IM "Stability" (28)
That may be an oxymoron, but for those of you who are doing this fulltime what approach do you take for stability?
Smash and grab
Amass as much money as possible so that it covers any downtimes?
Massive campaigns
Create a ton of small campaigns that will cover expenses and work on larger campaigns with the extra profits
Stick to what you know
Focus on one niche with a long history and master it
My strategy: Using short-term money for long-term projects.
Might sound confusing so I'll explain it with a bit more details. I consider all the money I make from Facebook/Media buying as "short term" because you never know how long a campaign will last. It's unpredictable. That's why my business is divided into 2 parts: I focus on all the campaign stuff which brings in the most revenue (by far, around 85%) and with that money I'm able to pay employees (2 at the moment) to let them work on long term projects (which are assets). Those long term projects are big portals focussing on a specific vertical (travel / finance / coupons/ mobile phones). These portals are driven by free traffic (organic = SEO) and all focus on programs with revenue share deals (someone books a holiday online and I get X% of the total sum).
It's working like a charm. My long term assets pay for all my overheat costs at the moment + salaries, so all the rest is profit. I recommend this strategy, it gives you the ability to give your business a "value" as well so you'll be able to sell it in the future (if you want). If you have any more questions, ask!
Originally Posted by scito
Thats an awesome bit of advice.....
Originally Posted by scito
SEO is a pain to do yourself, but once you know how it works, it's fuckin cake just to outsource shit. I was going to make a shitload of Amazon sites in anticipation of Christmas, but they killed the Amazon Associates program in Connecticut...
@scito: What kind of employees have you got? Are they virtual assistants from let's say the Philippines, or do you keep somebody in house?
Any experience with outsourcing content creation to people from countries in which they don's speak English as their first language? The reason I'm asking is because English is not my first language either, and it would therefore take some time for me to write quality content myself. Would love to get some longer term projects going as well.
Originally Posted by stocks
The nice thing is you can use all your optimization techniques you learn(ed) from all the campaign stuff right in your portals for great conversion rates!
scito, so you said those ecommerce project are web assets that stablize your income ?
@stocks - I hired a writer in the Philippines last year, paid her $200/month to basically write content full-time. Her English was very good, though it definitely required proof-reading by a native English speaker for polishing. I highly recommend it, as writing content is absolutely boring and not a good use of your time in many cases.
Originally Posted by hd2010
www.top10.com (unfortunately not mine) is a nice example of a portal that's probably earning more than half of this forum members income combined. And it's all affiliate based.
scito... great post thanks for that.
For any of you guys that know legit SEO, I understand paid traffic well, but I really don't have a "plan" when it comes to SEO that I could outsource. I have the funds to outsource it, but if I was to hire a VA or employee to work on SEO stuff I wouldn't really be able to tell them start to finish what to do to get real results. Any tips/specific companies to work with are appreciated. I don't mean to turn this into an SEO thread, but having more of these types of properties is what I'm looking at now as well.
Thanks.
here an interesting example of a good niche portal in Forex which everyone knows is very high paying ad market.......i have a trading site and they contacted me and the wrote a good post that linked back to them and gave me a link.......they are going thru the process of building good links and like mentioned above it can be tedious but rewarding over time.....this site gets poeple to sign up offering free community and they can promote within......if you scroll to bottom you see their contact is a Media company.....
if you notice just below the fold on the homepage is a review about top forex brokers with all affiliate links......humm, dont see any FTC disclosure
http://www.forextraders.com/
Originally Posted by theguvna
From my experience, if I try to hire someone to do something I don't fully understand, it fails. And if I try to hire someone to do an entire project, it also fails (or is much more expensive).
Before outsourcing any project, I learn how to do it intimately and successfully myself. Then I start breaking down all of the tasks that I have been doing so that I can decide what skills I will need in a hire. Come up with a short test for interviewees to make sure that they can handle those tasks to some extent, and then be prepared to spend at least 1-2 weeks training them (on the clock) so they produce the same results you have been getting on your own.
There really isn't any shortcut if you want outsourcing to be successfull, you have to be the brains behind the whole thing. If they had the ability to make profit on their own, they [well, most of them] wouldn't be looking for low wage freelance work.
Oh! I said there isn't any shortcut, but I thought of one that I have in the works right now and plan to test out in the near future:
Promote your best workers to manager status (with higher pay) and put them in charge of interviewing, training, and managing new workers to do the SAME thing they have been trained to do for you 
Then, for new tasks you can just train your manager and let him/her train the people underneath.
You'll still have to do everything in my previous post to get this process started though...
outsourcing SEO is hard.....but if learn the basic about onsite/offsite seo and then outsource the backlinking stuff its doable.....nowadays linkwheels,etc...are much sophisticated(like my attachment)....
there are guys for hire on warrior/Wickedfire that will do SENukeX/Xrummer/Scrapebox backlinking for you or post a "for hire" and see which most recommended show up...
Yep, had a good example of outsourcing from Ed Dale - he explained, if you have a personal assistant, what kind of results can you expect if you say to them 'organize something for Friday night for me and my wife for her birthday'......
Instead, if you are to have any chance of a successful night out - you need to be very specific.... 'Book a table at 'X Restaurant' for 7.30pm for my wife and I. Order me a bouquet of flowers, costing $25-30 that has white roses in, and have it delivered to my house between 12-3pm on the same day. Make sure a bottle of champagne is at the table on our arrival, a cab collects us from our house at 7pm and my diary is kept empty from 6am onwards on Friday.'
An outourcer/assistant, is only as good as the instructions you give them.
Awesome thread. This is something all Affiliates need to be thinking about, and far too few actually do it (myself included).
Originally Posted by chris_m
Originally Posted by blov
70/30 with affiliate marketing
70% focus on good campaigns
30% on new.
I apply the same model to everything, since going full time in 04.
SEO is an art form, but just take a look at the most recent Panda update to see how unstable this "stable" source of traffic is. Making money online comes down to traffic and conversion, and if you ever rely on just one form of traffic, you can't tout anything about the stability of it. Even behemoths sites like Ezinearticles got destroyed in the Panda update, you think they were lacking any amount of unique content?
Google (and other companies like FB etc) are getting more and more fickle, and if you look at their direction, they're very quickly realizing that 85-90% of their profits are coming from Fortune 500 companies anyway. While everyone knows the adwords side of things in regards to being an affiliate marketer being unable to compete with the QS issues etc compared to a company who spends millions a month with them and is given a free pass on their ad copy, what they don't realize is that Google is now trying to systematically do the same for organic search results. Just do some google searches on the internet, content used to be "king", but I know multiple top SEO consultants who have abandoned SEO altogether after Google has shown that their cards are not going to be consistent with that vision. Their highly authoritative sites which have hundreds of thousands of backlinks from trusted sites, their custom-written content by the top content experts in the industry etc all did not matter. There was a good presentation on TED on a topic related to this new Google initiative, and is definitely worth a look:
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser...r_bubbles.html
I am relatively new to a pure lead acquisition approach/mindset, but the way to have true stability in any online business has always been to diversify your portfolio. If you have the skillset (or the bankroll to outsource all of it), making bank is as simple as:
- Becoming an affiliate/Driving traffic to affiliate offers/CPA offers
- Seeing which offers/verticals are doing the best
- Analyze the niche/market, run fiscals to see feasibility in launching a well-laid out plan to create your own product/service to trump that product
- Rapid testing of conversion for different traffic sources -- Video salesletters, squeeze, list building, direct sale, etc.
- Optimize Backend, upsells, continuity, workflow, outsourcing
- Scale to tons of traffic sources -- Google/MSN/Yahoo PPC, Twitter/Youtube/Reddit/SU/Digg/other social media gaming, List building, TV LI DCPV Clicksor etc PPV, FB advertising to your site, FB advertising to build fan pages, Viral FB apps, Offline marketing (postcards, renting lists, etc), SEO (to some degree), media buys, Craigslist massing with CLAD + PVA's + geolocated proxies etc, amazon PPC, JV with others, approach and engage superaffiliates to promote your offer, etc
- Make bank, reinvest all profits back into LLC and repeat for new ventures, paying yourself a small salary so the US government doesn't take 45% of your money right out the gate
In that way, unless the whole electronic world was wiped out by a global EMP device, no one single act will ever mess with your business. Even if nothing online worked, you would still have revenue coming in from offline + continuity. Even if this entire thing failed, you would have launched 15-20 of these product empires where it wouldn't matter.
And if all of those failed as well, then you are probably SOL because the world has come to an end and people have turned into zombies and are cannibalizing on each other.
Originally Posted by timtetra
While I definitely would like to invest in some long-term SEO projects in the future, I'm not sure if I'll be going all out in affiliate sites as I originally planned. It also sucks that they killed the Amazon Associates program in Connecticut. I made my first decent sized affiliate sales through them, and putting up sites for Christmas is easy money too. I'll just play this by ear as I'm just starting to see a tiny bit of success with CPA. Just gotta be smart with my earnings at this point.
Although a little outdated in term of specifics, Eli (blue hat seo) put forward a great approach to building and sustaining a business built for online. The basics being build a solid foundation of assets and never rely 100% on any method of promotion that could be banned at any time.
As stated above, diversify your portfolio, and build it around a sustainable foundation that provides recurring income.
I compiled a lot of his blog a while back for easier reference. You can find it here.
The point is it doesn't necessarily need to be SEO, you could build a foundation income on freelance web design, local business sites, acting as an online marketing agency, whatever you're most proficient in relative to the target market competition.
Originally Posted by machete
Here's my diversification plan.
1) Work in good markets.
2) Build email lists when you can (and don't burn them, do it right)
3) Paid traffic campaigns
4) Organic campaigns
5) Buy sites
6) OWN products <-----huge
7) Invest
At that point, I think you would be pretty damn stabilized. If any one piece breaks, you have a counter. And if that breaks, you have another counter.
I don't know if an email list is the only way to retain. I'm just bouncing ideas around here but creating a community seems to play a huge part in many sites success. be it forums or profiles. Many top porn sites and gambling sites are doing this, and it's obvious in gaming. They tend to set the standard, the monetisation comes down to offering 'gold membership' and ad placement (placing own ads or selling space for media buys)
Linkedin is charging between around $30 to $100+(from memory) per month and closed at twice it's share asking price on it's first day on the New York stock exchange.
I'm thinking maybe to shift from a 'tricked you into getting here, now buy' approach to a 'build a self sustaining community, and pitch them relevant products in the form of reviews' approach, for SEO built sites anyway.
But that's just my opinion and i'm no expert, it'd be interesting to hear what others have to say.
I just want to jump in that if you're thinking SEO is long term, you're nuts. I know a ton of people who had to fire employees, who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or who lost million dollar buy out offers because of Panda. That's part of the reason why I'm here - my SEO stuff is on fire but I need to learn to diversify to different markets and traffic sources.
If you're not a brand or running a major project that you want to put your blood, sweat and tears into, then the best way to focus on diversifying is by learning new traffic sources, figuring out new monetization methods, developing your own offers, products, white labels etc and creating a business model that is not dependent on one traffic source, one type of offer and one type of monetization.
So for example right now I am too heavily dependent on SEO but even there I monetize two completely different niches with two very different link building strategies - one is CPS and the other is insurance lead gen. And with the CPS I have a full on white label that we'll be taking to PPC, retargeting and other traffic sources within the next month or two. In any event my point is to recognize that there is no inherent stability in promotion/affiliate and to keep that in mind when working on stuff.
Same boat, brother - I depend heavily on 2 main sites and I'm working to expand my empire. It's tough though as I'm not approaching it from a typical affiliate perspective... I'm growing content portals with active communities. I am currently working on an offer to test in July (bundle of blogging tools/resources for $1.99 or something, then upsell hosting). Although I'm still doing well and nothing bad has happened, I have developed the perspective that this isn't going to last. This leads me to: #1 build my sites into large portals with communities so they could sell for more and also have more earning potential; #2 build more; #3: continue testing my own offers until i find another winner (been a while) #4: get out of my comfort zone and open my campaign management (high vol only... fraud monitoring/ensuring fulfillment is on top of things/much more) and design/dev services to advertisers/merchants. I have the skills/the experience and the employees since I do the same for my own projects, so I'm just being a pussy if I don't go after the extra revenue.
At the end of the day.... my goal as in my follow-along thread, is $3mil in the bank within 2 years. Yes it's a bit crazy but possible, and the BANK part is very important... there's no point in making $10k/day for 2 years if you lose it to failed tests because you never invested in building a solid long term business along the way to carry you through failed efforts... or the FTC takes it all because you're trying to make money by tricking people... As Rich Gorman said on his directresponse.net blog, "any fool can make a million. it takes a wise man to keep it"
Originally Posted by ari_
Not sure if you guys have came across this phrase... "the biggest mistake that one affiliate marketer can do is by not building an email list when you first starting IM", at which I have no way not to agree.
I've watched a training course by Jeff walker, and in his product launch formula, I clearly remembered a point that is raised by him. Yes, SEO, PPC, PPV or any traffic sources that we all are using now, are fragile because at the end of the day, these sources are some external factors that beyond our control. We could lose it anytime.
Taking IM as a business (career for me), it's essential to own an asset, in order to be sustainable. All other traffic sources discussed in this forum, yes, you can make money with them. But you also risk losing them anytime. Eg. Your facebook ads could be disapproved by FB anytime if there is a change of their policy, or another reviewer disapproves them...
In contrast, an email list, however, will be your long term asset to your "business" because whenever you want money, you can always squeeze money from them (in layman's term)... Provided that you must build a strong and trust relationship with your list. It's by having this, and when FB, google, pof, or any other traffic sources diminish, you still can sustain your business and be the big time winner.
Having said that, I think IM can be a stable business but like any other business, it would still faces risks, both internal and external. Therefore it is always good to diversify your investments, like what other members suggested above, they are all brilliant ideas. So in case when one of your "business" crashes, you can still back by your other sources of income.
I hope I did bring out the point that, while you are banking with paid traffic or SEO, it is always good to build email lists across your verticals too because since you are banking with them, you know these verticals well and you can build a better relationship with your list better than anyone else...
The real asset you build when you learn paid traffic is the knowledge & experience. Traffic sources may come and go but there will always be paid traffic sources where you can get in and make money almost immediately.
There are a LOT of challenges in building lists that gurus don't tell you. A list is only an asset if you work very hard at it. There is a limited lifetime of a list as well. Having good websites is a FAR better asset than having a list IMO.
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