IM is overwhelming...

That's true. I'm talking about Private label only.

Just sent you a free guide by private message.

There is nothing wrong with affiliate marketing and starting a youtube channel, a blog etc. I highly recommend you to do it actually, but I would recommend you to see these things as LONG TERM. You won't make money soon with these things, it's a fact.

The only way you could make money quickly with affiliate marketing is if you pay for paid ads, and paid ads are way more complicated than it seems and you risk loosing money.

This is how I started:
Started by writing a few Kindle books myself. Saw that I was making money from them....The decided to pay people to write them for them and scale up this business as quickly as possible.

Then I realized that I could build a list from all these people, and I started to build a back-end from each book to grow a list, and I send affiliate offers to these people and this is how I make money from affiliate marketing.

A good strategy is to put a book permanently free on Amazon ( it will rank really high because of this), so a lot of people will read it, and a lot of people will subscribe to your list and you send them affiliate offers. Boom. You build a list for FREE and QUICKLY.

What are you going to do with the niche?

You see, people that don't know what they are talking about always say the same answers : find something you love, find a niche, etc.

What you need is a system. Go to the WSO section a follow one of the system out there. This will save you TONS OF HOURS of research. There are a lot of good WSO that are not expensive at all.

You need a road map, someone telling you what to do. DON'T DO like people with thousands of posts here.

There is a HUGE difference between what we call a keyboard junkie (someone who write a lot of posts but in reality are not making money) and people that are actually making money.

My two cents

I've highlighted the most important part of your post. You've got to transition from a consumer to predominantly being a producer. The people flooding your email box are producers. Unfortunately, it's hard to find genuine help on IM forums because it is loaded with producers looking for people like you to sell their products to.

The good news is, once you find your niche, your market and market research will tell you exactly what to do. Too many people fail because they build a business based on what they want, or what they think their target market wants, and not what their target market actually wants.

For example, let's say you decide "dog training" is going to be your niche. Some basic research will include reading and/or participating in forums, maybe taking a survey and competitive analysis of what products are on the market. What are people buying? Video? Ebooks? Those things that make a piecing noise?

That's why I always say, find a hungry niche with a problem. Then find or develop the solution to that problem, or problems. Your market will tell you what they want. The worst thing you can do is start cranking out products that nobody wants or that nobody is willing to pay for.

Thanks Gambino. Do you have any info to where I can learn more about PPL? This is interesting.

Thanks for this Robert. Yeah, that makes sense. Since a newbie hasn't really started making money online or if he did, he made just a few bucks, then why would it be a good idea for him to start in the MMO niche. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong but this makes sense.

PPL is simply a lead generation offer. You can find them at most any CPA network or you can try and find the owner/advertiser of an offer and try and get set up directly with them. Last but not least, you could develop your own PPL offer, where you find companies that want to buy leads and you generate them for them.

The simplest way to get access to them will always be through CPA networks and you can find out from your account manager, which offers they have are performing best.

However, it is key to test them and test the same type of offers against each other, to find which converts the best. I have seen offers that are all basically the same, but one will drastically outperform the the others. Had you not tested, you would have been leaving money on the table.

Also, anytime you have an offer that is performing well, you ideally want to have it from more than one network. You may be capped at how many leads you can generate or the network may have a set budget...cap on how many the network can generate. So if you or the network was to hit a cap, you will be required to stop promoting the offer. If this happens, it would good to be able to switch to another network, where no cap has been hit and continue to promote the offer.

Rarely are the networks paying the full amount that they could be. So if you are generating volume, you always want to be asking for a bump in your payout. Some networks pay poorly. I have seen payouts of like $30, for an offer that I was getting like $36. So you want to be on top of what is a fair payout for offers. You want to ask the network if they have any private offers that are available, because some networks will have offers that they aren't advertising, However, there may be some restrictions and if you are new, you may not be able to get.

I wouldn't work with any network that doesn't pay weekly or at least has an option to be able to be paid weekly. Which will typically be that you produce a certain volume. When your first starting out and depending on your operating capital that you have, this can be a pain, if you can't keep generating leads until you get paid and replenish your capital. Also, if you get to the point where you are generating high volume, you don't want a network sitting on your money, even if you don't need it.

The benefits of getting set up directly with an offer owner/advertiser is that you will typically be able to get a higher payout than a network will provide, because they take a piece of the payout, so they make money. Sometimes you can get your own custom landing page, so you are not promoting the same one as everyone else or be able to create you own and have them host it. There are some other advantages that may exists, but those are usually the key ones.

Then there is the option to develop your own offers. In order to sell the leads, you have to get buyers. I'm sure that the idea of getting buyers sounds difficult. But the reality is that so many businesses rely heavily on buying leads, in order to generate sales...buying leads is the lifeblood of their business and much easier than you think.

The key to developing a good offer is optimizing the page and form to convert well. Also you have to remember that much of the traffic these days is mobile and you need to optimizing for it as well. One thing you also want to do is host the offer with a fast / reliable hosting company. I have actually seen about a 10% increase in coversion from this before.

One big advantage of having your own offer is that you will be able to get the highest payout, because you are selling the leads directly to the buyers. However, once you have a high converting offer, yolu can also get affiliates to run it. There are a lot of big affiliates capable of generating $10K-$100K+ per month in commissions and they are always looking for good converting offers.

In addition to being able to get a percentage of each lead an affiliate generates, you get to monetize all the thank you page traffic and you get a copy of all the leads generated by them, which you can monetize and keep 100% of the profits from both. If you don't have affiliates, you still get to monetize the tahank you page traffic.

You want to build this slowly, because you need to build up your cash reserves for paying affiliates. If a buyer is late paying or worse, doesn't pay...you still have to pay the affiliates and do it on-time. Never extend a buyer more than a week of credit and have tight terms on when they pay. So if you going Mon-Sun, you want them paying Tue or Wen and pay your affiliates Thur or Fri.

Now with new affiliates, you may not want to start them off paying weekly( but paying weekly is a must to keep them happy), just to make sure that they are not trying to submit a bunch of bogus leads, trying to rip you off.

Once you fully build out one offer and have it running, then build out another and another, etc... and you could potentially build a huge business that's not going anywhere, as lead generation will never go away.

Anyway, that should give you some basics.

No, but I wish! LOL

It is a great and actionable read. Do the exercises though, that's where the real gold is.

Eric's book was a good reminder to what the crucial things are for success in this biz.

Paul's got his FB group where he posts things - https://www.facebook.com/groups/paulscorner/ - Yeah, he's one of the old-timers in the IM world, from the late '90's . . .

Thnx for the chuckle