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The Challenges Of Full Time Affiliate Marketing

Dec 09 2009

Here comes another entry to my Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle series. Or as PPC.bz’s barman so elegantly put it:

“Dear Diary,

BAaaaaAAAaaaaaAaaaaahhhh!”

I would save myself from the reputation as the emo voice of affiliate marketing, but I think this is something that doesn’t really get spoken about enough. The number of part time affiliates far outweighs the number of us monkey riding this industry for a day job. I get the chance to speak to a lot of relatively new affiliates. Many have aspirations to jack in their 9-5’s and they want to know the best way to get there fast.

I find myself juggling between the advice of “fight for your dreams” and “you fucking retard, get back on the checkout desk, you’re gonna starve”.

I’ve said over and over again that a career in affiliate marketing is just that – a career. It’s not some casual job description you pin on your badge while sunbathing in the Caribbean. Your lifestyle will change completely in those first few months that you decide to go it alone.

Many affiliates forget that for whatever success they’ve been having with one hot shot campaign, it doesn’t come close to the guarantee of a monthly pay cheque. No matter how insignificant your work wages may seem in comparison, they are guaranteed.

When I first started making significant money with CPA marketing, you would find me sitting in coffee shops with a scrapbook. I’d sit there calculating how much cash I’d have earned by Month X and Month Y if I continued earning X ammount per day. This is the single most dangerous thing you can do as a part-time affiliate – especially if those numbers are pinned on a small handful of volatile campaigns.

You only have to look at the recent Google account bannings to see how a money spinning regime can collapse overnight. I’ve rattled on about diversifying for months now. If you’re serious about doing affiliate marketing full-time, you should be comfortable moving in to any niche and working with any traffic source.

People ask me how much money I think they should be making before they give up their day jobs. Firstly, how the fuck should I know? And secondly, basing your career decisions on current earnings is like deciding to climb K2 because you fancy a workout. You’re going to run in to the unexpected, you absolute psychopath.

I know this because I’ve made some pretty drastic decisons with my own career. I quit my day job having branched out in to only two traffic sources, and a handful of offers. By all accounts, I should be slapping myself with naive disgust right about now. I’m not because I had the initiative to learn quickly when I saw the danger signs.

If you’re going to move in to this industry full-time, here are the immediate challenges you face.

Managing your time – What is the point in going full-time if you’re simply going to wake up at 11am and watch your stats all day? You should have just stayed in the day job and enjoyed your temporary riches with the security of a guaranteed pay cheque to underline it. Hell, if you’re doing that, you CAN afford to splash out on the luxuries in life.

This is a challenge for affiliates both experienced and new. Assuming you saw your success as a part-time affiliate, you’ve probably become accustomed to the idea of seeing a return on a few hours of work. It’s not so easy to motivate yourself when you know that riches are such a beautiful sight to watch when they’re flowing like gold from a tap. Unfortunately, for all of the three hours it took you to setup that initial jackpot campaign – you could spend the rest of your lifetime trying to find the next one.

If you expect to be able to turn on profit like a tap, you’re digging your own grave.

Instead of being entranced by the money I saw beginning to flow when I first hit success, I chose to remember the many hours and desperate times where shit hadn’t gone to plan. As hard as it may be, you have to turn your back on the allure of whatever riches you’re earning and get back to work. Otherwise when the tap runs out, you’re back to square one.

Social sacrifice – Do you really understand the true involvement of running your own business? If you’re managing your time correctly, you are going to be busy. If you don’t feel that you’re busy, you’re probably not doing enough to stay ahead of the pack.

Nothing prepared me for the personal burden of becoming entirely responsible for my own finances. I used to be socializing at every opportunity. Down the pub on Monday, drunk in a club on Tuesday and travelling out of town by Friday.

These days, a night out rarely passes me by where business is not somewhere close to the forefront of my thoughts. Some would see that as a prison. I’m passionate about what I do though and working has always been an enjoyable experience.

Whatever social gain you think you’re going to find by quitting your day job, rest assured that it will be neutralized by the sheer weight of responsibility that comes with slinging shit full-time.

Staying positive through hardships – I’ll be the first to admit that when I worked for other companies, I was never shy of a bitch or moan. If something went wrong that I was personally accountable for, I could play pin the blame and deflect attention from my own failures.

The biggest challenge for me over this last year has been embracing a new attitude. You simply have to be prepared to smile at the shit that gets thrown in your face. It happens every day. Every morning I open my email and instead of forwarding various tasks to my colleagues like I used to, I add them to my own to-do list. There are constant tests of your character. It may be an email that your Adwords account has been suspended, that an offer has been pulled, that your server was down for a few hours last night.

You can’t nonchallently forward these issues on to your boss. You ARE your boss. And your pay cheque will be the one taking the hit if you don’t stay on top of them.

There have been nights in recent memory where I’ve been sat at my desk, eyes aching, wondering just how I can turn a campaign around or get back on track. A part time affiliate would probably think “eh, was good while it lasted”, and that’s exactly where you have to stay strong. The industry is so volatile that if you stick to what you know you do well, it won’t be long before you see a return on it. Just be prepared to lose money and take a battering to your confidence in the process. It can be a lonely struggle.

I’ve already written several posts about how you should be investing for the future. It’s the single most important thing you can be doing to alleviate some of the stress. Short term fast burning affiliate campaigns are a recipe for long term unrest if you’re not moving methodically towards a more sustainable business.

There’s More To Life Than Affiliate Marketing

Sep 10 2009

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over a year now. In that year I’ve earnt more money than I made in the rest of my working life. I’ve quit my day job, gone a long way to securing my future, and made a lot of good contacts in the business. All a few months shy of my 22nd birthday.

But is it really worth it?

How much money does a man need before he’s finally happy? Everywhere I look, I see bloggers throwing out tips for how to make more cash. How to turn thousands in to tens of thousands. It’s great if you’ve got your back against the wall financially. But what is the end goal? What really makes you happy?

I’m tired of working 16 hour days, six or seven days a week. It’s gruelling. I’ve paid the ultimate price for it. I’ve lost something that actually matters.

I thought I’d get a lot of happiness out of running my own business – and I do. But it’s not what I want to be thinking about when I fall asleep at night. There’s more to life than affiliate fucking marketing.

So pro tip of the day: Take a break.

Go see the kids. Tell the wife you love her. Enjoy how far you’ve come. Whatever.

Just don’t be sitting there ten years from now with your only happiness being that split second it takes to refresh stats. I think I need to take a break and reconsider what I’m trying to achieve with my career. You don’t really hear much about it through the industry blogs – but if you’re sat at your 9-5 right now dreaming of a brighter future, this path isn’t always the right one. The life of an affiliate marketer is generally lonely.

I’ve been reading a book called Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. Now I don’t normally buy in to the self-help bullshit that most of America seems to adore. But there’s a metaphor which is pretty fitting for what I’m trying to say:

Most people live what I call “The Niagra Syndrome”. I believe that life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up. So, in a short period of time, they get caught up in the current: current events, current fears, current challenges. When they come to forks in the river, they don’t consciously deide where they want to go, or which is the right direction for them. They merely “go with the flow”. They become a part of the mass of people who are directed by the environment instead of by their own values. As a result, they feel out of control. They remain in this unconcious state until one day the sound of raging water awakens them, and they discover that they’re five feet from Niagra Falls in a boat with no oars. At this point, they say “Oh, shoot!” But by then it’s too late. They’re going to take a fall. Sometimes it’s an emotional fall. Sometimes it’s a physical fall. Sometimes it’s a financial fall. It’s likely that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream.

I remember interpreting that passage as people not taking a chance on their ambitions and one day realizing that they’ve achieved nothing. But there’s a different meaning when the river is money.

I used to think that making thousands of dollars every month would make me happy and open up the doors to chase opportunities that would otherwise be closed. It turns out, most of the things I was chasing were there all along.

Stop posting your links on Google and go do something worthwhile for the day. Better than living in regret.

Is The Warrior Forum A Pyramid Scheme?

Aug 12 2009

I could be convinced.

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.