BLOG INCOME

$28.50

PAID ADVERTISING

 REVENUE: $4,987.6
COST: $3,810.70
P/L: +$1,176.90

TOTAL

$1,205.40

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a good 4 months now and although there definitely are ample benefits of living this lifestyle, you rarely hear about what ‘frustrations’ exist in the average affiliate marketers world.

I feel like this will be more of a rant then a blog post haha

But seriously, there are some things that really do get to me when being an ‘affiliate marketer’

You need to explain what affiliate marketing is EVERY time you meet someone new: Two years ago, when meeting new people, I could get away with just saying ‘I’m a Civil Engineer that builds commercial pipelines around Melbourne’. People some-what understand that. Now, when I tell people I’m an affiliate marketer, (I try and avoid this term), I’m usually received with a blank look followed by a barrage of questions on how ‘selling something online but not handling the logistics’ is even possible.

Society is very unaccommodating of the affiliate lifestyle. I usually do the majority of my work in the morning. From 5am to 10am I’m finished with most of the items on my ‘to-do’ list which leaves pretty much my whole day free to do other things. At this stage, I CAN work more if I want, which I rarely do, or try and see if there is anything else to do. This is where I get stuck. During the day, there is NO one free! It’s weird to see everyone go to ‘work’ and be unavailable a WHOLE 5 days in a row, when all the good stuff happens. Come 5pm, people come home, rest and a couple of hours later are ready to do something but by this time, during the early part of the week, all shopping centers are closed, leaving VERY little things to do! Now, I usually wouldn’t complain about this but the last month or two I have been BORED OUT OF MY BRAINS! I seriously need to pick up a day time hobby. That, or I need to free all my friends from the slavery of work haha. Any ideas?

So I’ve been thinking of making this post for a while now. Firstly, to see for myself what my thoughts on the topic are and secondly to share some knowledge I’ve gained through out my own experience with affiliate marketing for the last 3-5 months.

When you first start affiliate marketing, there’s just so much to learn and so many ways to go about doing it that you’ll often find yourself stopping and reflecting on your progress. I’ve done this numerous times and asked myself if what I’m doing is the ‘right thing to do’ or not. If others who found success did what I’m doing or if others that are currently making an income via affiliate marketing are doing what I’m doing!

After a good 4 months in, doing this somewhat-fulltime, I’ve come to realize there is no right way to go about this with affiliate marketing. It’s a frustrating thing to hear, particularly for the ‘strategist’ type person like myself but it’s true. The fact is that everything I did in the early days played an integral part of what I know now. From the ridiculously poor -10 Quality Score landing pages that I tried promote on Google to losing $100’s of dollars testing PPC with no conversions at all, it all allowed me to see what was needed for me to become successful at affiliate marketing.

To illustrate this better, let’s compare two phases of my affiliate marketing career. One, the, ‘Let’s pump out as many campaigns as I can‘ phase and the ‘Concentrate on one campaign till I run out of ideas‘ phase

Overtime you’ll realize a few things about the affiliate marketing industry, 

• The initial learning curve is huge

• It requires a lot of patience and determination

• There’s a lot of hard work that goes into the initial stages of building campaigns, researching, trying out things, etc

• you need to understand the idea of ‘spending money to make money’. Much of your initial money will be spent on trying out things and although you may not see any income straight away, you’ll be learning a lot and that’s where the value is.

• Anyone can do it if you stick with it long enough and are serious about it

• Lastly, you can still make BIG money via affiliate marketing

At this stage you should have ample amount of data to make this a profitable campaign.

Mind you, many campaigns don’t make it to this stage but often, with enough data you can increase the chances of getting here.

The Right Mind Set

I’d also like to point out that many beginners, (I included), set affiliate/campaign goals as reaching a point of $x amount consistently a day. There is no such thing in affiliate marketing. You can have days where your campaign brings in $300 profit, other days it brings in $50, without you even touching anything. There’s just way too many variables in this industry.

What I now aim for reaching record days. For a campaign that I have hit $300 profit, it’s safe for me to assume that on average this will bring me $150/day including the best and worst days. This doesn’t mean I’ll see $150 days everyday but it means after averaging out my profit over a certain period of time I get $150 or so a day.