Post: #301

Agreed, it's fantasy for the most part.

It's possible a few 'gurus' manage to do it, by basically selling self help to oddballs who feel disenfranchised. All due respect to some of the 'names' in the redpill manosphere, although they may be good guys motivated by genuine desire to help people out with areas they've struggled with, their business model essentially is to 'exploit' (not necessarily in a bad or evil way) the insecurities of a sub-group who feel disenfranchised for whatever reason. The advice itself, and what they produce may be sound, but they are still fundamentally making a living from their customers' shallow sense of self-worth.

There is really only room in any market for a few 'gurus', and a limited subset of any given community who are susceptible to those promises of 'buy this e-book and it'll change your life'. It's a fairly saturated position in the market. The same is true of any other given market I can think of. The idea of effortlessly being able to earn enough money to live comfortably off is largely fantasy. Much more realistic if you really want it is to work 6 months of the year and spend another 6 months travelling.

Post: #302

Yeah unfortunately the only time you could make 500k in affiliate was probably the 90's

Those days are long gone....

Post: #303

I've read a couple of threads on here recently along the same lines of 'affiliate marketing is dead' blah blah.

You realise 'affiliate marketing' is just sales, right?

You get a commission for selling someone else's product.

Is sales dead?

Stop equating 'affiliate marketing' with the shady acai berry rebill days. It's a tiny segment of a huge industry. What you're focusing on is running CPA offers on paid traffic.

It's by no means passive, either. Leaving your campaigns running alone for a few hours could result in 5 figure losses if you're pushing volume. Whenever you hear the word 'passive' run in the other direction - you're getting sold.

A few years ago a winning campaign would be considered around 80-100% ROI. Now it's more like 30-40% ROI. Anyone making bank is floating low 5-figures a day. No secret STM forum is going to tell you that because then you wouldn't sign up.

It's not dead. The barrier to entry just got higher. The old timers automate processes that you're still learning how to do manually. They've crafted out an edge so newbies like you can't just stroll in and start a profitable campaign.

The OP is never going to drop a data sheet because there isn't some mystical, great secret to success. It's like anything. You learn by doing, tweaking and trying again. Then once you've got the basics down you work out how to create an edge over the competition.

After you drop 10k testing you'll hit a winning campaign and you can scale it to the high heavens across every platform you can dream of whilst praying you can suck it dry before any little leaches rip off your landers and reverse engineer your entire campaign.

Also - the top 1% of bloggers/news sites are clearing 100k months. Average travel bloggers get flown around the world to write about hotels and resorts. Fashion mag sites are getting 6-figure sponsorship deals from the tier-1 brands.

Every site/article you read, is making money off of you. If it's a bullshit top-7 list article it'll be monetised with something like Taboola with the recommendations at the bottom. If it's in a niche with a decent cpc it'll be Adsense mixed with private advertisers. If it's some shady MMO blog it'll be affiliate links to hosting (probably Bluehost/Beyond hosting as they have the highest payout) and bullshit tools from their other shady MMO friends.

The stories you hear about 'affiliate marketing is dead' are from people who couldn't make it work themselves. Rest assured many, many people are still doing very well.

Post: #304

(06-24-2015 07:45 PM)Tyler Belfort Wrote:  Also - the top 1% of bloggers/news sites are clearing 100k months. Average travel bloggers get flown around the world to write about hotels and resorts. Fashion mag sites are getting 6-figure sponsorship deals from the tier-1 brands.

Absolutely. Think about a site like Drudge Report, which is simply an aggregator--that is, they don't even produce original content. Yet they're likely pushing mid-6 figures monthly, with so little expenses and costs. Something I'm considering down the road...

My dad also told me about some girl who got flown to Thailand. I saw her blog... quite mediocre. Lots of opportunity out there.

Post: #305

Tyler Belfort - Can you show me concrete examples of who is doing very well exactly?

I know a guy who claimed he was making 1k a month as a college student. Yet he was fat as f*** couldn't buy a car or anything. I bet at most he was getting $250 per mo.

Google AdWords doesn't let you lead to shady landing pages with spartan content (of which many affiliate products and programs lead to) so maybe I'm missing something here.

I've been in the Online Ad space for 5 years now and when I look at the job listings for legit Affiliate managers they are making 3/4 and sometimes even only 1/2 the salary of legit PPC managers for the same big brands.

I just cannot see where and how Affiliate can succeed nowadays in an increasing world of Google's Quality and Relevancy Empire along with Privacy laws becoming more and more aggressive.

If you're gonna pump money into affiliate you might as well just invest it in stocks. Your odds of success will probably be better.

Post: #306

(06-25-2015 07:24 AM)BrazilianCocaine Wrote:  Tyler Belfort - Can you show me concrete examples of who is doing very well exactly?

I know a guy who claimed he was making 1k a month as a college student. Yet he was fat as f*** couldn't buy a car or anything. I bet at most he was getting $250 per mo.

Google AdWords doesn't let you lead to shady landing pages with spartan content (of which many affiliate products and programs lead to) so maybe I'm missing something here.

I've been in the Online Ad space for 5 years now and when I look at the job listings for legit Affiliate managers they are making 3/4 and sometimes even only 1/2 the salary of legit PPC managers for the same big brands.

I just cannot see where and how Affiliate can succeed nowadays in an increasing world of Google's Quality and Relevancy Empire along with Privacy laws becoming more and more aggressive.

If you're gonna pump money into affiliate you might as well just invest it in stocks. Your odds of success will probably be better.

The affiliate money is not in Google anymore. It is in mobile. The secret in mobile marketing is to find the perfect traffic source. There are countless of mobile ad networks out there but 90% of them are selling crappy bot traffic.

So I agree with you to make it in affiliate marketing you need to risk money and be ready to lose a huge junk so investing in stocks might be a smarter option for some people who are looking for a real passive income.

Post: #307

(06-23-2015 10:27 AM)BrazilianCocaine Wrote:  Yeah unfortunately the only time you could make 500k in affiliate was probably the 90's

Those days are long gone....

The real question is, what is the next thing people will say this about in 20 years time? Best find it and get there now.

Post: #308

Network marketing...anyone know about this? Apparently the only difference between affiliate marketing and network is that you typically solicit business from people in person.

It's basically performed in more or less legal pyramid schemes around deregulated products or services. I haven't been able to find anything on the forum so far.

Post: #309

(06-25-2015 08:16 AM)h3ltrsk3ltr Wrote:  Network marketing...anyone know about this? Apparently the only difference between affiliate marketing and network is that you typically solicit business from people in person.

It's basically performed in more or less legal pyramid schemes around deregulated products or services. I haven't been able to find anything on the forum so far.

It's been discussed many times, it's 'multi level marketing'. And it's horrible for a variety of reasons unless you're the shyster at the top who initiated the whole thing.

Post: #310

Found it. You're right, this is a really bad idea.

Post: #311

I'm currently on page 3 and kinda starting to believe. Hope I don't feel like fool in a few minutes.

Post: #312

I think the best strategy is to focus on organic SEO, then that truly can become "passive" income in the right niche. You will still need to do an SEO campaign every couple of months to remain on the first page, but you can outsource this to a reputable business for a lower cost than your profits. PPC is too active and difficult for my tastes.

The trick is to pick the right niche. If you're only looking at forex, MMO, affiliate webhosting etc you're up against competition that knows what they're doing. Try picking an obscure niche within alternative medicine that hasn't been fully tapped. Get a large volume keyword 20k/mo and optimize your site around it after reading up on the latest Penguin updates (hint: if you think off-site backlink anchor text linking with your exact keyword is a good strat, you're not up to date on SEO). You should be focusing your anchor text within your on-site links in a non-spammy way, not offsite. Yes you can fool the algorithm easily, but rest assured once you get traffic, you will have a manual review, and you will be penalized if you've tried this.

Build a legitimate site in a non-competitive, high search volume monetizable niche, do your SEO with the latest penguin considerations in mind, and I promise you this can be passive income. SEO only becomes a full-time job in a competitive niche which has at least 10 other people who know what they're doing. There's lots of untapped gold still out there, niche and keyword research still remains the most important factor in IM in my opinion.