Short-term VS long-term.... Quick cash VS building an asset..... Borderline or straight-up scams VS providing actual value....
Affiliate marketers are notorious for picking the former over and over and oveeeer again..
To the people that have made the transition from hard-selling right from the get go to building email lists and nurturing the clients with soft tender love from your copywriters and actually going through the trouble of creating/finding real value products:
1) What's your process like for finding legitimate products to promote? I'm assuming a lot of direct deals?
2) What's your nurturing to selling ratio like? Finding the balance between nurturing and selling.
3) Looking at your bottom line now, was the transition worth it?
Interesting topic. I'd like to hear from some people who have made that transition too. I started out with the latter so never made a transition and I'll answer from that perspective:
Thanks for the reply! What was the pricetag on your infoproduct, mid $xxx? Yeah, I guess it boils down to strategy and a lot depends on what your end goal is - nothing wrong in accumulating 5mil+ relatively fast and then diversifying rather then trying to build a (more) sustainable business from Day 1.
As a sidenote, one can also split-test the rapey-nurturing approach (put them through a short funnel and then hard-sell poor products with questionable billing terms and flush your credibility down the drain) to see if affects EPC a lot compared to sending the traffic straight to your sales page.
I really like this post's name. I'm going to go throw a "rapey" headline into Bing ads and see what happens.
If you're poor, blackhat is the way to go.
It will ALWAYS stomp whitehat if scaling/volume/etc are not factors.
Blackhat offers, promotion techniques, and "whats working now" are all highly correlated.
Is the goal to "nurture" a brand and/or acquire a user-base? No. It's to nurture your bank account which IS progress.
When I was little I never imagined my job would be sitting in front of a computer snickering as people responded to pop-unders
that provide questionable (at best) value to them...but they do and so long as they do I'll be providing em
Notes:
I'm using the term "black/white hat" VERY loosely.
I get your point OP but love arguing
Lastly, saying aff marketers are notorious for churn-n-burn is straight up false. It's akin to saying "women can't drive" or similar. What you *may* mean is that this forum (and elsewhere you frequent) specialize in 'flavor of the week' offers - which is true. If you wanna go be a lame adult join aff playbook and focus on "sustainability". If you want to be peterpan stay here.
Being bad is (and always will be) more fun
I agree that if you're lacking cashflow and want to see some fast results then promoting your offers with non-compliant tactics is absolutely the way to go. Mixing in blackhat (using the term loosely as well) is sensible even if you do have a decent bankroll as unless you're doing straight-up fraud a lot of the blackhat stuff can be scaled to an extent as well.
I don't understand though why you're downplaying sustainability. If you're a single guy in his early/mid twenties and making 5-10k/day off TS makes you content about your future then yea, fuck sustainability, yolo. If you're in this for the long-haul though and want to pull 7 figure months on a stable basis you've got to diversify and start thinking a few steps ahead.