Tired of Helping Other People Get Rich - Should I hit Affiliate Marketing??? | Warrior Forum - The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace

10 years ago

Originally Posted by bigcat1967

Currently, I work full time and my part-time biz is helping business owners drive more traffic to their site. I know that one particular company has made a lot of money off me helping them - and I'm cool with that. Actually, just about all companies that I have consulted with have done well. However, I think I might be missing something.

Since I know how to do SEO, which would be better? Me carrying on - trying to make my SEO work full time OR do affiliate marketing? In other words, truly working for myself and not business owners.

I'm trying to hit around $100,000 a year - this would justify me quitting my full time job. I feel like I'm not making a whole lot of money with my part-time SEO biz, and just curious if me making the leap from a SEO biz to affiliate marketing would be worth it.

What do you guys think? Affiliate marketing or SEO biz - trying to go full time?

Do both until your affiliate marketing business takes over in income, then go full time

Thanks
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hipeopo02 10 years ago

Be careful because people who claim they "know SEO" move into affiliate marketing thinking they will use SEO. They soon realize their SEO skills are not as good as they thought hahah...
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- fmolina2010 10 years ago
  
  Robert Kiyosaki, a financial author/writer/speaker, was once asked, "Is real estate a good investment?". Robert answered, "Are you a good realtor?"
  
  Robert's advice is if you're going to start a business, go with something that you're already good at.
  
  Is that SEO or affiliate marketing for you? I'm assuming that it's SEO. I'm thinking an seo company with outsourced employees. 80% of your effort goes into SEO and 20% will go into your "experimental" projects, in this case, it's affiliate marketing. This is something that I would do if I were in your position.
  
  Thanks
  
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bigcat1967

10 years ago

Be careful because people who claim they "know SEO" move into affiliate marketing thinking they will use SEO. They soon realize their SEO skills are not as good as they thought hahah...

I have a good reputation of driving traffic to client's sites. I imagine I can do the same for my own site.

Thanks
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hipeopo02

10 years ago

Originally Posted by bigcat1967

I have a good reputation of driving traffic to client's sites. I imagine I can do the same for my own site.

That's because you already made your "sale" from the client. When you have to depend on the actual traffic to make you money from sales you tend to need more of it.

A local market client that loves you for sending 15 more real hits to his website everyday is nothing compared to the competition involved in global products and services. you need thousands of visitors daily to stand a chance at making a good living.

Thanks
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Kevin Maguire

10 years ago

Originally Posted by hipeopo02

That's because you already made your "sale" from the client. When you have to depend on the actual traffic to make you money from sales you tend to need more of it.

A local market client that loves you for sending 15 more real hits to his website everyday is nothing compared to the competition involved in global products and services. you need thousands of visitors daily to stand a chance at making a good living.

What if I'm selling luxury Yachts for $22,000,000 @ 20% commission?

@BigCat

I made the exact same kind of leap last year and it's working out just fine. I had 5 good paying clients. I passed 3 of them to a trusted friend as their sites where already ranking well, and only really required minimal maintenance. That opened up enough free time for me to start my own site. It took me a little under 3 months to bring that site up to $15k+ a month which made up the income loss.

Next year I plan on letting the last 2 clients go as their contracts run out in March anyway, and after that I plan to expand what I'm doing for myself. In my experience so far with it I'll be honest and say it can be fairly stressful when your out doing your own thing without a safety net.
But worst case scenario is that I can always go back to client based work any time I want so.

Go For It...But phase it in slowly until you get into the money making SERP spots.

Good Luck

Thanks
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hipeopo02 10 years ago

Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire

What if I'm selling luxury Yachts for $22,000,000 @ 20% commission?

What's your profit margin?

It doesn't matter because BigCat isn't going to sign up to an affiliate marketing program that sells "luxury yachts" because there isn't one open to the general public and even if their was selling such a high price/low demand product with SEO alone? LOL...You better be the authority site on yachts hahaha......

I didn't bother reading the rest of what you wrote.
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- Sholem 10 years ago
  
  Hi
  What I think would be smart to do, is to train a VA or a team to do the actual work of SEO with you as manager making sure its done well, and you as the expert open a site and start selling SEO services and use your reputation to put you in front of your competitors as a trusted adviser with a great track record. why bother with affiliates? you can hire affiliates to push your products.
  
  You can use all methods not only SEO to push your products, Social Media and the rest of the game.
  
  If you need any help making that happen i would be more then glad to help you, just send me a massage.
  
  I hope that helps.
  
  Thanks
  
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online only

10 years ago

Bigcat1967,

It's nice to hear that you are doing well with SEO. It's something that 99% of people are doing wrong.

I've never understood why people who do well at SEO bother themselves to do work for clients. Affiliate commissions and passive income is something that makes you feel so good. So instead of doing SEO for clients, I highly suggest you to start building links to your OWN sites.

If you don't want to drop your clients, you could actually reduce 50% of your work and then concentrate on your OWN sites. Once you see success, you can drop another 50% and be fully focused on your own sites.

$100,000 is highly doable.

Anyhow, I wish you good luck whatever your decision is

Thanks
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dennis09

10 years ago

Originally Posted by online only

Bigcat1967,

It's nice to hear that you are doing well with SEO. It's something that 99% of people are doing wrong.

I've never understood why people who do well at SEO bother themselves to do work for clients. Affiliate commissions and passive income is something that makes you feel so good. So instead of doing SEO for clients, I highly suggest you to start building links to your OWN sites.

This. That's what I think when I see someone pimping an seo service sig. If it was really as great and effective as they ALL claim they'd be doing it for themselves. Much less work, much more profit and you can dissappear any time you want without worrying about clients and the liabilities and headaches that come with them.

Thanks

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bigcat1967

10 years ago

Thanks for all your comments (except for hipeopo02). I'll be making my decision soon.

Thanks

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tcrews

10 years ago

Absolutely yes. Stop selling your skills for cheap, use them wisely.

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palmer9999

10 years ago

Originally Posted by bigcat1967

Currently, I work full time and my part-time biz is helping business owners drive more traffic to their site. I know that one particular company has made a lot of money off me helping them - and I'm cool with that. Actually, just about all companies that I have consulted with have done well. However, I think I might be missing something.

Since I know how to do SEO, which would be better? Me carrying on - trying to make my SEO work full time OR do affiliate marketing? In other words, truly working for myself and not business owners.

I'm trying to hit around $100,000 a year - this would justify me quitting my full time job. I feel like I'm not making a whole lot of money with my part-time SEO biz, and just curious if me making the leap from a SEO biz to affiliate marketing would be worth it.

What do you guys think? Affiliate marketing or SEO biz - trying to go full time?

I think every on-line marketer has considered this! Why work a 9 -5 job when you can be your own boss and make twice as much!

Don't leave until you have a certain steady income. How are you going to earn that much when you can't make even a proportion of it part time? Quitting your job and doing affiliate marketing full is not going to magically make you 100k a year.

Thanks

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seococonuts

10 years ago

A long time ago, my dream was to have an empire of affiliate sites all bringing in passive income (me and the rest of the online world I know lol)

I started doing SEO for clients to help pay for domains and other expenses, and before long I became very busy.

I won't dribble on too much for this post, but personally I think helping others online is much more rewarding and probably more lucrative than trying to be a big time affiliate marketer (assuming that you do well obviously)

My personal opinion nowadays is that whilst working on other people's sites and making people rich can be a drag sometimes, there are times when you've actually make a big difference to someone's life.

I have a few affiliate sites that pull in revenue but my focus is SEO and client work now- I genuinely enjoy the interaction which I think affiliate marketing lacks.

Thanks

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hipeopo02

10 years ago

Originally Posted by bigcat1967

Thanks for all your comments (except for hipeopo02). I'll be making my decision soon.

You already made your decision before you made this thread looking for people to blow smoke up your ass

Thanks
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robbeh 10 years ago

Honestly, I have gone from Affiliate Marketing to Consulting and the only reason I am going back (part time) is I enjoy it more doing it for myself and the fun of building and breaking a site. I make much more money consulting though so I will never leave that safety net.

My honest opinion, stick with consulting and just make sure you raise your rates - maybe do one affiliate site for fun and to test new things. You sound like you aren't charging enough. It's tough selling SEO but when you optimize a clients site for a keyword for a machine that sells for $140 000 and they make around 10% on the sale. 1 extra sale = $14000 less their costs (sales man etc) so charing $1000 for 1 keyword seems like peanuts in the long scheme of things...even 2 or 3 thousand.

It's just a matter of knowing who your client is and their market.

Here is a really friendly tip for anyone consulting who is confident in their skills.

Offer your client 2 payment options (change the prices as needed):

1) They can pay $500 per keyword with no guaranteed results and $100 a month.

2) They only pay $150 per keyword up front but you guarantee them either a top 3 ranking, or "x" more hits or "x" more sales. However, if you hit the target they pay you $850 plus the $100 a month.

Basically you are getting a bonus or commission. This will help bridge the gap of trust for "if it does it work". You can even do the SEO for free but charge $1000 if you hit a target.

Now to determine the rates, you need to know what a sale means for the client. So in my case I know it's $14000 a sale for them. There are around 700 searches a month for this keyword so I know that I can easily get them 1 lead a month. I base my offer on that:

Option 1: $1000 a keyword with $250 a month fee (minimum 6 months) with no guarantee

Option 2: $500 a keyword with a $2000 bonus if they make a sale (not a lead) and $250 a month fee (no minimum)

Option 2 is almost too easy for them...$500 and no contract...so worst case they invest $750 and maybe get a bit of exposure but if they make a sale they only give up a bit of their commission...once.

The client made 3 sales 2 months later, I made $2500 on one keyword and got an order for 15 more keywords (all worth FAR less since they are smaller products).

This is my dream story and not all of my clients have nice products and low competitive keywords but you get the idea of how to make a lot of money as a consultant.

Hope that helps!

Robbeh
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- nik0 Banned 10 years ago
  
  Right now I'm serving about 150 monthly clients so it would be a waste of money to let them go of course.
  
  At the same time I am running experiments on about 35 Amazon affiliate sites that I build in the last couple of months.
  
  I grouped it into:
  
  - 20 Amazon niche sites, focused on narrow niches like hair dryers, generators, bread makers and that kind of things
  
  - 6 Amazon broad niche sites, think of personal care, garden, pets, babys, cooking, those are planned to be build out to let's say mini authority sites.
  
  - 7 local lead generation sites where I try different styles of back linking
  
  - 1 site setup as an eCommerce site using WooCommerce where we rewrite all descriptions and titles to be unique
  
  - 1 site setup as an eCommerce site using WooCommerce again, but this time we don't rewrite product descriptions and titles but instead noindex the whole shopping section and write about 20 unique articles that are supposed to rank and that lead to the shop section.
  
  Some other plans are to setup Adsense sites in different styles/ways, I have no idea how lucrative that will be but it's worth to test it and soon enough I'll find out which method/style of site building will work best and last the longest and then I'll focus on that and by then I might quit bumping my sales threads and let the SEO selling business die naturally.
  
  Most probably I will continue with some large clients who each have at least a handful of sites with me, and crazy enough they make up for about 70% of my total revenue so there will always be a safety net.
  
  Thanks
  
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DeskCoder

10 years ago

The reason people who are good at SEO stick to just SEO is because that's just part of the many things that go into making a successful affiliate site. Just because you can drive traffic to a page doesn't mean it will convert.

Off the top of my head, here is what else is involved:
* Niche research
* Keyword research
* Affiliate research
* Website creation
* Website design
* Content
* More Content

* Conversion tracking
* A/B testing for improving conversion

See my point? I like to think I'm good at website design ... but I absolutely suck at content and SEO. Yeah, outsourcing all this is possible, but you still need to maintain and oversee all that.

I say if SEO is making you good money, try to ramp that up more. If you want to branch out and try your own affiliate sites, test the waters with 1 (maybe 2) ... don't jump in too fast, you'll be over your head in no time.

Thanks

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Tired of Helping Other People Get Rich - Should I hit Affiliate Marketing???

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