The jump to full time (29)
Hey, all. For those of you that are doing affiliate marketing full time, could you briefly describe how you made the jump? A couple of scenarios I picture
- students who start doing affiliate marketing in school and just shift to doing it full time after graduation. They never had a "real" job.
- Someone who was unemployed or just couldn't find a job and started doing affiliate marketing because they had no other choice
- (and what I imagine to be the most common) Had a full time gig and started doing affiliate marketing on the side. At some point made the jump and quit their job.
I guess it's that last one that I'm most interested in. What finally gave you the confidence to make the jump? Did you match your salary for 3 months straight?
I made about $20k profit last year doing various online marketing part time. I make $80k/year with my full time job. So part of me says that if I'm making $20k/year part time (maybe 5-10 hours a week) that if I were to drop my job and be able to give 100% of myself to affiliate marketing that I'd be able to make at least $80k/year.
But then another part of me says that's not responsible and that I should wait until I make at least $7k/month for three months in a row before quitting my "real" job.
But then I worry that I just don't have the time to make $7k/month AND work a full time job without my wife divorcing me and my son not knowing who I am.
See the back and forth arguments in my mind?
So I'm just curious what others have done and how it's worked out.
I was a university student, who was learning the ropes of AM while I was going through my degree. I gave myself 3 months once I finished university to make AM work. All I really needed to do is make enough to pay off my modest bills. By the end of the 3 months I made enough to cover my bills for a long time.
I don't think I know anyone who has gone from a full time job to full time AM. Not saying it's not possible. You're just coming from a mindset that is harder to shake off.
It's hard to comment on your situation based on having a wife and kid. Is the industry you are in easy to get jobs in? Could you easily get back that $80/k salary if things don't go to plan?
With wife and kids, it is not a responsible move to quit your salaried job based on matching your salary with your affiliate earnings because affiliate earnings can go from 2k / day to 0 / day in the snap of the fingers and the level of stress you will feel when you have people dependent on you and you're not making any money and have no "job" will probably crush any energy that you would need to make successful campaigns. I started hitting bigger numbers while working my old job, and literally a week after I left the job, my affiliate earnings went from $xxxx / day to 0 / day. That was not the highlight of my life. I didn't have anyone dependent on me so I was able to scrape by and make it, but it was very stressful and I can only imagine how stressful if coupled with having to support others. That being said, if you have a lot of money saved up and could responsibly cover all expenses / emergencies for 6 months to a year out, it might be worthwhile to give it a go full time. You just have to really want it and have a structured plan.
Was a carpenter for 13 years loved carpentry and building stuff just hated doing it for others, 2009 recession kicked IN went from working for 3 companies to doing 1 maybe 2 days a week they just had no work
So i was spending more time at home working on my hobby making money online (it was a hobby back then) few months later was earning around £6,000 profit a month, carpentry i earned maybe £4000, carpentry work started to pick up again but online earning started to decrease
like you say doing both is a struggle at times
up at 6am
work all day have some shitty lunch
finish work
sit in traffic
few beers
get home around 6-7pm
shower
dinner
fall asleep
The last thing i wanted to do when i go home was sit on a bloody computer, so i took a risk as it was mid December when talking to my brother over a few drinks about i earn more when i online full time he said surely you would rather sit at home in your pants then sit in traffic or getting covered in dust, He was right so next morning hungover i rang everyone i worked for told them in the new year i wont be back for the new year im going work online
New year started slow but got to point i was earning again a few things i noticed was the money i was saving
No more spending £10 a day petrol
No more buying unhealthy junk food for lunch
No more having a few beers after work
was saving around £400+ a month just from them
Its hard to say goodbye to a 9-5 that provides you money every month
Sure i don't need to tell you this but leave work if you do on good terms you may need them in future for job or even a reference, we all talked about how we love to walk in drag the boss across the desk whilst beating him with a stapler or keyboard then walking out like a boss, but that only makes you feel good for a hour or 2
The back and forth arguments your having is same as me FEAR is what stops you what if this, what if that what if what if what if you wont know untill you do it
FREEDOM from working from home is the best part for me, but i have earned money i would never earned in carpentry, but if i did not quit i think i would be still be working on construction sites and stressed still
Just to add
I still every 2-3 months go and work for friend who has a construction company for the day for no cost he just has to buy me lunch and few beers, WHY? he thinks its because i get bored or miss it, but its a reminder to my why i quit
Just like in another thread where someone said they sometimes go sit in 5pm traffic to look at everyone unhappy as a reminder not to be one of them
anyway i'll shutup now
Very interesting topic guys. And Budd,your story is inspiring! You were making slightly more money part time online than your somewhat "save" JOB, and you took the opportunity to quit and go fulltime and you did that successfully!
There are a LOT of people (me too) in the same boat as you wiggywack. Some moments you are making good money, and you think "if I can keep at this level for a month or so I can quit...". Than competition rises, offers pulled, etc. and your online income has decreased, you get depressed and don't believe you will make it when you go full time.. And than this repeats...
They used to say: Quit your JOB and go fulltime, because you can always find another JOB.. But this doesn't apply these days with the recession going on. I keep seeing people losing their JOB here and there and they are still struggling to find a new one.
Anyway. Please tell your story guys if you want to share them, it will help alot of guys to make a decision.
Originally Posted by marcovandaar
One the best things to do is cut all the shit expenses out of your life you don't need still have nice things but things you can afford as mark cuban says in his book
"The cheaper you can live, The greater your options"
I have friends who earn less then me but spend 3X more a month on shit they never used like HD cable, expensive phone contracts because there to lazy to seek a better offer, cars they cant afford, designer clothes etc...
In fact i have one friend who told me he needs to earn £1000 a week just to pay his bills, which shocked me
You will have your ups and downs you get that in any job being self employed, being on a payroll is safe some people like to play it safe until the day they get told the company is in trouble and laying people of then they panic
Because they thought they where safe
There will never be the "perfect" time to do it. At some point you will have to jump.
I was working 10 hours a day in a corporate job, making a lot of money but hating it. I had 2 to 3 hours in the evenings to learn AM. It was incredibly tough and took me about 3 years to learn enough to go full time. Even when I did quit my job I was nowhere near replacing my salary.
Its amazing how quickly you learn when you "have to"
If it does not scare you then you are doing it wrong. The biggest thing is making the mental switch from getting a salary to running a business.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
So it's in the same industry, but just a much different focus: brands as opposed to direct response.It would be possible to get an $80k job back, but not easy.
I like keepitsimple's advice about having savings. If I just save every dollar I earn from affiliate marketing, then I'll have some sort of cushion should I choose to drop the full time gig. It's just hard thinking about what I should try in AM as I'm at my day job and then trying to remotivate myself and put in hours to do AM at the end of the day.
This is a huge issue for me because right now I am making decent money in my job and decent money in AM, neither is great though.
I am so tempted to quit and go full time but I'm worried about losing my offers, campaigns or anything else.
As time goes by, my long term plan becomes more clearly revealed and I start learning hard lessons on small scales, lose a couple hundred here or there on a campaign, make a note, move on, but I'm still making in my day job so it's fine.
I am hoping to quit by the end of this summer but I still need better volume to feel 100% safe in doing so. It's a tough affiliate game and very few people master it or even make a full time income.
Got a few optimistic looking campaigns to roll out...I will make it work but the point at which you go 100% is different for everyone. Soon as I make double my day job income consistently for a few weeks or a month and know I can make that money again and again, my day job is gone for sure.
wiggy - if you're struggling to find motivation, consider forming a skype group with some other members in this forum. You guys don't have to even share in depth info about your campaigns, so much as just keep each other on task / motivated and working even though you'd rather not be. Having a group and some sort of informal accountability / peer involvement helps a lot if you find your motivation waning.
The only full time job I've had is affiliate marketing but I believe that having a structure is everything if you're going to make it work. Treat it like a normal job, wake up at similar times every morning and spend time on it with no distractions, its so easy to get distracted when you don't really have anyone overlooking your shoulder and telling you what to do, procrastination will kill your work flow haha!
I would suggest having a decent amount of savings as well, we all know how fast AM can dry up $100k month to $0 overnight if your offer goes down so having some emergency funds is going to save you some grey hairs.
I also agree with the top statements, having a wife and kids will probably change the whole scenario for sure as it would be a lot of added stress if nothing was coming in. Maybe you should spend the next 2-3 months putting in a bit more effort into AM and try to see how much you can make and keep learning the ropes of verticals like mobile, credit, dating etc which are evergreen. (STAY AWAY FROM CLOAKING) This will give you something to fall back onto at anytime you're struggling.
Once you have had successful campaigns on several offers and traffic sources (even in the same vertical) you will start to become confident in your knowledge and process for designing new successful campaigns. It will always blow when a great offer goes down, but you will know there is always another one around the corner because affiliate marketing is not going away any time soon. Once you have this mindset you won't consider IM as risky as you did before. It is not rocket science and you don't even need to be very creative. You need a very analytical mind and you need to become an expert at a few pretty simple things. Of course earnings will always be volatile but it doesn't really matter as long as you are saving lots of money in the good months.
I am still in the transitioning phase myself, working part-time on the side, but one great tip I picked up somewhere was taking a "work holiday" to test the waters. So you basically take 1-2 weeks off from your day job and instead of spending it on the beach you work on IM full time.
This will give you a feeling of how your full time IM life would potentially look like, how much efford you are able to put in etc.
It will be a challenge to explain this to your wife and kids, but definitely worth trying out 
My story is similar to Mr.Green and Maynzie. I never had any real job apart from affiliate marketing.
I started AM on the side while I was studying to get my uni degree and would put couple extra hours every day in running campaigns.
At the beginning it was just some nice side money to cover my expenses , nothing crazy.
The real change came only after 8-9 months when I finished my studies and had 6 free months till I started my master.
During that time I started working really hard and with a plan. I would wake up early , forced myself to test 1-2 campaigns each day , write down everything.
During this time I had my first big profit days and from there it has always been pretty stable. Oh , this caused me to drop my master halfway but I am really happy I did.
AM gives me much more freedom than a job could ever offer me.
Back to you , I wouldn't suggest dropping your job right away since you have a family to support.
Success in AM depends on many factors , and a very important one is being stress - free.
If you will need the money right after you leave your job you will be forced to stop campaigns to fast to avoid losing money and so on.
So what I would suggest is , put the extra effort into AM for the next couple months. Maybe wake up an hour early and sleep and hour late.
Force yourself to test new campaigns every single day. If you see good success during this period , give it another 3 more months and save every profit from AM.
Only after that it would be safe to quite your job and not worry every day about getting a profitable campaign.
Same here. I started while i was a uni student. When i started the university, i wasn't able to pay for it so i applied for a student loan to cover the costs. Funny thing, after 3-4 months i earned enough to pay everything back!
My suggestion is: If you got some money from big campaigns, invest it to offline businesses. There'll be times when AM earnings dry out for weeks, maybe months. If you got these offline investments, you can feel yourself safe. I got a lot of inspiration from my offline businesses (accounting firm, bakery (free breakfast wooot! and i had a bar also in the past) and they and my employees keeping me motivated enough to stay in this biz. Avg. salary in Hungary is $300-$500USD / month. Imagine how shocked i was at my first $1k/day, later at my first $5k/day etc...
Risk management is a key in this business. A distracted mind can easily cost you more than you can imagine...
Similar story to others, but here's some key factors to being successful fulltime
1. Having savings that you're ready to spend. Atleast $5k. Ideally 10k+
2. Working HARD, SMART & putting in LONG hours
3. Saving what you make, and putting it back into your campaigns
4. Understand you may make $100 in jan & feb, and that will be the majority of your $ for the year. This isn't nesscerily true, but you need to be comfrtable with this fact as possibility.
5. If you have family/commitments, i'd recommend doing it part time for a while first
^ summed up brilliantly,
I have worked with quite a few dudes who have worked their way out of full time jobs, many still on this forum and they're all treated the above dot points before quitting and they've never looked back since!
:O:O
@peterb, I wouldn't mind hearing your story. you could post it here if you wanted. would save you from repeating it on skype if others wanted to hear it too.
I know everyone sais to be responsible and save, or earn enough on the side to make a leap, however, in my case the best option was to take the plunge.
Working full time 60 - 80 hours at a marketing agency didn't leave me enough time to know whether I can master AM. Eventually I knew only way to find out is to quit. Once you are self employed you will find ways to make money, from consulting, to one off projects. Eventually those 60 - 80 hours you spend making someone else money will pay off and start making you money. The transition is hard emotionally so here is what I found helped.
1. Surround yourself physically with people doing same thing... forums are great but meetup with human beings
2. Make sure to have a strong support network, your wife, friends, whoever who'll help you bounce from bad months
3. Understand there will be ups and downs and its the trend that is more important than daily revenues
4. Get out of the mind frame of I want to make $xxx/day... your goal is to build a business stop thinking like a wage slave
Originally Posted by The Angry Russian
Now on to the other three...
I didn't really have any savings tucked away before I moved in to AM, but I had timing on my side.
2009 was a boom period for the industry and you could move in to verticals where it was possible to double, treble your spend with very little competition. Add in the fact that platforms like Google and Facebook were still an affiliate's playground and you had scalability by the bucketload. Didn't need to be particularly smart to make a buck, and a lot of people weren't.
I went from working the day job to full time AM in the space of about 6 weeks. Three factors helped me:
- Borrowing money from my family. Not a huge amount (only £2000-£3000), but the margins were so good at the time that I could pay them back within a few weeks with a nice chunk of interest. I left my job once I had gotten on to weekly payments.
- Coupons, coupons, coupons. Back in those days it was possible to set up as many Google accounts as you wanted with AdWords coupons swiped out of magazines. There are still opportunities out there to 'game' the system through coupons and what is essentially free ad spend. It's not something I like to talk about, or vouch for, but when you're looking to make that jump to full-time, you hustle in ways that look extremely amateur and desperate several years on!
- Scalability wasn't a problem. A lot of new affiliates (in 2013) are cutting their teeth on low volume traffic sources where it's extremely difficult to scale. When I got started, everybody was using Facebook and Google, so scalability was kinda built-in to all of our businesses. It was just there by default. These days you have to make a conscious decision to go for high volume targets if you want to grow your business fast, and the way the industry has changed, that points towards higher risk (doing shady shit on Facebook, attempting to crack mobile and etc).
It's difficult to give a 'correct' time for making the jump to full-time AM, and I think a lot depends on your life situation. If you have a mortgage, a wife, kids, and debt, then you need to tally up the risk and stay in your day job until your certain you've found something that's going to replace it. For others with more freedom to fail, you can afford to be a little more bullish - so long as you don't mind eating noodles all day every day if it goes tits-up.
Originally Posted by andyvon
This will give you a feeling of how your full time IM life would potentially look like, how much efford you are able to put in etc.
It will be a challenge to explain this to your wife and kids, but definitely worth trying out
Your situation is very different with having a family, and the fact that your making some money already, but I thought I'd share my experience. I'd be hesitant to part with the day job making $80,000/yr until you know for SURE that your campaigns can surpass it to support the family. As said before, AM can be very volatile at times. just my 2 cents!
edit: I do AM part-time and primarily focus on my uncles business now, since it's what keeps the lights on and the servers running!
Originally Posted by wiggywack
After I graduated college I saved up money and travelled around SE Asia for 6.5 months. I wanted to do nothing other than travel. I met some dude from Canada who was an affiliate. After I pieced together "internet money" and "full time traveling" I was sold.. AM seemed like the ONLY thing that made sense for me to do. I never had any desire to work a real job. I'm a shitty employee, as I have no desire to help some shit head get rich while I'm on a fixed salary.
I was lucky enough that somebody in my close group of friends was already a successful affiliate, and I was able to get him to be my mentor. At the time I was living at home with my parents and relied on them for financial support. I basically grinded it out for many hours a day for a solid 13 months before I started making any money. After coming back from ASW 2013 I hit a big campaign. I made enough money to afford to move out of my parents place and support myself. Now that I support myself (I live in Manhattan which is NOT cheap), I have a special type of motivation to work hard- if I don't work then I won't make any money, then I'll have to move back home with my parents.
I guess you can say that I was always a "full time" affiliate, as I've never had a "real" job (I did work a few part time gigs, like being a substitute teacher and a lifeguard in the summer time). In the past, one of my biggest strengths was my ability to recognize & exploit good situations. My parents were nice enough not to charge me for rent and to pay for my food. Instead of saving up my money to move out on my own I saw this as an opportunity to invest everything into AM. It was shitty living at home with my parents, but I have no regrets about doing it. I wouldn't have had the same motivation to make AM work if I were supporting myself at that time.
As I said, most people probably can't relate to my story (I probably sound like I was spoiled, relying on my parents for financial support and all), but perhaps some of the younger people on this forum should read this again.
Sorry Peter! My bad! Congrats
----
After reading all the post in this thread. I would be confused as what my approach should be, some people say dive into the deep end, others say walk in slowly. Either way, all the people who have posted their story have accomplished the goal that you wanted to hit which is being able to do AM full-time.
You know you position best. You know how you work. Pick an approach and stick with it. Good luck, and keep us updated
Thanks, everyone. I was thrilled to see this thread called out in the STM newsletter!
BTW, I also want to add that my wife works full time and makes almost as much as me, so it's not like I'm providing 100% of the household income.
For now, I'm trying to save up any profits I make with affiliate marketing. Those funds will then go towards being my backup should I decide to go full time. Once I've saved enough to match 3-6 months of my salary, that's probably when I'll make the leap. At that point, I'll already be making money with AM so I'll just need to close the gap between that and my salary. And if I was making that amount part time, full time should equal more.
The next trick is trying to dedicate enough time every day to put towards affiliate marketing and going with the motto "ABL" or "Always Be Launching". Always be launching new campaigns no matter how successful or unsuccessful you are at the time.
Good luck, and looking forward to hearing how things go!
As an AM there is NO better feeling than seeing that Skype message
"Dude, I quit my job today!" As cheesy as it sounds. Surprisingly though, I've only got that message 3-4 times in my two years of aff management.
It's a ballsy move. Saying goodbye the cozy blanket of cheques on the 1st and 15th to banking on campaigns that you're truly unsure about in terms of longevity. From an AM's perspective I would urge anyone thinking of quitting their job to look at their savings, think about other mouths your feeding and ensure you're running 5+ stable offers (hopefully some direct with the advertiser) before even thinking about it.
Awesome shares everyone! I came out of the agency space and have other income(wife and consulting, etc) that helps support making the move into a full time gig. My approach has been slow and steady, trying to prove campaigns prior to expanding them and not just spending $ to spend.
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum