Fair is Fair - Did anyone notice an update that positively affected Affiliate Marketeers

I still use my broker and prices didn't change much, however the list gets shorter by the day, in the past I could easily buy a few dozen domains in bulk, now often not more then a handful or a dozen when I add in the $200-$250 costing PR4's,

Normally I could get dropped PR4's for $70,- but those are extreme rare now.

It's ridiculous. I took a 1-yr break from affiliate marketing to focus on my digital marketing career. Back then, my PBN was considered the creme de la creme. PR4-PR6 domains, backed up a strong Tier 2 network of PR3-PR6 sites.

I had around 15 sites in my tier 1 network, so all my Amazon sites received around 15-links.

I would hit #1 in a matter of weeks, and have absolutely no competition. My competition was toptenreviews who got beat easily.

Now, I have a Tier 1 network of around 35 PBN sites, and a Tier 2 network of around 20 sites. This just isn't enough... I'm glad I focused on my career and let affiliate marketing lay dorment - because affiliate marketing ain't going to be "easy money" for much longer. There's too many people in the industry, and there's nothing unique to do. You can't compete against a PBN by traditional digital marketing (outreach, broken link building, media etc). The reason being is that time = money. It would be a full-time job digitally marketing my Amazon site, and it wouldn't earn me the same amount of ££ as a full-time job in digital marketing.

And so, the only way to compete is to have a "bigger" and "better" PBN than your competitors. And then, you run the risk of being deindexed by Google 12-months later - so it's never long-term.

I'd heavily suggest affiliate marketers start focusing on their careers. I've just landed a big job at an international corporate company leading up their digital marketing strategy. In 30-years, my career will probably net me £80k-£100k a year if I manage to hold onto managerial positions. That for me is 5x the average UK wage and something I'm happy with.

But don't get me wrong. Bringing in an extra £1k-£3k a month from Amazon for little to no work is nice - but I get the feeling it's going to get HARDER and HARDER going into 2015. You either take up affiliate marketing as a full-time job or forget about it, and for me, I can't take that risk. I don't want to be around when Google's algorithms become so complex that building your own links don't work anymore - because so many affiliate marketers will have their lives ruined. For me, it's much more stable and safe to do it as a hobby.

And so, this month I will continue building my PBN. I will play the "dirty game". Luckily, I know of a few TLD's that are out of reach for the mass - making them easy to find and acquire for me. I can regularly pick up PR3 domains for $20 a pop. If I salvage their pagerank and funnel them through to my Tier 1 sites, which in turn funnel juice to my Amazon sites, I'll eventually beat my competitors.