The "affiliate marketing is short term" theory. (20)
This theory will completely depend on your goals/how you want to live your life.
I often hear people leaving affiliate marketing for something more "stable and long term" which makes sense, but if you look at affiliate marketing in a larger time frame it can definitely be considered long term.
Lets say over 3 years of affiliate marketing you've made $900,000 NET profit.
Year 1: 80,000 NET
Year 2: 520,000 NET
Year 3: 300,000 NET
Now say you manage to spend $80k/year of that traveling/food/life etc...
This leaves you with a lot of $ saved and quite a nice life.
If you think of affiliate marketing this way, you could take months of traveling after a big campaign runs up, etc... and easily hop back into things. Start new campaigns up at home, or on an Island in Fiji.
This is just 1 way to look at it, but its a way i like to look at affiliate marketing sometimes.
Affiliate marketing isn't short term. Campaigns can be. But like you said it depends on what you want.
- If you want pure cash then there is nothing wrong with sticking at affiliate marketing.
- If you want a predictable steady flow, then siphoning money into something less volatile makes sense.
- If you want to free up your time, then the easy option is to outsource.
- If you like to spend out of your means, well then you are fuct either way.
This plays into this whole discussion as well:
http://finchsells.com/2013/10/10/how...ate-marketing/
I'm about 1 year into affiliate marketing and I love everything about it!
My biggest concern is this idea that some people voice that "you can't make a lot of huge money ANYMORE if you're starting out". This is due to regulation / competition / large ad networks hating affiliates, whatever. Are these sound concerns or just talk from people that couldn't hack it?
I'd love to hear some of the "big stackers" take one this. As far as I can tell the whole industry is rapidly expanding and opportunity is massive. Am I missing something?
All things being equal, does a *smart, hard-working, focused individual* starting today have the same chance of netting a mill that he would if he start5-8 years ago??
Would LOVE to hear your guys take on this...
Money aside, AM also teaches you very valuable business skill set (banking, credit building, money management, book keeping, budgeting, negotiation, networking, copywriting, selling ect.) that will continue to serve you in life for whatever you may choose to do down the road.
Glad you started this discussion. AM is definitely a bumpy ride but its a jackpot as well. When I made huge money back in the day I got fed up of hopping between offers / traffic sources & got into the mentality of building something long term (web assets) which distracted me & bought me down from 10-20k a month profit to barely 1-2k a month for a very LONG period of time. This year I said FUCK IT & hopped back & have already seen 30k profit months. Needless to say I wasted more than a year in search of 'long term' businesses but now even if I know that AM is not long term, I consider it as my PRIMARY platform to make huge sum in a short interval & then invest this money into long term web assets / real estate.
Originally Posted by malachii
Back then...
If you wanted to ask a simple question. You would risk the chance of getting flamed to shit on wickedfire, or get misinformation from some make money online forum. You had to figure most shit out for yourself.
If you wanted to spy on ads. You would do it manually. There weren't tools that you can sort by date, placement, keyword etc, like there is now.
If you wanted to run something uncompliant you would have to try submitting tonnes of ads through brute force. None of this cloaking bullocks.
If you wanted granular tracking, that handled a lot of volume. You only really had one option, which still didn't really do the trick. Wanted to track mobile? You would of been shit out of luck.
At this present time, there are more traffic sources to tap then there ever was, there are more offers to blow up than there ever was, and there is more support and technology to help.
Same rules apply then and now. #ifyouslackyoudontstack
totally agree with Mr green here..
Affiliate marketing is here to stay for the long run.. However, the truth is campaigns do die off and it becomes like a highly paid job.
If you think of this as a job, then you will forever be grinding your way through and it can get really tiring. For me, i have been doing affiliate marketing
for 6 years full time now. And it has really been a roller coaster ride for me.
From doing $1x,xxx/day to getting banned by Google to $xxx/day and then work your way up again to $xx,xxx/day and then seeing it crash down when
the offer start to die off.
The truth is, it can be v emotional coaster but if you think about it, this is probably one of the easiest way to generate BIG profits
in a very period of time and almost anybody can do that if you put your heart and soul into it!
After you generate that pot of gold mine, then the next step is probably to use the funds to invest it into businesses or something
that can generate you passive income like real estate or equity.
I have gone from a lone ranger to now have multiple employees working for me and handling stuffs for me that i never knew i could
outsource.
The plan is, decide to hire someone to help you and put some thoughts into thinking what could be outsource. Think like a corporation
and a businessman and you'll see your income growing and you facing your computer less.
The thought can be as simple as:
How can i get the job done without me having to face the computer? If you can achieve that, then you would have freed yourself
from your 'job' in affiliate marketing.
What are your thoughts? 
Finch's post also touches on a key point about AM and stability: depending on your income goals it's possible to set up your campaigns to be much more stable than the stereotypical "massive but volatile" campaign.
For example, I've had niche dating campaigns last nearly a year. I've got CPS campaigns that have lasted considerably more than a year.
Bearing in mind the number of small business of any kind don't last a year, that's a pretty good lifespan.
One of the joys of AM for me is the sheer number of "levers" you can adjust in your business model. If you want something more stable, you can just tweak what you're doing until it becomes more stable. Then if things change and you want more volatility but more cash, you can do that too.
Originally Posted by clubdrock
The same goes for if a seasoned affiliate decided to get a job as a marketer for a agency or become an affiliate manager, their negotiating, networking and similar skills gives them 10x more of an advantage then something like university could ever do.
Well, there are a few ways you can look at it.
Affiliate marketing as a concept - the middleman who connects customers to the right products - is definitely here to stay. That will always be a profitable business.
The danger is that the part of it many of us choose to associate with (in the CPA industry, at least), is closely tied to shitty offers with shitty customer service that often fail to deliver on their promises, no doubt with the help of our often questionable marketing practices...
That subsector of the industry where we make the most money... I find difficult to imagine thriving in its current form 5, 10 or 15 years from now. Not without adapting to a new environment. So when you consider that your highest earning work today is not likely to be as lucrative in the next decade, you have to be able (and willing) to adapt to that future environment where customers are getting better and better connected, advertising regulations are getting tighter and tighter, and internal competition from other affiliates is growing by the day. And you often have to do this before you are shoved. It's much, much harder to adapt to a new environment when you're not making X/day. The emotional loss of leaking money stops many affiliates from moving with the times and making the changes that thriving in the long-term is likely to demand.
I don't consider affiliate marketing to be a short term business, but my business - in it's current form - is definitely weighted heavily towards campaigns that are, realistically speaking, short term solutions.
That doesn't mean we're all shooting ourselves in the balls by pursuing this as a career. When you look at the potential ROI, this is one of the rare few hidden gems of a profession that can multiply your investment sevenfold in a matter of weeks, and then provide a ridiculous income thereafter for as long as you remain proactive... all without politics, qualifications and earning ceilings. What's not to like about it? You'd be mad NOT to pursue it if you have the technical and mental abilities...
I can't think of a single industry that offers the same economies of scope and economies of scale.
That all said, I think the smart affiliate knows that gaining control and ownership in the marketplace is the best way to ensure he continues to earn a lot of money when his campaigns fail or the environment changes. You won't ever find a better source of investment capital than a few well-oiled affiliate campaigns, so as long as you're investing the profits wisely, you're enjoying all of the benefits and reducing your exposure with every successful campaign.
Even if affiliate marketing isn't a long-term career, it gives you the ammunition (both capital and knowledge) to move in to just about any market and start making money while others are theorising over business plans, 'brand building', and academic teachings.
Very well said. As competition gets more intense, and rules/regulations get tighter new interesting opportunity's open up. It's always been that way. As long as you adapt i still don't look at it as short term. Only the current campaigns you're running are short term. Combine those with the next 5 good ones you have over 2-3 years and it's fair to consider it long term.
How long term do you consider long term though?
To me, long term is 10, 15, 20 years from now.
If you're talking about the next 2-3 years, then I'd consider that the short to mid term. And yeah, I agree, affiliate marketing is unlikely to shift too dramatically in that time span.
Originally Posted by Finch
No matter if you are running CPA campaigns, building web properties, writing software, whatever - odds are that 10 years from now, without continually improving your products, adapting to changes in the market etc. it will be worth as much as a 5 year old acai berry campaign.
So if you have to adapt constantly, no matter which path you choose, how bad is affiliate marketing really?
It's hard to think of a job that would be stable 20 years from now without changing much.
Of course there are the classic jobs like dentists , lawyers etc , but it's very possible to make more in AM in 5 years than a normal job will make their entire life.
Also , AM is really good for generating seed money for other online businesses. You don't need to always be a single affiliate running campaign from his home.
Think about scaling , becoming the next Matomy.
the legal job market / field has changed immensely (shrunk) due to technology / outsourcing, so even classic jobs have been subject to significant change. Everything from electronic / automated discovery to 50% fewer jobs than 30 years ago and an increasingly large number of new lawyers / unemployed lawyers. AM is no more unstable than anything else in this day and age. Just don't live beyond your means and save / reinvest the majority of earnings.
Can't speak for other countries, but there are a shitload of lawyers driving your taxi in Germany... simply because it's common to use fresh college graduates for a year for cheap and churn and burn them. Same goes with doctors... I personally know a doctor (pretty close friend) and according to him, he's roughly making 5-6k PRE tax... now that's about 3.5-4k euros a month... talking about ballin...
For all those who think AM isn't longterm, just think about the following: as long as there'll be ANY products that can be sold in ANY way, there'll always be affiliate marketing. The internet isn't going anywhere, so it stays a HUGE sales channel. People always want to advertise / drive clients to their product => people who do that are much needed.
Originally Posted by andyvon
As a normal rule, I'd never plan more than 5 years in advance for a business.
Even at the 5 year mark you're basically writing very aspirational fiction rather than actually planning anything. By the time you get to 10 years, 20 years, you might as well plan to have your accounting done by goblins riding unicorns: it's about as likely to happen as anything else you predict that far out.
(Remember: in 2003, 10 years ago, most people still thought cameras in cellphones were a stupid idea that wouldn't take off, but that investing in the property market via subprime vehicles was a great idea. 20 years ago the World Wide Web was a crazy idea that would never work. I've been running the same business for 15 years, incidentally: and I can assure you that my plans from 1997 didn't get to 1999 without being drastically changed, never mind 2007.)
Now, add to that the fact that, IMO, the world's changing faster than we've ever seen before.
No profession is safe: dentists might well see their jobs going to robots overseen by telepresence in the next 10 years. Lawyers, quite apart from the glut of them on the market right now, are being steadily squeezed by increasingly-competent research tools and expert systems: a legal review of cases that would have taken 6 months in the '80s takes more like 6 days now. And expert systems are poised to eat a large chunk of the information worker market: I know some guys who work at the pointy end of AI, and what they're able to do is pretty scary.
One of the biggest global growth sectors right now is demand creation - we've got the "supply" thing sorted, but there's more shit being made than people want to buy. So getting people to buy things is even more important than it ever was.
I'd say that affiliate marketing is actually one of the most stable skillsets to be investing in right now, in terms of it still being useful in 10 years.
^^ Here here!
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum