I've always looked at Affiliate Marketing as a bit of a black hole. A lot of people obviously do very well at it, but it was a bit 'mysterious' in how it worked. Using Adsense or sticking a few AuctionAds on a site seemed like a much easier life. In November '07 I wanted to buy a Wii for Xmas. Soon realising that everywhere was out of stock, I started searching for "Wii stock" "Wii in stock" etc. Seeing the stock checking sites made me think about how much damn money they must be making. But I had no idea how to go about building one. Then I came across a guy using Blogspot to display a guide to using Amazon Germany (where they had plenty of stock - Amazon UK was out of stock and had been for weeks). He had dozens of people per day thanking him for the guide (having obviously used it to place an order). So I quickly registered a domain, stuck Wordpress up and created my own guide. Then the unknown part - Adwords. Easy. I created my ad, set it to running and in no time at all had people ordering Wiis from my site. Wow. I couldn't spend enough on Adwords for the demand. I spent perhaps $200/day the first couple of days (was used up in a few hours), then ramped up to $300 ... but then I was about broke (having bought various large Xmas presents, including that Wii) and couldn't really promote as I wanted to. Luckily the word had got around forums etc and I was still getting 600+ people per day visiting my site, and the conversion rate was awesome. By this time I had also bumped up to the 9% commission rate so my takings per Wii ordered was $30+. My calculations showed that I was making over $1k per day (despite Amazon's annoying day lag in stats). I was planning bank/family loans and all sorts to start the advertising campaign going again, and could see a rosy future. Then the bombshell after just five days or so - Amazon Germany emailed to tell me to immediately remove the affiliate links to their site. They had decided it was against "their best interests" to have people promoting sales of the Wii for the UK market. I was gutted. So I started trying to run my own "stock checking site" manually. Signed up to affiliatewindow, tradedoubler, buy.at, dgmpro, cj, and put on the links. Well it hasn't been $1k/day since that point (nowhere near), but I have made a decent amount, particularly from Amazon UK sales and the others listed above. Overall I spent about $800 on Adwords (I tried signing up to Yahoo, who rejected me, and MSN AdCenter who denied my Wii related ads). Overall I made: Amazon Germany: $7,000 Amazon UK: $800 Others: $500 Total: about $8,500 or $7,700 profit. In two months. And I was honestly clueless about this stuff. So what's the point of this long, rambling post? To show off? Nah, not at all. I thought it might inspire any newbies who are wondering how to get into Affiliate Marketing or wonder how successful it can be. My only regret is not having enough capital to promote 24hours on Adwords - I think I could have easily doubled the Amazon Gernany commission before they pulled the plug. Traffic to the site now is, of course, almost non-existent. But I did have over 1,000 comments from people looking for Wiis. I even had 6 people 'buy me a beer' for £4 as thanks (via Paypal)! My main lessons: - Spot the opportunity - Xmas brings plenty, but they exist all year round I am sure. - Make sure you have the funds to support a heavy PPC campaign if required. If not you will need to be patient - Amazon for example takes over two months to pay out (I still haven't got a penny from them), so I am in effect almost $800 down (well, I have payments from some of the other affiliates who pay twice per month etc). - Spend the time required. Luckily I had a quiet period at work so spent much of my days at its peak sorting things out on the site and answering queries. My fiance soon got annoyed that I was spending all evening on the site too though =0) - Higher price items. A console, even though some retailers pay different commission rates (just 2% often), is still going to make you decent bucks per sale. - Start out with Amazon. It's amazing what other crap people buy while your cookie sits on their PC. I had one person order 120 books priced $30-40! (10-20 copies of each). I reckon I made about $200 from that order alone! Plus they pay decent percentages (starting at 5%ish) - but if you specalise and find a good niche, you could almost double that to 9%. - Give it a go! Start small if you need to but you may be surprised.
@Chimaera Thanks for the awesome writeup. I was looking for some honest review on affiliate marketing You just left out one thing - It would be of HUGE help if you link to your website so that we can take a look at what a succesful landing page looks like. You may answer me in PM if you want Thanks a ton, again!
I keep bouncing on and off affiliate marketing. Whenever I get down and under because my affiliate producs are not selling, I see a thread like yours and lighten up Thanks.