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Why I havent Been Active on the forum for a year... (9)

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So I wanted to share that after I joined this forum (8/2012) I ended up quitting my job and starting my own business doing AM fulltime as well as managing the marketing as a freelancer for some clients.

2 months after joining stack that money, I went from making ~8k/month in my job, to $45,000/month, most of that income from a single affiliate program which I made $30k from that month, about 70% of that 45k profit.


That said, after paying debts and whatnot, I started 2013 with $3k in my bank account. I ended up trying to start my own company over the course of the last year doing affiliate marketing, managing freelance clients, etc, and ended up making $493,000 last year at about 50% margin. I didnt even know how well I did until the accounting firm I hired showed me my year end financials. I am really grateful, but I also worked myself into a rut: I hired a bunch of people to 'automate' my client side of the business (I dont like dealing with marketing clients, but didnt want to get rid of them since they were a consistent 10-15k/month paycheck, even though I was making 10k-40k/month from AM) and ended up with all these people that relied on me, and kept me in the office I got. I ended up losing a lot of money there in my quest to 'automate' that side of my income because I had never been a business owner before. Between job recruiters, salespeople, account managers, business leads, office space, computers/equipment, software, accounting, etc it gets really expensive, and ended up as a super expensive learning experiment in an area I'm still not sure I'm particularly interested in.

I also let my voracious appetite to launch new affiliate campaigns on new traffic sources take a backseat. This was the element that really got me here in the first place, and created my first part of my success. I've definitely learned a lot this past year, its nice I still have 6figures in my bank account, but I feel like I'm underachieving now that I'm not doing enough of what I love which are big affiliate campaigns...no-strings-attached-affiliate-monies! I aspire to travel, and havent been really able to ever since I created this illusion for myself that I had to parlay my money into creating a 'real' business....fuck that bullshit. Life is whatever you want it to be. I still feel like I have learned and grown a LOT through my experience of starting a business, understanding what I want, etc. Right now I make $63,000/month, but only $10k of that is profit after employee expenses which is pretty shitty by my standards since I made more than that 2 years ago. I think my business will be at the point it runs itself in a few months, but the struggle to get to that point ain't fun, and I do not believe was the shortest way possible...I would've been better served just continually, and individually pounding away at affiliate marketing campaigns until I stacked up either a fat nest egg, or figured out how to make my campaigns more passive and avoid burnout. My advice would be to focus as much as possible on affiliate campaigns as you can, but keep in mind a way you can create passive income from doing what you love long-term... for me its teaching people, and I'm going to do that by expanding my own affiliate network and me and my buddies will act as mentors to younger affiliates in it. I also partnered with a hypnotherapist to create our own product, which is in the follow-along section. Shooting for 50k/month NET by July 2014.

Either way, thats been my 'success story'. I'm back on the forums, and going to be actively showing insight into the campaigns I am running, and and building out new ones for new products, etc. Stoked to be back in the fray, and let me know if you have any questions, or have had any similar experiences!

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appreciate the insight mate! best of luck!

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what is that spark that you think contributes to this 8k$ => 45k$ leap?
anyway great results man!

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Awesome post man, thanks for the wonderful insight. Life is for living, stay hungry keep pushing!

Looking forward to the 7 figure success post number 2, you got this mate!

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I'd say a dual part frustration combined with focus. I was a fucking machine, methodically launching new campaigns, testing traffic sources, and implementing 80% of the time, learning 20%, for almost 2 years.

But the straw that broke the camels back? Im not really sure, but I know making the decision to quit my job must have had a big effect on my mentality. I was being paid $5500/month at my job, and had some freelance clients which contributed an extra 2500-3000 per month i think. I kept expenses low so I could quit and still not worry about paying rent. But making the decision to quit my job really forced me to that point of no return, and out of my comfort zone. Now that I've made some money, I once again feel out of my comfort zone only making 10k/month net (and i also have much higher expenses).

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You know, the problem with affiliate marketing is that is not 100% reliable, so you can't use it as the only profit source. There are so many affiliates that made 50k/month than went to 5k/month in a month just because the entire business rely on others.

A real business with employees of course is hard, and if you don't enjoy it...fuck that. Do what you enjoy. Freelancing/outsourcing I don't think is such a good business model these days, is not scalable and you need to deal a lot with hr. Why don't you make your own product that gives a monthly recurring revenue? This way you'll know almost for sure what will be your income for the next few months.

But a lot depends what you like to do, more than just making money since I feel that you get back to aff marketing just to get back on track(love for the $ or love for the process of making campaigns, testing etc?)

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Totally. A big part of the initial success for most affiliates (myself included) is part luck, but that luck is still created by a long history of hard work. For me, the obsession is condensing that 'luck cycle' with experience, so that I can find those places I get results faster and faster.

Yea man! Employees arent fun and they've created this guilt and responsibility that really weighs on me in a super negative fashion. The 'employees' I like the best are the people I work with on a performance basis, either affiliates in my network, or fellow marketers I collaborate on projects with. Pay-for-performance model is the ONLY way to go in my opinion for jobs that can be measured by such. Of course you'll always need to pay your bookkeeper, or even support-related roles require some sort of base.

I created a clickbank bizzop product about 6 months ago, spent maybe 2 months putting everything together, but I didnt really have any reputation among other bizzop affiliates who could promote my product for me to their email lists, which is the main distribution method for those sorts of products. I worked on honing my sales page for a time to make a direct media-buying approach work, but as I said, the major problem is that thats just not how these products are promoted. Also, my product wasnt broad enough (being Adwords specific) to really make waves in the 'Make $67/hr working from home!' market that 'make money' products like Empower Network, Anthony Morrison, Coffee Shop Millionaire, etc leverage, and I wasnt really passionate enough about it to go that route.

I am working on my own product right now with a few partners, its a stop-smoking product, we have some celebrities endorsing it, and I have it posted up in the follow-along section. I have another rebill product on the market right now ( https://bedroomguardian.com ), which performs pretty solidly on Google/Bing Search, but havent been able to expand conversions much beyond search.


I love affiliate marketing I love the challenge of getting things to work, and the joy when you uncap budgets and watch the spend go up, and up, and up. Those moments dont happen often, but I think those are the moments that keep the lifers in the game. Ultimately, I want to have some passive money makers on the backburner, and be able to work on things at my own leisure. I'm also considering firing all my inhouse employees soon (~$10k/month) which would simplify my life a lot, although I'm pretty determined to make this business thing work. In a sense its like its own big affiliate campaign, you figure out whats making ROI and expand on those activities or employees, and whats not, and cut them out. You figure out whats taking up too much of your time and hire a person there. I remember talking to my friend jason, and he told me how he ran his entire business through financial sheets, with revenue or profit segmented by different data points; profit contribution by employee, by activity, by department, etc. Its really all similar at the end of the day.

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New affiliate here, would definitely be interested in a mentor if you're offering.

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Hey man, we're in a kinda similar situation right now with the balancing act between affiliate marketing and managing employees on another business.

$63k rev with $10k in profits blows though, mind sharing what's making your expenses so high?

I currently have 2 staff and are really bootstrapping the business and trying to create some synergy between the affiliate marketing biz and this offline biz by making them share the same backend system of virtual assistants.

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