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$622,322.96 in 2009 from Affiliate Marketing

by Jesus Perez
0 replies
I found an interesting comment-thread on Reddit related to Internet Marketing. Specifically, Affiliate Marketing using Google Adwords and Facebook.

I made $622,322.96 in 2009 from affiliate marketing. AMA. : IAmA

Plenty of other interesting nuggets scattered throughout. Use Firefox's CTRL+F search function to look for the user's name 'richoffyou'.

And ofcourse, keep in mind this guy may be full of BS...or may be telling the truth.

Comment Highlights:

...My first year it only supplemented my income as I had a full time job. I made around $40k. In 2006 I hardly did any marketing, probably made a few hundred. In 2007 I made $16k, in 2008 I made $44k. I started doing this full time in 2007 and as you can see I've been able to successfully increase my earnings every year since then. This year my goal is $1 million or more...
Anybody can do this. You don't need any special skills. Programming and web design just allowed me to be able to earn faster than probably the average affiliate marketer. The best advice I could give is to:
1) Don't be afraid to take risks.
2) It takes money to make money (at least if you want to earn real money)
3) Attend any of the major affiliate conferences like Ad:Tech or Affiliate Summit and you can learn a lot from keynotes in just a few days.
4) Test, discover, repeat...

I can go weeks without making hardly any money and then some weeks I can do tens of thousands. I save a lot, live pretty conservatively. We're saving to build a house.
Most of the time I create "landers," a fancy name for a sales page. Server side programming like PHP isn't as important as client side stuff like HTML/javascript and a nice design. On the page I talk about or review the product(s) and link the user to the actual sales page with the client. All clicks and sales/leads are tracked by a middle man called an "affiliate network" who has a direct relationship with the client. Think of affiliate networks as a store who gets their inventory from wholesalers and then sells it to the public. An affiliate network gets advertising campaigns from merchants at a certain amount per sale/lead and distributes them to the affiliates (people like me) to market at a lower payout so they can create a margin....

I try to be as clean and simple as possible. I've found that landers that are more personalized or information based do well than commercialized. People who are looking to buy something online almost always look around for reviews. My strategy is to feed them the review, information, etc BEFORE they see the product site.
I search for products to promote using tools like OfferVault (http://offervault.com) depending on current trends. I find the best payout, research the product, build a landing page to "pre-sell" it before they actually see the product website and advertise it using Facebook and/or Google. I generally use Facebook for promotional offers, dating, insurance, lead gen and then Google for everything else.
Weight-loss, stretchmarks, and biz-opp (specifically Google biz-opp) products last year (2009)
Here is what I normally see on a successful sale ad: 0.5 - 3.0% click through rate, then a 5-12% conversion rate on those clicks. On lead ads I see much higher rates but then the profits are small (but add up).
The major difficulties that I encountered in the beginning was failing time after time. Then I changed my attitude towards "failing" and just reworded it to "testing." The process of testing is the most important part of this entire process.
Check out http://affbuzz.com and read/follow the bloggers in this industry. I don't recommend getting advice from forums but some of the ones to check out would be http://digitalpoint.com, http://warriorforum.com, http://**********.com (be careful there).
I've lost thousands and thousands of dollars online doing this. Most of the money that I lose is by testing and filtering my methods against different products. I may spend a couple thousand testing a product's marketability until I can find that sweet spot in targeting. Once I've found the perfect target and I start seeing profits, it's not uncommon to profit $2-$4k a day just from one campaign.
That's a big problem in this business, affiliates ripping other affiliates hard work... However, it's part of the game. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. In fact, I live by multiple eggs, multiple baskets.
I've contacted the web hosts on some of the people who have ripped my pages and successfully shut one down.
On Facebook, I generally start by creating several ads targeting various demographics, different ad texts, different pictures and then letting them accumulate clicks. The ones that don't convert or have a ****ty click through rate, I delete. I keep filtering based on conversion rates and profits. Once I find the ads that work, I make more to target other demographics, etc. I keep doing this until I feel I have exhausted the targeting.


You can use this method with Adwords too.. except with Adwords you're targeting based on keywords.
What would you consider a good ctr for the ads in Facebook?Depends on the offer. I like for dating ads to be 0.75% or better. I can get away with 0.5% on some ads. I generally aim for > 1%.
#$622 #2009 #affiliate #marketing

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