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Question for those making a full time living with Affiliate Marketing (33)

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Hey guys. I know a bunch of people on this forum are doing unbelievably well with Affiliate Marketing. Just had a question for those of you. Do you get to a point where you can really do whatever you want, whenever you want? And by that I mean, do you have enough campaigns that if one dies, it's not like your income just drops to 0? Do you have the luxury of traveling for a couple of months without even checking your campaigns, but know that there's money coming in? (bit of an exaggeration, obviously checking campaigns is important). That's a big part of why I'm pursuing Affiliate Marketing - I'm a hard working guy, but I also realize that having the freedom of time WITH money is probably so much better than slogging away 12 hour days working your way up the corporate ladder, waiting to wake up in your 40's with the amount of money you wish you had in your 20's (to each his own).

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Yes. But this just means your time is flexible - if you stop working as much, your income will drop.

Yes, but you need to always be finding new ones or sooner or later that income will drop to 0.

For 99% of affiliates, no. If you're lucky enough to have a true goldmine with no competition, for a while yeah. You can, of course, still travel for months, but you've got to be putting some work in.

I think you're better off accepting the fact that you'll have to work really hard for at least several years before having this opportunity. Who doesn't want loads of money and free time - affiliate marketing is a great industry but it still isn't the lazy man's way to riches. Even if you did achieve massive success with minimal effort, you'd want to do all you could to preserve that wealth so that you don't end up a rich man in his 20s and a poor man in his 40s. I think the better goal is to learn to enjoy affiliate marketing so that it doesn't feel like a job but a fun hobby you can't wait to do everyday.

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Definitely, that's a great answer. Was just curious how much of the "Internet Marketing Lifestyle" is reality and how much is overinflated. Thanks though.

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Hmm, also a question on this topic. Have any of the more successful affiliates considered outsourcing? Or any other way of separating time from monetary income? Seems like that would be the end goal in it all.

Maybe even hiring an actual staff instead of all VPA's. Though the VPA's are definetly cheaper and much more expendable - and they are getting quite a bit more advanced. To the point where you can literally outsource anything

Anyways, just a thought. Would be interesting to get some feedback

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I've been to that point for years now. I have enough time to do whatever I want and the money that I need to.

I'm more an SEO kind of guy, but that's not so different after all.
Yes, I can loose some of my assets and income will not drop to 0.
If it does, I have save some money to have the time to rebuild without stress.

I travel for 4 months per year, I only check the global business stats.
I guess that is really depends on how you setup your business.
I will be in Belgium next week, I do not plan to work there.
I will be in Japan 3 weeks next month, I do not plan to work there.

But sometimes you will have to, because sometimes things goes wrong :/
The more strong is your system, the less it happens, after that problems have ruin part of you travel, you learn to fix them and that happen less and less.

Like @dusklife says, I think that the goal is to learn to enjoy affiliate marketing.

I have a lot of freedom of time and the money, but I spend almost all my time when I don't travel to work. Why ? Because I fucking love what I do !

Online business as any other business required a lot of personal investment to work, that not an easy path. But if you are good at it, and if you became passionate about it, you can have the time and the money.

If you only want the money and the time without the passion, it will be really harder to reach the goals and to maintain them after that !

I have the money today because I loved what I do since day one, not because I've wanted money.
And I have the freedom of time, because I've rebuild things many time to finely find a way that works. That's where being a hard worker person is useful

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Yes, there are a lot of people on this board who fit that description.

Take a look at this amazing speech from one of the STM Thought Leaders, timtetra at the last STM Meetup in Bangkok earlier this year.

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I use AM and similar activities to enable me to pursue my filmmaking work independently, which is not the cheapest passion in the world. Also, it pays for me to, you know, eat.

To answer your questions:

Can AM Give You Purely Passive Income Which You Don't Need To Check?

AM's not great for pure "passive income" - ie 0-hour input income. It's absolutely fantastic for low-maintainance income, though.

That's not a bad thing, in my experience. I spent a while (measured in years) split-testing the various approaches to online income a while back, and pure passive income approaches tend to seriously compromise themselves on the $/hr in order to get the maintenance time down from "2 hr per day" to "0 hr per day".

Barring truly genius approaches and black-swan events, there seems to be a sweet spot for people wanting to enable a chosen lifestyle around the 1-4 hr a day mark, whether you're doing dropshipping, email, AM, whatever.

That's why it wasn't called the "0-hour Work Week"

Can It Let You Do Whatever You Want?

As far as "whatever you want, whenever you want" - it very much depends on what you want.

There are some activities that AM will definitely not, ever, get you to the point where you can pursue them. If you have the same dream as Elon Musk (colonising Mars), that's going to require a different approach - like, say, founding Paypal . Likewise, if I wanted to take the big movie studios on at their own game (required budget around $3bn / yr), that's definitely outside the top end that even the biggest affiliates can manage.

However, for most things, AM can probably enable you to do them, and do them secure in the knowledge that you'll have enough money to live on at the end of it. You've got to spend a while considering how you'll smooth out the peaks and troughs in AM income (pro tip - look into poker bankroll management) in order to prevent it being very stressful and possibly disastrous, but that's a solveable problem.

How you approach your AM career from there will very much depend on how much money you need to achieve your dreams. This is where it's really worth taking a hard look at how much money you need to do what you do - you'll need to do enough work to achieve what you want to achieve, but it's also important (IMO) to not over-extend and aim to achieve far more than you need to achieve your dreams. Your dreams and your security (and that of your family) are the key point - not numbers in a bank. I'm a big fan of Tim Ferriss's "Dreamlining" exercises for this - they're a great way to figure out how much you need to do what you want to do, and let you plan from there.

Of course, for many of the best affiliates, the entire thing becomes more like a computer game where you're trying to achieve the biggest numbers - and at that point it's almost its own reward! But that's a different story.

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The simple answer is ofcourse.

Basic and common example of a typical affiliates income-life:
Jan/Feb/March = $90,000 Net Profit
April/May = Loss of $20,000 testing
June/July/Aug/Sept/Oct = $40,000 Net Profit
Nov/Dec = $7000 Net Profit

That's a total of:
$117,000 Profit.

You could take off the whole next year and Volunteer and just live off that $ (if you wanted to).

In short: I try to look at my affiliate income annually. I think it's the healthiest way to do it.

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You can call me a weirdo if you want but I won't be at ease if my income is 100% passive, I truly prefer to have the skillset, the abilities, networking, knowledge and so on so if things go bad I know that I can rebuild (or work as a consultant).

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Here's the lifestyle I've developed.

My home base is in Atlanta where I have an office and a team. We work hardcore 6 days a week and I have a strict routine. I don't really go out or party ever when I'm here and I'm completely in the zone. But twice a year I'll take off and go traveling in Asia to see my lady (This year I was gone May / June, and I'll be going again Nov / Dec).

When I travel I'll wake up early and spend 2 hours checking out the campaigns. At this point my employees back in Atlanta pretty much manage everything so I do more of Skype chatting and strategy. But I'm not actually the guy who's in the trenches launching campaigns.

Lets say you make $500k profit this year after taxes in affiliate marketing (not TYPICAL, but definitely possible). That's enough money to live well in some places for over a decade (Eastern Europe, Some parts of SE Asia, Some parts of South America). So yea if you want to have a few years of retirement then it's definitely do-able.

There is one issue though. If you're the kind of person who can make $500k a year + in affiliate marketing, you fall in love with the game. Affiliate marketing becomes fun. I love traveling as much as the next guy, but a large part of my happiness does come from working and making progress.

I use to live in Asia for 3 years (Bangkok and Vietnam). I left because it was too distracting and it sapped away at my motivation. Now I prefer a more balanced lifestyle.

As far as worrying about your income dropping to $0...that's why it's important to be frugal and live below your means. Affiliate marketing also comes in "waves." When times are good, I am working my ass off. If things are a little slow, then you can go travel. That's why I travel at the end of the year, affiliate marketing tends to be slower.

Whatever "lifestyle" you want, affiliate marketing can give it to you. Don't put the cart in front of the horse. Focus on NOW. Get to your first $100 a day campaign, then $1,000 a day campaign. What you'll find is planning that far ahead is useless. Make the money first.

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Do you get to a point where you can really do whatever you want, whenever you want?

Yes.

Do you have the luxury of traveling for a couple of months without even checking your campaigns, but know that there's money coming in?

Yes.

One thing I would say is affiliate marketing quickly forces you to figure out what you want, and what is important to you.

From the age of 1-19 I pretty much went with the flow of life, passed school, passed university, followed the herd. At 19 I quickly realised what I didn't want to do, which was work for other people. I soon managed to make affiliate marketing work.

I was then the left with the "challenge" of having zero responsibility, two passports, and enough money to keep me going for years. I mention "challenge" because some affiliates actually manage royally screw up this privileged position. They blow all their money on flashy stuff. They get an ego. They attract the wrong crowd. They lose their existing friends. They burn out physically and mentally due to not living a sustainable lifestyle of partying, or living behind a computer.

It's so important that whatever you do you keep your headspace healthy.

I actually felt a bit lost for a while after my initial success, as my mindset rapidly changed and the possibilities opened up. Affiliate marketing can change your life in a big way, which also means the life you previously lived won't feel as relevant to you anymore.

If you get AM to work, you have complete freedom (outside of your non-financial based responsibilities). Freedom can be your friend, but also your enemy. Use it wisely!

I fucking love life. It's just taken a little bit of adjusting.

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Stackman defined it pretty well, you have some good days, weeks, months, followed by bad ones.

As he said, you need to look at your yearly income as it's done in any company, forget about thinking on weekly or monthly stable income, you are not an employee, you are a company owner, even if the company is just you sitting at home.

As for long term... well there is no long term for independent online AM. Everything goes so fast on Internet, gold mines come and go in waves, they key is to catch the next wave before your current one is gone. If you are bored and want to keep reading, here is a resume of my life as AM, with it's up's and downs as example.

I started in 1999, I was a young Computers student at college. I created some adult websites, and saw it was so easy to make money in adult with dialers (premium numbers). I started earning way more money than I could in any daily job, so I quit college and started my first company. Things were nice for a while, and I met some other young "webmasters" making a good living out of it, and burning the money as it came. Then one day around 2002 the government in my country banned dialers, and boom, my whole business was gone, my wave had past, but I had savings, knowledge and was hungry for the next thing. Others just went back to a daily job as they had no money or energy left.

So jumped into online gambling as AM, expended hours learning all about it and PPC, buying traffic from Google, Yahoo/Overture, working on SEO on my own gambling portals etc. I invested a good amount of my savings on gambling traffic, working as affiliate on revshare model, as I was looking long term and knew that there was more long term money on that model than on CPA.

Things started to go very well, after the initial struggle investing and waiting for the long term return, money was coming even faster than with dialers. It reached a point when I thought I would be able to just enjoy life not working anymore, just from the passive revshare income. Luckily I had learned the lesson before with dialers, so I started to invest part of my earnings in real state just in case gambling died as dialers did.

And of course they did, Google and Yahoo banned gambling, so no more golden PPC traffic (well it lasted for a while with some tricks, but it was the mouse and cat game with them, opening accounts as those were banned etc). I still had passive income for a while, until regulations came in most of countries, forcing the gambling companies to reset their customers databases. Good bye passive income.

So again my wave went down, and I started to look for the next one to ride. In my case, i went back to adult, I had the contacts, money to invest and knowledge. Bought a medium/big tube (was Alexa 3k at some point), a big network of blogs and started to work again on SEO, while selling my ad space and also buying ad space at other adult sites to promote affiliate offers.

One day in 2010 an affiliate rep contacted me by ICQ asking if i had mobile traffic in my adult nework and explained me how to make money out of it. I did, another wave to ride on. It was the very beginning of the adult mobile industry. Almost nobody knew how much valuable mobile traffic was those days, so I started to invest big $ on buying mobile adult traffic, from networks, direct publishers, google, bing, etc, while becoming one of the first adult mobile media buyers.

Then in 2012 one of those affiliate programs offered me to join them as company partner to help the company expand their business, both with my knowledge and contacts. They had then 25 employees, big plans and big money to invest. I did and it's the current wave i'm surfing over now. Company peaked at 80 employees and soon will open more offices in Latin America and Asia while expanding into mainstream. Life is way different than being an independent AM, I was not sure about it at first, but I'm really enjoying learning about running a big company and defining strategies now. I'm also older now, 39 yo, married and with two kids, so I can't be as adventurous anymore nor I need to either, also I was burned out of working alone and needed new challenges, but this is other story for another time, I feel like the old "grandpa" telling tales

My advice is to always keep an eye on what is going around you and never relax to not to miss it, and of course to save part of your earnings for the next fall down, as it will come for sure.

As for freedom, yes, you have it as AM, but I would say it's not freedom in the sense of not working for a long time, but the freedom to work your ass off when you want and from where you want, but still working your ass off and reinventing yourself from time to time

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Great question..

Yea, I after my first big campaign for few months I wake up without alram, go to the gym after checking stats in the morning, going to the beach in the middle of the day few times a week, going to restaurants (don't look on menu price..) few times a day, and work during the evening/ nights, some days not work at all..

If one of my friends suddenly was able to take vacation I just spend whole day with him,

Was around 5 times abord for vacation this year, so yea you can have lots of freedom, but really hands off its really hard.

Online marketing is real business, behave like this will affect your income directly and its not professional, however its really hard to stay highly motivated for long times and keep pushing forward after you hit it big.. (its much easier it you set up enviorment which for you to work, like rent office and hire people..)

For most affilaites income will probably drop to 0 or less at some point if they just stop giving it attention and love..

I never aimed for creating sustainable 100% passive low-medium income, which I am trying to think about it recently, however I got the impression most affilaite aimed for big & short wins instead of low-medium long wins.. (its really shift in mindset to to think long term )

However it has also lots of disadvantages(which people often don't talk about)- it can bring tons of pressure, angry, depression, envy, scams, risks, ego issues and many more.. (I was much happier few years ago and am really trying to get back to that level..not so easy..)
plus you will need to work extra hard in the start until you will master the basics and stop doing stupid mistakes..
Ohh and once you hit your angle and find what working for you it can be quite tedious or boring work..

In the other hand you need really small budget (compare to open offline business), you don't need to be smart or having specific degree.. you can still doing it
while still working in corporate job..
just start do and never stop, you will eventually learn the important lessons in the easy or the hard way..

For many people I don't think there is good work alternative to online marketing especailly today in the corporate arena.. they money is so good but beware its not shiny as it may look..

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All these answers combined could serve as what i'd like to coin as REAL affiliate marketing.

It's not about daily income, your watch, or if you did $X,XXX,XXX for only 1 year.

It's about the longterm work ethic, forming a mindset, book of business and connections that will keep you in this business for the longterm.

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Perfect resume!

If you have all that you listed, you will have highs and downs, might have to reinvent yourself a few times and you will be rich or not, but you will be able to live from Affiliate Marketing for your whole life.

It will mean hard work, stress, etc but also freedom and won't ever be bored unlike most of the people around you.

Affiliate Marketing is a way of life, not just a business.

PD: Connections are key, with the affiliate reps, account managers, publishers, other marketeers etc. Try to attend at least to one event per year. If you haven't, you don't know how open is the people when talking face to face and how much trust you can build when meeting people in this business that is done mainly behind a screen.

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5 years ago I started affiliate marketing, I dropped out from university in last year to do AM full time.

I thought school will not help me too much to achieve my dreams, I was young, so nothing to lose...

Great move!

Starting AM is best thing that ever happen to me, I stopped asking money from my parents, they helped me till my age of 21 now I help them till the end, nice felling...

Plus freedom, you own all your time, travel, play tennis, pursue your real dreams, music production in my case for which I don't have enough time atm, but working on that...

I lived in a rented apartment, last year I built a house, I'm driving a nice car, I live more comfortable.

But these things will not make you happy for long term...

In my case I want stability, make money from AM and invest it in ways of passive income (my goal for next year is to make $10k/month without using my time).

delash said very well, there are also lots of disadvantages, you will not sleep well sometime, white nights, your mind will be very busy, your friends/partners might screw you, and more...

I am chasing the same thing like you, that is different level, working on it...

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It sounds like a bad cliché, but yes, this is indeed one of the few industries where you REALLY can work from a beach in the South of France.

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For what it is that you are asking, the answer is YES as long as you treat affiliate marketing as a business and focus on the important things instead of just some solo wolf show. When the bottleneck is you, of course your income is going to drop if a campaign dies while you're traveling and no one is looking at it. If you have a team in place, and your skill comes in being able to take yourself out of the equation and have your company do just as well if not better than when you're around, then the world is your oyster.

For me, I traveled for 3 years nearly full time, only taking 1 month off every 4 months I was traveling. What this does to your psyche is make you extremely fluid at being able to hyper focus and only attend to the things that are 100% necessary. If I am in a new country with wondrous sights, food, and other things I want to do, the last thing I want to do is sit there "grinding" like some newbie affiliate marketer. Even before I built a comprehensive team, I realized that there really are very few things that entirely contribute to your success. If I spent at most 1 hour a day working, then I wanted to make sure that 1 hour was an action-packed hour. When you get into the "grinding" mentality, you sit there for hours not really that productive, but by allocating only 1 hour a day for work, it forces you to cut the garbage and TRULY focus on the things that WILL make you money. That means you spend less time split testing dumb stuff that shows very little upside and only spend 100% of your time fishing for the whales. That means you stop worrying about relatively pointless things like colors and layout on LP's and focus on bridging the mentality between the person who sees your ad and connecting one of their internal desires with whatever you're promoting. You know, the actual HEART of what marketing is.

I've done both approaches before -- I've had a few hundred dollar/day campaigns running concurrently for a false sense of "security", but if you just look at the raw numbers, one good day from a true whale of my angle + business opportunity with scale + traffic source that can fill that demand will outearn months of these smaller time fish. You see this Pareto principle at work everywhere in the real world. The richest 85 people in the world control more wealth than the poorest half of the ENTIRE PLANET.

This may not be the best mentality for someone starting out, since you need to learn the basics, but far too many people after learning the basics sit there grinding like it's some sort of badge of honor. My philosophy is simple. My time is the most valuable commodity in the world. If you want a piece of this, you better damn well make it worth my while. Just as Warren Buffet is not going to listen to some dude who wants $20k funding for some abstract idea, I don't concern myself with any business proposition that does not have certified whale potential.

I can only speak for myself, but assembling a team that values their time, waits around for signs of the whale, and then executing a specific whale-killing protocol before other fishermen even know it's there means that I can live the most hedonistic life you can imagine. Personal consumption of any kind if easily within reach without regard for pricing, and the main problems you deal with on a consistent basis are ones that normal people would slap you for if you brought them up (One of mine was How do you stay fit if the thing you love most about travel is being able to eat the exotic local cuisine, and you never go home to get into some sort of routine to goto the gym or "eat right" -- essentially how do you lose the weight you gained while on vacation when your entire life is a vacation and it doesn't end?), and of course dealing with esoteric philosophical issues like what happens when you struggle your whole life to succeed in something and then finally do -- thereby erasing a large part of your self-imposed life's purpose?

Money doesn't solve all your problems and so I would highly recommend anybody regardless of income level to really work on themselves and develop their personality and characteristics to the point that they like who they are and are happy in life regardless of income. All money is, is access to more resources. However you choose to allocate these resources and whether they work FOR you or if they just become liabilities will make all the difference in the world.

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OH DEAR GOD YES.

I've experimented over the years with exactly how many hours I need to put into different business types. It's truly amazing how fast and effectively you can work if you really focus on the key elements.

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relevant book: http://www.amazon.com/The-ONE-Thing-.../dp/1885167776

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This look gooood. Buying now

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did you guys achieve this type of income from cpa networks

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From running offers on CPA networks? Yes.

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It's funny. Some of the biggest affiliates are in a position where if their biggest campaign died, then yes, their income would drop pretty much to zero.

That's the situation with a lot of FB affiliates whenever they lose accounts.

In contrast, many mid-level affiliates can afford to lose a campaign or two and still make money from the rest.

But the 'hustling costs' of maintaining so many campaigns has a real psychological effect on your perception of time and money.

I think specialising in a small number of big volume campaigns is the way forward for the lifestyle that you're suggesting.

But in a strange paradox, you don't ever want to be in a position where you rely on having 'enough' campaigns to get by. You want the campaigns you do have to be such high quality, and so far apart from the competition, that you're not seriously in danger of losing them.

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What would you consider a "small" number of campaigns? I know you wrote a blog post about it recently too - keen to know what a full time AM thinks is small

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I've tried this so many times haha. Within 30min the screen glare is too intense, my wrist is stiff and my neck wants to faint. The cliche is no fun!

I've learned to work indoors, and then spend the time on the beach doing "beachy" things.

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“What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”

When you go as small as possible, you’ll be staring at one thing. And that’s the point.

“Every great change starts like falling dominoes.” —BJ Thornton

Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.

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It's this kind of battle-hardened advice that makes STM so valuable!

I couldn't agree more. I've tried working the cliche too, and yeah - looked better in the photos.

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How you make money is only one factor in personal freedom. I'd argue not even in the top 2 or 3 most important.

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I have actually found a happy medium. Finding a balcony unit on the beach is the perfect balance. Work from the balcony while outdoos + nice view. Then hit the beach.

This way you have a semi-proper setup and no sand in your laptop or shorts.

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The honest speech I ever read about!

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ivancy was def one of the smarter ones from that era... I can tell you "Wolf Of Wall Street" stories of friends of mine from the adult business who would spend $50,000-100,000 easily per weekend in Vegas/Cabo etc... They would buy massive mc-mansions, buy 6 sportscars and go to tradeshows and blow stupid amount of money trying to impress people.

They were making $xxx,xxx monthly and they thought the gravy train would run forever. The smart ones saw the writing on the wall and invested in real estate/assets and or investing in other companies. The ones that weren't so lucky are now driving tow trucks/limos, working dead end programming/tech jobs or selling real estate to make ends meet. It was a massive reality check for most of these guys to lose it all because they were not prepared or even interested in when the "next wave" was coming. Money was just too easy back then...

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Listen to Finch!

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