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Why is everyone content to make $100, or $1,000 with their site or group of sites? Even the most ambitious group of affiliate marketers seem to be aiming to make $10,000 per month. This is not a lot of money for a person who is putting the time and effort into creating a business from scratch!
I believe the prime opportunities in Affiliate Marketing have passed us by. PPC campaigns now easily top $1.00 per click for even the most generic ad campaigns. Sales commissions continue to shrink. If you can get 10% of an E Commerce sale you are very lucky. Especially if you can sell more than a handful of items. Commissions of 1% to 3% are much more common, especially for merchandise that people actually have an interest in buying like computers and consumer electronics.
It seems the only opportunities in affiliate marketing that offer decent commissions are internet marketing schemes. And most are truly schemes, with no value to anyone. Except the marketers themselves.
I believe the best opportunities in AM are long gone. Should we all be looking for the next big thing?
I hope someone can prove me wrong!
as for your 1-3% comissions... amazon pays 5% and up... many merchangts on cj pay 7-10% and upwards.
I dont think you have a very strong point
stick with it and keep learning, even if you only reach an extra $1000 / month... is it not worth it?
Amazon may pay 5% to 15% on a $20 item. But that is still only $1 to $3 per sale. And Amazon has over 100,000 affiliates. Perhaps you could sell 3 to 10 items per day. At best this brings in $30 per day. Not enough to live on, let alone enough to justify starting a business for.
Seems to me there are better opportunities out there.
It is getting more difficult, yes. But you'll be rewarded if you succeed. You've to keep on working and thinking out of the box.
If you think you can't, you're right
If you think you can, you're right too :)
It seems "everyone" knows "someone" who is making $1,000, or $5,000 per day in AM.
Yet "no one" has any actual experience doing so.
I do not believe those revenue figures actually exist, unless you are a major corporation with several million uniques per day, and a multi-million dollar advertising budget.
But whether you believe it or not, people ARE making those kind of money right now.
Oh, btw, read this thread ==>
[webmasterworld.com...]
and you'll know there are people who are earning that kind of money and experiencing it....
I have already read the post you referenced. I've followed it from the beginning. It means nothing.
That post is about someone's GOAL to make $1,000,000.
If my goal is to win $25,000,000 in the lottery, well then that is only a goal. It is not likely it will be achieved.
That post is about someone's GOAL to make $1,000,000.
That shows you've not really read the thread. There are posts from people who have already made that (or close to that). Look out for Michael Anthony and MovingOnUp's posts for example.
I'm really trying to help. If you don't believe it, so be it...
$379
$249
$289
thats $45 in revenue there, not to mention the 11 other small sales I have had.
Also, you seem to think that it is just a belief that 1,000/day affiliate marketers exist, it is true. I have seen many people on these forums that currently make that much or more, not to mention myself.
As the others said, start small and work up to the goal. You arent going to realize these numbers in a month, it took me just over a year.
I think Gabby is just looking to crab. Whoever said that this person was looking for instant success but never found it is probably dead on.
Gabby, don't take this an an insult. I have had hard times too, but I keep trying. If you don't keep trying, and don't think that it can't be done, then can't.
Good Luck,
C.K.
Yet "no one" has any actual experience doing so.
I know plenty of them (inclduing myself) and there are many on this board who I personally know making this kind of $$. And then there are some I know of in the "P P C" who are making 5 figures per day and have been for quite some time.
You will make money.
Oh yeah, and get creative.
Diversify.
Use some common sense.
Learn from mistakes.
You can make a lot of money at this game...
PPC campaigns now easily top $1.00 per click for even the most generic ad campaigns
Then that's an opportunity for Adsense...isn't it?
You do have a certain point about the slimming margins in PPC. There are a lot of knuckle heads overbidding for terms. As soon as they realize they are not making money there is another one to take their place.
If you want to make some money I would consider becoming a retailer so you could buy products at wholesale. You then have a whole lot more margin to play with. You can then bid higher for PPC or better yet become a power seller on Ebay. You can't ask for more targetted traffic than Ebay.
As with any business, there will be many who try and don't succeed. There will be some who try and barely make it. There will be a very few who make a fortune.
Because of the low barrier to entry, there will be far more people who try and don't succeed in affiliate marketing. But there will also be quite a few who do very well.
Those who are making $100,000 per month aren't going to be here posting about their "Quest to $200,000 per month". They're going to be out there working on it.
Oh, and PPC isn't dead, either. My average bid is around $0.20. I spend around $200 per day and make around $500 per day profit from the PPC traffic I receive. You don't have to take the number 1 spot.
With AM, unless you're someone like mfishy who just makes so much money that it becomes worth it to hire people, it's just you working from your home on your own time. You don't have to pay for employees (we'll call them optional), you don't have to pay rent on commercial property, there's no equipment you need beyond a decent computer and the internet, and the only money you *have* to spend to expand your business is around $10/yr for domains and $50-150/yr for hosting (varies largely). You can spend on PPC or other means of advertising if you want to, but you don't need to (vice versa with SEM).
You really can't be comparing AM to starting a regular business, if that's what you were doing. And if you were looking for a get-rich-quick, good luck finding that anywhere.
LOL , but well said ...
Gabby ,here is a tip for ya . In any affliate marketing message board the most vocal would be people making moderate money , the >100k/month sharks would remain in their caves most of the time and always be tight lipped about their cash-cows!.
So , is there money to be made online - hell ya ....is it easy as before? - Nope ,but still relatively easier than making money in an offline business.
Anyway , Wish you best of luck ...
I've been saying Affiliate Marketing is dead for the past 3 years (as I personally don't get that much satisfaction selling other peoples crappy products at times), but, it has only grown, and will continue to grow.
$10,000 per month. This is not a lot of money for a person who is putting the time and effort into creating a business from scratch!
Yes, you're right, it's not. But it's not all about money. I have a friend who is a landscape gardener who set up his business with a partner about a year before I set up my business. They were both making a lot of money when I was still on a very low monthly income. They're still making a lot of money now, though not much more than they used to.
However, since I work on my own, I've never had to put up with the disputes that they have with each other or the other strife which comes along when business partners disagree. (Two heads are not always better than one).
Crucially though, while I've been earning less than they have, my time has been my own. There are not many offline businesses run by a single person where that person can take a month off and still earn $10,000 despite not having done any work that month.
There are three major advantages to running a business based around AM, which offline businesses don't generally have:
1) You don't have to wait for clients in order to work and earn money.
2) You don't have to work sociable hours. You can work whenever you want. If you want to party all night, sleep half of the day and work until halfway through the morning, you can.
3) Most important: you are not geographically bound. You can double or triple your income by going to live in a place where the cost of living is three times as cheap. (If you're from the UK, the weather will probably be better as well).
Being free to work where you want, when you want and for whom you want is rare in the world of running one's own business.
I will continue to work AM. I feel it will be strong in the near term. I wonder about the long term.
At best this brings in $30 per day. Not enough to live on, let alone enough to justify starting a business for.
At best it doesnt bring _just_ $30/day. Like any business, you don't start making $100k+ profit(or whatever your minimum income level is) the first year either...
What is true is that the simple methods are becoming more difficult to profit from - a low barrier to entry always means inceasing competition.
I believe the days of setting up a campaign and leaving it to pay the bills are coming to an end. If a campaign is to succeed these days, it needs constant attention and creativity. Which is rather annoying, as it means working sometimes!
On the flip side, I'm not going to put out a site that focuses on a niche market of high PPC words.
I guess the industry I'm serving needs to catch up. ;) Either that or I should probably make the AdSense ads stand more so than my own in-house ads. On the contrary, I like a clean looking site so maybe I'm at a loss.
Anyway, y'all have a good one!
Regards,
Kory
Today I almost fell out of my chair. One of my sites sold a $9000+ item, giving me over $900 commission. I have to cross fingers that the sale is not reversed, but if this doesn't convince me that AM is alive then nothing will.
Another surprise for me is that I pride myself in building lean, well-SEO'd sites that rank well and I sometimes spend a whole day to build and upload a site with thousands of pages.
But the $9000 product sold off one of those "instant store" scripts supplied by the merchant! I never thought that such cookie-cutter scripts (that you implement within 10 minutes and your site looks 99% like the next one) could work. I won't say that ever again, although I do my SEO stuff on such scripts too. Perhaps I should reconsider other cookie-cutter scripts I dismissed and install them on a hundred sites?
Here is an Amazon tip: The best money to be made is not from their books or magazines. OTOH you cannot ignore these items because they help you make the unit sales to reach the higher levels of commission.
Scepticism is your worst enemy in AM. You will miss out on making easy money if you don't jump in (with both eyes wide open).
- Ash
Great job on getting the big 10% commission, you must have been excited.
I am not making anything substancial YET, but I really don't think Aff Marketing is dying.
The simple truth is that online commerce is growing, and more and more companies need people like us to get them sales, leads, whatever.
More people are doing AM, but it takes a certain breed to succeed - A rare breed I think. This limits things.
Thoughts?
All the Best,
C.K.
