for me. A learning curve that keeps on giving.

But at the same time, if you’re a part of this younger generation, you need to think long and hard about the practicalities of what you’re getting in to. I’ve seen so many affiliates making huge profits and somehow blowing it up the wall and staggering back to their day jobs within the year. To reap long term results, you have to learn to channel the positive energy of being young, creative, and web savvy – to overcome the challenges of sudden responsibility and dealing with money. You also need to stay humble.

Why humble? Who gives a fuck about humble when you’re stacking dollar bills to the sky?

There are affiliates out there who are quite happy to boast about their earnings, shove screenshots in your face, and build up a personal brand that suggests only following their every move will take you to the riches. While I occasionally drape this blog in the necessary arrogance that it requires for a cynical crowd to take notice, it’s never a good way to run your business.

One of the most important things you can be doing as a young affiliate – or simply just a young businessman – is to learn, learn, learn and learn. It doesn’t mean shit that you’re earning crazy figures today. The second you let the money go to your head and sap away your desire to become better at your craft, you’re flirting with disaster.

There is always somebody better than you, always somebody earning more. If you forget to carry yourself with a humble willingness to learn and to listen to what other people are doing, you will completely toast your long term prospects of surviving. Or certainly achieving what you might have done in this industry.

There’s times where I browse WickedFire and it completely blows my mind that such a collective bag of dicks could ever have the social or diplomatic know-how to sustain good relations with a single network – let alone the far reaching contacts necessary to run a proper business.

I know there’s a lot of “front”, and many people will talk shit simply because they’ve established a net vBulletin post count of 10,000 in the noughties where faceless web bashing has become the norm. But sometimes, people will judge you by the only face they can see. There’s a lot more to be gained by carrying yourself with respect and actually giving something back to the community rather than shitting on it.

I often get asked what it’s like to be working for myself so young. I always answer the same: incredibly stressful but always worthwhile. I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of the boozy shipwrecked Friday nights on the lash that I used to enjoy week in week out. Not because I feel financially restricted, but because I’m carrying the weight of my own expectations on my shoulders. And I expect a lot from myself. If I’d allowed my ego to dictate my life, I would have crashed and burned long before now.

One of the drawbacks of being part of this younger generation of web entrepreneurs is that some of us simply aren’t ready for it. Teaching yourself discipline, motivation and the ability to plan ahead is not always easy when your first taste of success is as simple as refreshing stats. So many of us enter the industry full-time starstruck on the back of initial success. It’s a good idea to remember where you came from, and how your success can be as fleeting as the time it takes you to fall. Don’t let your bank balance go to your head and don’t book a worldwide cruise on the back of a good month’s work.

Networking with other marketers and sharing your knowledge is probably the single most effective way of gaining experience as an affiliate. We all have our own successes and failures to talk about. I can always tell when I’m talking to a young egomaniac with his head up his own arse. And I never share anything useful with these people. If you act like a lone riding dick with a chip on your shoulder, people will treat you like one.

There aren’t many industries where you can be so successful in such a short space of time. I hate to say it, but just because you’re making money, that doesn’t mean you’re great at what you do. I think many young affiliates will drop out of the business as competition becomes more fierce and the road to riches becomes harder to negotiate. Those still standing will probably be the ones who haven’t spent all day living the jet-set affiliate lifestyle they took for granted and thought they’d always have.

So you’re young and rich. That’s a notorious recipe for ending up old and lazy. Working hard through the good times, staying humble around your peers, and helping others to succeed. These are all qualities that are likely to work in your favour at some point. The riches for young affiliates are mind boggling. But you’ve gotta grow up fast to enjoy them.

This is something that has been grating at me for a while now. It’s quite common that I’ll be emailed a simple question like, “Have you tried pushing acai on Facebook?”

Yes, I have. And yes, I stopped.

Not so long ago, I was talking to an affiliate manager of a network that will go unnamed. I was told that Offer X in the acai niche would sell really well if I cloaked it and ran it through Facebook. I’m not stupid enough to do something like this personally. I have actual campaigns that are profitable on Facebook which I would rather not lose. More to the point, I believe in the theory that you’d be an absolute retard to burn all your bridges to chase a few extra dollars of profit.

What really concerned me was the idea that affiliate managers are actually pushing this advice on their publishers. Are you out of your fucking minds?

It’s easy for a network to sit there and tell a publisher to go compromising a personal account by selling a prohibited product through Traffic Source X. But it shows a massive lack of respect to the naive affiliate who’s trying to earn an honest wage. What happens when the affiliate gets shut down? Sure, there’s some personal responsibility attached. But I’d be tempted, knowing what I know, to tell any affiliate manager who pushes advice like that on me to go fuck himself. Which is, ironically enough, exactly what I did.

What I’m trying to say here, is that if you’re a hard working affiliate, you need to look out for yourself and take what a network throws at you with a pinch of salt.

I’m forever opening my inbox to see messages that read like this:

“Well, why don’t you try Offer X. It’s really taking off and seeing big volume right now.”

Network wide volume means jack shit to me. Profitability is all I care about. I couldn’t honestly care less if an offer is blowing up and seeing thousands of leads per day. I would much rather push through one lead that gives me a return on investment that I’m happy with. This is where networks will try to fuck you over and fill your inbox with false promise.

But, hey, you can’t hate on the networks for doing their jobs. The more experienced you get at this game, you better you become at being your own judge of an offer’s viability.

What really gets on my tits is the outrageous attitude from certain affiliate managers who believe that because they’ve been placing your pixels for five minutes, they somehow know what’s good for the long term success of your business. Telling an affiliate to go and try acai on Facebook is no better than Google turning around and saying “Thanks for the money, now go rot in a hole somewhere.”

Or “We appreciate your leads…while they lasted.”

“Teehee, motherfucker. This is the sound of us banking on your banned and blacklisted ass. Refer us to friends though, right?”

Before you ask, no I haven’t been banned from Facebook. But I’ve heard a lot of stories from people who’ve suffered that fate. Much of the blame must rest on the publisher. I’m not for a moment suggesting that a network is responsible for an affiliate going out and breaking the terms and conditions of a traffic source. This is more of a rant against stupidity.

Let’s say you decide to push acai on Facebook.

It’s profitable and there’s big money to be made there. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read that much. With some simple targeting, a cloaking redirect and a slice of luck – you can probably ride the fat loss waves well in to 2010 making some good bank. But there is your problem.

You might not make it in to 2011 with Facebook account in tact.

We’ve seen the backlash from Google and we’re seeing a similar backlash from Facebook. It’s possible to get a new account after being banned, but it’s about as pleasurable a process to follow as a gentle fist up the jacksy.

You can enjoy a few great months of addictive profit and life changing ROIs, but when the screws come unhinged, you’re left without a Plan B. And whatever Plan B you might have had is going to be severely compromised by the fact that Traffic Source X now has you blacklisted and wants nothing to do with your business.

Is that the way forward for an affiliate marketer?

Some of you are crazy sons of bitches who will simply ditch the wife, change your birth name, move to Alaska and open up a new advertising account. Whatever puts the notes in your pocket, right? That’s one way to do it, I guess. But you’re going to be forever searching for loopholes while I would rather be kicking back on a sunbed and enjoying a legitimate long term business growth.

Here’s the greatest catch of affiliate marketing. You don’t have to be clever to make money. Any affiliate with balls the size of Texas can bend the truth far enough that it lines his pockets with the dollars he craves. But at some point – today, tomorrow, maybe next year – you’re going to have to deal with the hand you’ve been dealt.

I’ve spoken to some truly shady black hat Internet marketers in my time. Not just affiliates, but “entrepreneurs” who will completely reinvent the rulebook of what’s acceptable if it’s financially suitable to them. You know what nearly all of these guys have in common? They all WISH they could have the same success on the straight and narrow.

Many of them are incredibly smart and more than capable of carving a long term business. But they get blinded by the short term riches and choose paths that I’m sure, in many cases, will eventually come back to haunt them.

You can base your business decisions on what will line your pockets today (slinging acai on Facebook, pummeling bizopp on Google)…or you can keep a level head and try not to burn all of your bridges in a few short months.

When you come back down to earth and realize that affiliate marketing is a full time career and a full time responsibility, it’s probably going to dawn on you.

You’ve got work to do.

It was Conv3rsion who made the comment:

“One thing being an affiliate marketer can teach though is that there is always opportunity out there. You can always out hustle someone else and get some of the pie. If anything, this life style breeds life long entrepreneurs. I don’t think I can ever have a job again where I’m not the boss.”

Life long entrepreneurism.

That’s pretty much what this game is about if you plan on remaining an affiliate until retirement. But it also got me thinking whether all affiliates actually possess the entrepreneurism streak that’s required to succeed. And is that what separates the top earners from those chasing the coat tails of more successful affiliates?

One of the things that I always stress very heavily to people looking to jack in the day job is that affiliate marketing is a career change – not a retirement plan.

It doesn’t matter how many successful campaigns you have up and running. You could be earning 10K a day and it still doesn’t mean you’re prepared for life as a full time affiliate marketer. Not unless you possess the mindset that will keep you ahead of the pack.

I like to look at my current situation in affiliate marketing using tomorrow’s stats as a marker.

Zero clicks. Zero conversions. Zero profit.

It’s simply no good to assume that your success today will see you through to tomorrow. You have to be constantly visualizing those zero columns and using it as the incentive to find new ways to build your income.

When I quit my day job, I made what had to be one of the most reckless decisions of all time. All of my earnings were wrapped up in two traffic sources stretching across a handful of offers. Within weeks of going full-time, those traffic sources had fallen out on me and I’d been forced back to the drawing board. Many affiliates would go up in flames at this point and never produce another profitable campaign.

So one of the first things I had to do as a full-time affiliate was stare at a list of zero columns. To rack my brain for new opportunities, new ideas, new ways to pay the bills. I’ve managed to rebuild my business on much sturdier legs now that I’ve felt the true vulnerability of the industry. But Conv3rsion is right with his comment – one of the qualities that distinguishes successful affiliates is the ability to seize on opportunity and grab success. If you want to quit the day job and never go back to it, you really need to find that entrepreneurial spirit.

How many affiliates are suffering from banner blindness? I say that with tongue in cheek, but it’s a genuine question.

If you ask an affiliate where he makes his money, you’ll probably get an answer along the lines of Adwords, Facebook, media buys or PPV. Too many affiliates do their research, learn about these well known methods of making money, and draw a line under them. That’s all they want to know about. But if you’re truly in possession of an entrepreneurial streak, you don’t stop there. You should be using your eyes and ears.

Opportunity is everywhere on the web. How many times have you been browsing a site, seen an Ad that caught your eye, written it off as a media buy and not even bothered to check the bottom of the page for an “Advertising” link?

The reality is that a smarter guy was there before you. He saw an opportunity to reach a demographic, jumped on it, and now you’re sitting nodding your head in retarded approval.

Spending so much time on the web, I see dozens of different ways to generate income every single day. I don’t always see immediate use in them for myself, but it doesn’t stop me bookmarking the pages, taking some notes and storing them in the memory bank for later use.

Here’s a tip. You never know what you’re going to be working on tomorrow. So pay attention to great marketing and keep on learning. It might just give you a headstart over your equally retarded competition when it comes to brainstorming your next campaign.

Just because a piece of great marketing doesn’t fit in nicely with your niche, that’s no reason to turn a blind eye. This is what I call banner blindness for affiliates. The ability to gloss over incredibly profitable opportunities. When money is made in every corner of the web, why are you only looking out for good keywords and good dating images?

Are you one of those guys who opens up Adwords and thinks to himself “What can I sling today?”. Maybe you make money, maybe you don’t. But I much prefer to let new campaigns come naturally to me. Find a market first, target the need, THEN decide the best method of promotion. It might be Adwords, it might be PPV, it might be some long ass email to the webmaster begging for a banner tenancy.

But if you’re actively in the trenches hunting out these marketing opportunities, you’re gonna be better placed to make some money than the dude who sprays shit at the wall in Adwords hoping something will stick.

There’s too many arbitrage affiliates out there who refuse to get to grips with what marketing is all about. They become masters of traffic sources. They start turning over fortunes using just Facebook. Or just Adwords. One day their traffic source falls out from under their feet and what happens? They embark on this route of discovery to find the opportunities that they should have been getting out of bed to look for in the first place.

That’s the difference between the guy with the entrepreneurial spirit and the guy who knows how to use XXX to make money. One can live and learn from failure – the other will probably roll over and die if his one trick pony gets shot.

It’s not always about making more money. At least for me it isn’t. I take pride in wanting to be good at what I do. I might be harming my own profit margins by spending so much time exploring other avenues, but with knowledge comes experience. With experience comes the know-how to deal with failure. And you’re nearly always going to fail at some point in affiliate marketing.

Are you prepared for it? Or are you a headless fucking chicken who knows how to open Adwords and not much else?

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve stumbled across this hell hole of an Internet Marketing forum and actually posted there. Not for long admittedly. As far as messageboards go, this is the shit that George Orwell pissed his bed sheets over as a small child.

Here is a board that thrives on the principle of getting nowhere in Internet Marketing. Let me correct myself. Nowhere beyond the actual confines of The Warrior Forum.

It amazes me that this place sustains a stuttering eco-system of guys and girls who make money on the SHEER PRINCIPLE of making money. I can’t imagine they make more than the odd ebook sale – but it’s still mind boggling to understand that this shit is happening. Real time. As we speak.

Every other member has a link slinging an ebook. You know the kind? Probably hand-picked from a collection of 72,000 in a Demonoid torrent. These people strike me as the sort of hob goblins that spend 6 months researching key terms for a soon-to-be-hot niche, only to roll out an acai berry blog in 2011.

It’s plain as day that the best performers in the Warrior Forum marketplace are making their money from selling crap to…fellow Warrior Forum members.

Okay, fair dos. You get the odd smattering of urchins from Bangkok looking to send 5000 visitors to your site in 24 hours – but as far as quality services go, I can only assume that these guys have accidentally homepaged the Wayback Machine and forgotten how to close the window. A brief glance over the latest threads and you’ll see questions like “Am i being geolocated?“, “How does this blog know where I am?” and my favourite of all time, “Does posting links on Google work?”

Now, I’m not trying to knock too heavily on the happy go lucky community of The Warrior Forum. I’m sure they’re all hard working mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. Christ, they better be hard working. But I’m writing this to anybody who’s new and getting started in the business. Anybody who reads some ridiculous sig link and is already on the phone to jack in his day job.

IF IT SMELLS LIKE BULLSHIT, IT PROBABLY TASTES LIKE BULLSHIT.

I spend day after day searching over new tools and systems that are allegedly going to make my life easier as an affiliate marketer. If I worked 365 days, I’d probably only stumble across something worth paying for on 5 of them.

When you get good at affiliate marketing, you become a good judge of the scam artists and the guys who are actually rolling out a quality service. I’m using the Warrior Forum as an example – I don’t hate the place – it’s just a terrible breeding ground for poor marketing. It’s like walking in to a fully immersive flog and personally, I come away from the place feeling just a little bit creeped out by the smiling avatars.

There is no magic recipe for success. And if there was one, it wouldn’t be sold on WF – or on any forum.

No successful affiliate hits the jackpot and then decides to sell it for $27.95 in an instant download. These guys seem to have established a mini circle jerk to pay the bills. I’ll buy your book, if you get three retards to buy mine. And so the madness spirals out of control.

I do a lot of work on traffic sourcing strategies that receive hardly any coverage across the many affiliate marketing blogs. Christ, most of my money is made from traffic sources that I haven’t even hinted at once during the lifetime of this blog. That’s just how it works.

You can go on Affbuzz and read to your heart’s content – you’ll get absolutely nowhere without action.

No secret worth knowing is handed to you on a plate.

Time and time again I’m getting contacted by guys who want a hint there, a nudge in the right direction here…but what can I say?

When you uncover a marketing tactic that works – you’ll appreciate the value of shit not getting saturated. If you’re new and fresh to the affiliate marketing business, you need to grow some thick skin when it comes to sales talk. The reality is that the best tool you have for this industry is Notepad and your keyboard. Time to get skeptical about everything else.

When I think of SEO, I think of ballbreaking keyword research and a drawn out link building program that could reduce a grown man to tears (or just a Black Hat manual). But the more money you spend on PPC, the more glaring it becomes that you’re paying to get your shit advertised alongside a bunch of free listings that are spitting out pure profit.

Now I know what everybody says. Link building? Writing articles? That, is the work of slavery, and damn near offensive to many.

Even beyond the attitude that it’s time consuming, boring work, and a waste of market knowledge – some affiliates seem to assume that it simply isn’t possible to catch up with the top rankers. Well, maybe you can’t work as hard as an army of Indian kids spinning out articles for $1 a pop. But you definitely can work smarter.

Through PPC, you can rapidly discover the keywords that produce regular sales. You do this by busting out your Adwords account, setting the crosshairs on a bunch of search terms, and then letting rip with your own money. Sure, you might lose money. But you can’t buy the knowledge that comes with knowing what sells.

Say you’re one of these organic search guys who lays down the foundations of an SEO campaign before a single sale has been banked. A good SEO campaign requires good targeting and good groundwork. You might spend 6 months optimizing a site of 300 pages to reach the top of Google for term “xxxxx”.

What if “xxxxx” doesn’t convert? Those 6 months would have been better spent on Redtube.

Coming from a PPC background, you can test the waters and find exactly which terms are converters. Get yourself 4 or 5 super targeted keywords, spin a domain out of them, and do your own SEO groundwork accordingly.

There’s no point wasting your own time on articles. But Christ, you wouldn’t believe how many affiliate marketers are so tight when it comes to paying a kid in Asia a small fee for getting some work done. If you’re truly enjoying the high life, employ a genuine professional and you’ve already got a competitive advantage over many of these top ranking sites.

Most affiliates build a successful campaign and ask themselves “how can I scale this bigger?”. Not many ask themselves “how can I reduce my costs?”

Reducing your costs will usually make a campaign more profitable than spreading your net and scaling upwards. I realized this after I noticed that I was making more money from a few organic sales than I was from 25 PPC sales in a day.

Fact is though, if you’re going to build long-term sites for your affiliate business – you’ve got one major problem.

How do you build a long term site for a short term product?

When I log in to Convert2Media, I see about 25 different Google offers. It looks a bit like this:

Google Profits
Make Money on Google
Google Money Profits
Profiting on Google
Google Income
Google Money Income

So how do you even think about building a site to rank naturally when the name of the shit you’re slinging is gonna change before you’ve opened the FTP to publish it?

I should say first of all that if you’re actually using the term “Google” when you push bizopp rebills, you’re walking in to a firestorm of legal problems. It’s blatant infringement on the Google brand. Even though the actual advertisers do it, why do you think we have so many Google bizopps in the first place? Rinse, say sorry, and repeat.

If you want to promote any kind of CPA rebill, you’re going to have to build your own brand and focus only on the terms that don’t change over time.

Sure, “acai burn” might be a popular search term today – but there’s no guarantee that it will be tomorrow. “Cure my fat ass” on the other hand, is always going to be a go’er, because let’s face it. America is fat.

For long term success, you need to be targeting the keywords that are here to stay. Ranking takes time and it isn’t really a good fit for the cut throat nature of the CPA industry.

The safest way to build a long term future in affiliate marketing is to target sales instead of leads. You can’t fuck with the quality of a sale. But that doesn’t mean we all have to bend over backwards and become bitches of Commission Junction. There’s still money to be made from long term sites pushing short term offers. That’s if you get it right from the beginning.

I see quite a few guys trying to build review sites for dieting, cleansing and whatever else is pulling a $37 commission. I can only imagine that they’re PPC burners, because it doesn’t make sense as a long term goal otherwise. These CPA offers are getting rebranded practically every day. You need to target the needs of the market, not the product on the shelf.