Digital Photo Taken By Me At Phoenix Women’s Expo.
It’s been a long time since my last crash on Affiliate Marketing in 2001-2003. At that time, I really don’t know where I will be going with affiliate marketing. There were only few big player at that time such as Amazon and commission junction. Everyone is selling the same things while only getting 4% commission from the big player.
Every since Facebook becomes a money maker and play ground for new comers to generate income, I have to rethink the possibility of using social media to generate extra passive income. Don’t get me wrong. Affiliate is a great way to generate significant income, but it has a fundamental fraud.
You have no control.
Your advertiser can easily decline your effort and stop paying you once for all. It also requires tremendous hard work to find new offer, new merchant and new way to promote other people’s products.
Just yesterday, I went the women expo in Phoenix. You can see people are dump their hard work money from their wallet and buy something really unnecessary at the trade show. So I decided to have a good look from the Aisle 100 about affiliate marketing.
There are two ways to make passive income with affiliate marketing. You pick your own choice.
Affiliate Marketer
Most people with or without good knowledge about Internet choose to become affiliate marketer. This is definitely a slowlane way to earn significant income, but it does possibly generate good income. The fact is that only few top notch affiliate marketers have done so. Most affiliate marketer exaggerate their results.
Here is what you need to become an affiliate marketers.
- Find the niche(s) – This is one of hardest part. You need to find a great niche that has buying potential with higher profit margin.
- Setup website(s) – You need to setup multiple websites to list all the affiliate offers and get traffic to your site.
- SEO and More SEO – Without good SEO (search engine optimization), you won’t get steady traffic and you will not get good conversion
- Generate Traffic – Use Facebook Fanpage, Twitter, Email Marketing, Press Release to create buzz and generate traffic to your website.
- Conversion – Without a good conversion rate, you will never earn good affiliate commission
- More Offers – This is also the hardest part. In order to increase your sales and revenue, you have to keep looking for good deals and products to offer your visitors. This is time consuming process. Most affiliate marketer failed, because they dump everything they find onto their website.
Create Affiliate Network
Personally, this is going to be the fastlane to make passive income. Basically, people are selling your products or services. You just need to make sure you offer good products and services that is attractive enough to generate LEADS!
- A High Profitable Margin Products – This is your key to success. Or you have to get enough volume to do very well.
- A profitable commission structure – How does 30%-40% commission sounds to your publisher? While most merchant offer 3-15% commission.
- A great network of publisher – This is where you can scale up your operation, sit and watch your revenue grow.
Now it’s your decision on which business model you are going for.
Personally, I pick both. I’ve built WordPress website for a while, I now turn them into a semi-automate affiliate marketing site. One of the website is now reaching 900 unique visitors a day since my friend and I launched the site in late August 2011. We are also getting more than 14K fans on one of our fanpages. Other than paying ourselves salary, the website is almost break even.
I also have a product that can generate good income with volume. It’s not a high price luxury items, but it’s something everyone can use everyday. I am on my way to turn that into an affiliate network.
Anyone who wants to earn residual income will not miss my 30%-40% commission offer. Would you?
With the help of Facebook Social Reach and Google Image Search, taking affiliate marketing to the next level is much easier than in 2001.
Time to get back to work. Feel free to contact me, if you are interested in how I do both, I am more than happy to share that in the near future.
Join me on my Fanpage and you will be the first one to see my update.
About Terence Chang
Hi Terence, good post. Mostly people like affiliate marketing because it seems easy… especially for people without business skills that don’t understand concepts like leverage. Your article will help to educate.
The link to your wprestaurant.com is broken… looks like you forgot the “http:”
Jon
Jon Symons recently posted..Golf GPS and Rangefinder Buyer’s Guide
@Jon:
Thank you for stopping by and correction. Link is fixed.
I was debating if I should get back into affiliate marketing. It’s NOT easy at all. Now I have a friend of mine handling part of the tasks. I now can free myself to do more PHP, SEO and automation, which makes big difference.
With a little success using Facebook to generate traffic and got lucky from Google Image search. I think I can have better success, if I can turn my own site into affiliate network.
Well. Still have lots to learn from you in the Fastlane world! Where are you up to these days?
Terence Chang recently posted..Lady In Red At Phoenix Women Expo
Hi Terence, I have just as much to learn. At this point I’d much rather be a product owner than affiliate, if I was starting over. Just had one of my sites traffic cut down 60% by Google Panda update. Stable site, with excellent traffic for over 3 years. Good lesson not to rely on any one partner, like Google, for a large amount of business.
Most of my time these days though, I am trading stocks, which I like much better than marketing, but a very steep and expensive learning curve.
@Jon:
That is exactly what I have in mind. You have no control if you are just the passenger (affiliate marketer).
Build a solid product and brand will last longer.
WOW. I am glad so far Panda Update has really hurt me that much, but I can see all my competitors are down.
I agree, trading stock is an expensive lesson. However, it is not real passive income to me. You have to watch the market, even though you only work few hours a day.
I put my money on Tax Lien, which gives me 5%+ return and I only do that once a year here in Phoenix. The downside is that you have to put lots $$$ to get huge return.
It’s the same as stock market. You won’t make millions if you don’t invest millions! 
Nothing is easy though!
Terence Chang recently posted..Good Bye Cherry Creek Ranch
Affiliate marketing is definitely a great way to get passive income. However, it does requires a lot of efforts to do it right!
It’s also very crowded! Better find the best and profitable offers out there!
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