In your opinion, what factors & traits are most important in being able to make it in the affiliate marketing world? I've been doing affiliate marketing for a couple months, and have made decent money doing it...but it seems that the moment I stop promoting my product, all the money stops coming in. Is there a way around this when you're new and don't have repeat customers going for other products, or is that just how the affiliate marketing world works?
You have a market and once you've sold it to the market I doubt they'll buy again. Try versioning or SAAS (Software as a service). With SAAS you can get monthly recurring money. For versions just simply make an upgrade fee.
well my point of view if u take it.. only 3% of total webmasters or affiliate marketers are making money and also struggling to make it continous or long lasting.. for the rest 97% its like hit and miss game.. the more you try u hit more and u miss more.. affiliate marketing for the rest 97% is like spamming all day.. spam search engines spam directories spam your links everywhere legally u can .. keyword spam comment spam intelligent forum spam yahoo answer spam youtube spam linkdumps spam dating site spam social network spam..and spam and spam and spam and spam.. imagine a new dating or myspace clone site which slowly getting 5k+ member base.. now if u can automate and contact all this 5k members or post comment in their profile.. you just marketed ur website or affiliate link to 5k new visitors and if ur website or affiliate link is targated to what they want.. it can be 300$ to 3000$ profit.. so in short affiliate marketing is spamming .. and thats why most forums and every site on internet(craiglist youtube) hates it and tries to stop it by putting captha and limiting how many comments or spam u can post per hour etc even google hates affiliate links and try not to index them.. and also has limited google url harvesting after 2000 urls per query.. again seo and all other search engine optimization again are nothing but link request spam thats why no bank support this business model and its not a job or business and no fixed or continous or minimum earning..anymoment ur technic/software/script might stop working.. and become useless.. everybody here tries to hide their traffic sources and technics.. or charge money for telling their secrets.. now despite all this bad picture for affiliate marketers some will say buying ads on adword or other ppc isnt spamming and they are master of it some will say doing seo isnt spam.. and i have a exceptional website that serves ppls demand.. they are the 3%. they work on their website only for a purpose..they make a website that helps or serves ppls.. example the forum we are all in.. digital point forum.. the owner must be making regular 20K+ adsense alone.. so first analyze with ur website how can u serve ppl.. or make a solution for ppl.. or entertain ppl .. and why is it different then 20k others? then u can think yes now i have a big website with large audience..now i should put some adsense or affiliate programs here and there.. and start charging ppl for advertising on my site.. most ppl just wants money.. and quick money.. and just money.. they want the clicks and sales.. but have no clue why will ppl buy from theirs other then 100k other websites similer to them they just think putting up a domain hosting script and design.. and putting their links in 1000 places is all they need to make 2k to 10k month.. or may be putting 1000 sites each with $1 will get them to $1000 month.. yes they might get success with spam or cheesy sites.. but it wont last long.. and sooner or later u will again come to position zero 0$ month.
If you are too lazy or don't have time to promote use paid advertising which generally produces better results vs free advertising e.g. there are people who will submit your ads daily for few months to Yahoo groups, for a fee, of course - but here you don't have to spend any time promoting as your daily ads is sent out by others. As long as you get a net profit, go for it. By net profit, I mean you earn more from sales vs the money you spend on paid ads.
I hope I'm not hijacking your thread here. I know its a few months old, but I found it by searching the board and there are a lot of really good responses in here that I wanted to comment on. I have a similar issue / problem and I was thinking that maybe we could work together, maybe share ideas or hire each other to do what each of us knows how to do so that we can all be very successful. I don't know if that's possible (working together, but I at least wanted to put it out there)... I understand what you're saying but I don't necessarally agree because with my affiliate program, I think the majority of my sales are repeat buyers and referrals. I think it really depends on the product because if people like what you have, they will refer others to it and buy it again if needed. wow, wouldn't that be nice. I think a lot of people refer to this as, "the silver bullet" and of course most of us believe it isn't out there. I think a lot of marketers get lucky but for the most part (as mentos mentioned below), once you stop promoting it - that's it. However, I would like to say that one of my affiliate sites have been online for 5 years and I really busted my tail trying to get it out there in the first few years. I spend time and money advertising, SEO, and pretty much everything I knew how to do. I wasted a ton of money on PPC and many other methods, nothing really worked for me but what I did manage was to create some natural search engine traffic. In other words, what ever I did, it managed to get the website out there so that once the search engines did find it, I begain to get a pretty consistant string of visitors and sales. The problem I still have is this string of residual / repeat traffic is very minor and I have no idea how to get the traffic up higher that what it is right now. I'm averaging about 100-200 visitors a day and this is the best I have been able to do and that sucks. I know there is room for improvement a thousand fold, I just don't know what to do about it. I'm to the point now, where I just want to hire someone to take it from here. Maybe hire someone as a consulatant, maybe hire someone to help - I don't even know. All I know is that I personally don't know what else to do with it I agree with you about it being a hit or miss game and only a very vew people actually earn good money with affiliate programs, but I think it can be done without spaming and my website is an example of this. I imagine this is an exception to the rule and the spam technique is the general concensus on how to have success but I just believe there has got to be a better way. I think a lot of people consider this to be the case, but as I said I don't believe it to be the only way. I also want to say that while I agree many websites don't like it as you have mentioned, I think they main reason is because an affiliate site is usually NOT Orginal content and SEs and many other websites do not want loads of duplicate content or duplicate websites all presenting the same thing over and over. The main reason forums don't like it is because the post on their forum usually has absolutely nothing to do with the topic in question and the post is a blatent attenmpt at advertising with nothing useful for the forum, youtube, myspace or any other community. I agree that banks don't like this model, but I will have to think more about what you are saying. I was under the impression (after actually talking to a banker), that the reason was because they did not understand the concept and they did not trust or believe in the model as it was mostly speculation in an area they know nothing or little about. Yes people hide their techniques because there would be no value in it if everyone were doing the same thing. If we were all millionaires, money would have no value - so what good would it be? As far as adwords or other PPC, I must suck at it because I have wasted thousands of dollars trying that method with very little to absolutely no success at all. I have totally given up on traditional PPC advertising. This I seriously doubt as well because I also run a respectable size forum with 26,000 members, 100,000 page views per day and average about 1,500 posts per day with about 600 new members a month. And would you believe that the adsense is only a few hundred dollars a month? We have other advertiser with banner ads on our forum and still the income from that is only a couple hundred dollars a month. If someone could also clue me in the secret of cashing in on a large forum, I would certainly pay money for it as well, because just because you have a large forum doesn't automatically mean you're earning several thousand dollars a month - that is a myth and a fairy tale. This is very true and I agree with you 100%. I also agree that most / many people over look this concept. could you or would you be willing to help me with this? I am willing and ready to pay money for someone like this to help and assist me in my marketing efforts but I don't really know where to look or how to find these people that you are talking about. More input on this or about that would be greatly appreciated. If you are reading this post and you have some ideas, I would be willing to hire you as a consultant and perhaps together we can work together. You need not be an expert at it, just present some ideas that I have not seen or tried and that's good enough for me. Perhaps I can help or assist you in some of your campaigns as well as I am also pretty good and SEO /SEM myself. Be that as it may, even the "Experts" can't always figure out the problem 100% of the time. Your thoughts?