barney

My buddy is convinced he can make a $million a day in affiliate marketing (maybe
a slight exaggeration on my part)
His enthusiasm piqued my interest and I started checking around. Upon first
look, it appears the only money being made is by people selling books and
courses to teach you how to do affiliate marketing.

He is slightly pragmatic, saying that he wants to set up a hundred sites, fed
off of some software service. He said he expects to make only about $10 or $12
per day from clicks, multiplied times the number of sites he gets up and
running.

Can anyone point me to any books or web sites that offer some truthful insight
into the prospects and process of affiliate marketing?

Thanks!

barney

$10-12/day from clicks? He's dreaming, unless he's Amazon or other high profile
site. He *might* get that much from all 100 sites total. But even that's
doubtable.
To get $10-12/day from a site, you must have people visiting the site. This
means lots of good, applicable content which needs to be updated regularly. One
person can't build and maintain 100 high profile sites!

If he's building the site to make money off of clicks, he'll do better by
flipping burgers at McDonalds.

OTOH, if he's building sites to promote products/services, provide quality
information on a specific topic, run the latest and greatest online RPG, etc.,
clicks can help pay for the hosting. But you won't get rich.

barney

Jerry, are you trying to discourage a potential future competitor or
something?
Good quality hosting can be had for less than $10 per MONTH, not day. You
can make $10/mo on something as simple as Amazon links (that suck, but
still...) on a not-so-popular site.

And of course you CAN at least support yourself off of your site. The
definition of "rich" is different for everybody, but if you get serious,
you can do a lot of good stuff with your site that earns you money.

The problem with OP's friend's approach is that he wants to make it run on
autopilot feeding crap content via software, probably scraped off of other
sites. Although this may work for awhile, this kind of site will
inevitably suffer as SE algos become more sophisticated. Good site
requires a lot of work.

So, you can get rich but you have to work real hard for it, which holds
true for pretty much every occupation, not only Web development.

barney

What do you mean by "affiliate marketing", in this context? The term
is usually applied to mechanisms by which you offer, or link to, some
other supplier's products on your site and then you get a commission
on every sale. The canonical example of this is Amazon's affiliate
scheme, which probably has more members than any other. But you don't
get paid per click on these, you get paid for actual sales.
As a general rule of thumb, affiliate marketing in the sense that I've
described it only works if you already have an established website
with lots of users and you are offering links to products that your
users want. There are three exceptions to this, which I'll mention
below, but on the whole affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick
solution. If anything, it's probably the least productive form of paid
advertising for the majority of sites. I've been involved with several
websites that use affiliate links, and the only supplier which
actually gave anything like an acceptable return on the effort is
Amazon.

Pay-per-click advertising, such as Google Adsense, is usually a better
choice for most websites. But even that isn't going to make you
upwards of $10 a day per site, and the claims made by the "Adsense
Ready" content-mongers are always hugely inflated. Adsense revenue
will vary according to the popularity of your site and the eCPM of the
adverts that get shown, of course, but you will typically need a daily
average of over 5,000 tracked impressions - that is, page views by
humans (not bots) using browsers with Javascript enabled - to be
earning $10 a day. And that is a *lot* of page views - it's a lot more
than you think, especially if you're used to measuring your pageviews
by means of log analysers like Webalizer or Webtrends, which
invariably inflate the figure considerably.

Going back to the affiliate method, there are three ways of doing it
which can earn reasonably good incomes. Ihe first is to set up a site
which deliberately acts as an affiliate portal to various different
suppliers, with the intent of marketing it to shoppers as a one-stop
site for various different products. http://www.cantbarsed.com is a
good example of that - I dont know how much money the operator makes,
but the concept is strong enough to make the site a destination in
itself and thus get traffic from people who are strongly motivated to
click on the links and then make purchases. That's fine, and entirely
legitimate, if you're prepared to put the work into it. The other two
ways of making money from affiliate schemes are somewhat less ethical.
The first of these is to buy Adsense advertising on various obscure
keywords (thus keeping costs down) and pass any traffic from them
through to your eBay affiliate ID. You've probably seen these on
Google - do a search for anything rather unusual, and you'll see an
advert suggesting that you can get it on eBay. The other is to set up
a site which merely repackages Amazon's catalogue via their affiliate
scheme, and then submit it to Froogle so that your site comes up in
product searches. Any sales made will earn you commission. I'm not
recommending either of these, I'm merely mentioning them because this
is probably what your friend will be told to do if he buys any course
or book on affiliate marketing!

barney

As you know, you can't get a true idea of a newsgroup
or a forum just by dropping in for an hour. The OP needs
to lurk there for at least a week to get an idea of things.
As for people not claiming to be making a decent living,
I tend to think the people who talk less are the ones who earn
more.

One of the secrets about affiliate marketing is exploiting a niche.
You really think any one with any sense is going to go spouting
off about how well they are doing on a particular keyword or product?

I agree with your part about having other products or services on
the site though, it isn't just a case of throw up a 100 sites and just
sit back and hope for the money to start coming in.
You tend to get out of it what you put in, but the rewards are there
for those who are serious about it, and it is a far easier way to make
a good living than a lot of other jobs.

cher

I've read Holly Mann's - Honest Riches e book. I found out to be really useful for a stater. Hope it helps.

john239

I can definately say that $1 million per year can definately be made from affiliate marketing. It just takes time and you have to learn alot of stuff plus keep up with the changing internet.

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