Let me explain, for the past 2 weeks I've been trying to get my affiliate career to at least a decent starting point without asking for help (because I know it bugs the living shit out of some people in this forum) Point is, I'm a Junior in high school and constantly getting a bunch of essays, projects, homework etc. I actually set all of them aside so I can work harder in making some money. It's no suprise that my grades decreased quite a bit. (not to all F's or anything) I find it worth it if I can make this work, since my parents always say have a plan B, well this is it. What I'm saying is that, should affiliates have a lot of time on their hands to attempt Affiliate marketing?
As you might have guessed, the more time the better. Depending on what aspect of affiliate marketing you are working with, some will consume more time than others. Since it sounds like you have a lot on your plate right now, I would reccomend working with SEO over paid traffic sources. SEO arguably takes more time overall, but PPC will need more attention as you will have to be constantly watching your ads. Not to lecture in any way (I'm a recent college grad so I do remember how unfulfilling school work is) I would recommend not to let your affiliate marketing negatively impact your school work (too much at least!) as school is a great backup plan if affiliate marketing does not work. Best of luck!
Yeah, I agree with doitup. Just focus on the school. Get it over and done with. Organic traffic (SEO) is good, but can get tricky. If your comfortable with PPC and working in a hot niche, then go for it - but don't drop the school priorities.
If you have the money to set up a good campaign with PPC (which will cost a nice amount of money usually to develop into a "good" campaign), you can be raking in money without spending lots of time. But you'll have to check up on this daily to make sure the campaign is running smoothly (as prices of keywords often change through the day). Anyway, it's possible to make good money with affiliate marketing spending a bit of time every day, but as doitup said, the more time the better. If you're looking to work on SEO for a website or landing page, this can take many months of putting effort into it, but once you're ranking well in google, you can earn a lot of cash as well.
Stick to school, it is more important in the long run - affiliate marketing should be your plan B youre right, but if it is costing your your grades, then you are really letting it become your Plan A, and if you fail school because of it then youll be in a much worse situation. Do it in your spare time, you can learn a lot in 5-10 hours a week even - learn bum marketing (http://www.bummarketingmethod.com) and just make steady progress to where you want to be, start swapping around which is Plan A and which is Plan B when you are actually making GOOD money!
Word, I really shouldn't let my grades slip. I'll manage my time better where I can attempt both. Thanks Amigo
I never looked at it that way, making it my plan A wouldn't be the wisest idea, that's true. I'll take a look at that site right now. Props Amigo
You could save the really stressful, brain zapping stuff for your summer holidays, and just do sort of "nesting" work for now, which would mean a certain amount of time consumption, but wouldn't drain your academic energy. What I mean by "nesting" is, setting up a couple of blogs, getting followers on Twitter, working on the occasional Squidoo lens (which you can edit later) and maybe registering a couple of domain names (remember, website age is a factor in rankings so the sooner you get ANYTHING up, the better). Best of luck.
Squido Lense and Hubpages are driving a lot of potential traffic these days, unique contents on these pages can provide good google rankings.
Cash is always good, but seems like you need to go the IM education route first ("spare" time while studying). Then, as Condra says, hit it again during the summer hols.
Dude, I'll say it straight out. Youre right in not asking for help, not because it pisses people off (I love helping btw!), but because people need to learn this stuff for themselves, not because this is the best way to learn, but because every single business is different. If I taught everyone how to do SEO my way, they would all suck at it because my business is different to theirs. Best advice I can give is to learn by trial and error, then focus on what works.
You can manage your time to go to school do affiliate marketing and plus have time for fun im doing that almost 2 years