How I Got Rich

This is REALLY depressing. I’ve only just found your frank and honest blog and have to admin I am in much the same kind of boat. I spend a lot of my rare idle time struggling between two positions. On the one hand what I am doing works in the sense that I am making money (if you ignore the cost of my time) and I believe it could work even better, so I should invest more time to try to build it up. On the other hand, although its working I wonder if I will ever get to the stage where I am earning a good living, and perhaps I should accept that affiliate marketing will never be more than a hobby activity that will earn enough to get me a nice holiday each year.

Of course the motivating factor in the background is probably found in the title of this blog – the belief that if I can make a good living I should be able to continue onwards and develop this into a great living. Trouble is I still haven’t managed to make the good living yet.

Well at least I’ve found someone else who instead of being a ‘how I made my first million eBook’ merchant is honest enough to express their true position. This in itself is heartening so for now I will stick with the “red pill” and set myself a similar goal: to move earnings up from below a basic wage to the stage where I am getting the eqivalent of what I could get working for someone else.

George
Affiliate Marketer
= Professional Writer of Shitty Articles for Backlinks.

I’m doing something similar to your original project, but had some big success a couple of years back due to one golden offer i promoted before anyone else really grasped it, so have something to start from. I’m now the owner of a site which ranks very well for some good phrases, but since giving up the 9-5, i got disheartened with it, and did more freelance work for other people than doing anything with my existing websites – to the point that it was earning nothing for me for most of last year. I think your blog has given me my own motivation that money can be made, and will help with my drive on my new project to get up to some REAL money with affiliate marketing (click on my name for the blog website!).
In return, i hope you may rediscover your own motivation when you get home from work each day and actually spend 2 hours working part time, but working hard on your sites, you’ll probably see exactly the same steady increase in rankings and sales as when you were supposedly full-time, but probably spent half of that reading other blogs, checking earnings and generally faffing about!

“I think affiliate marketing is like most things in life: most people can do ok at it but to really succeed you need something special about you. A natural talent if you will.”

Sorry I can’t disagree more with that statement. That something special is called hard work and persistence! You said above that you have been lazy, well then there’s your problem, there’s your ‘something special’.

I’ve been following your blog for a good 4 months or so and from what I can tell you have only tried one approach to affiliate marketing, the ’100s of niche sites’ approach. Try something different. It took James Dyson 15 years and 5000 prototypes to get a working bag-less vacuum cleaner, then a further 2 years just to find someone to license it after getting turned down by many many companies. Like I said before keep at it and you will eventually find that winning formula and once you do you can replicate it and your earnings will catapult.

Stick at it mate, the early days are always the hardest. I remember reading in Duncan Bannatynes book, “the first million was the hardest”. He was talking about his own first million, it was so hard to make, but once he had they just didn’t stop coming, because he found out how to make his business work, and you have to do the same.

I’m newer to this game than you, and in my first 4 months have made just enough to buy my mates a round of beers, but I have no doubt in my mind that I will make a very good living out of this eventually because I’m not going to stop until I do, it’s just going to take time, and hard work.

Can I suggest you read (or re-read if you’ve seen it already) Ken Evoy’s ‘Affiliate Masters Course’. Just read Day 1 of the course, that should get your affiliate juices flowing and give you the perspective you need. I read it last year before I got started which really helped. I made a couple of sites but didn’t see any amazing results, so I read it again and I can see some areas where I’ve gone wrong, I’ve now got a big site in the pipe line that I’m going to work at like a dog and I believe it should earn me quite a bit come the end of the year if I get it right and follow the advice in the course.

Interesting post and nice to find a site where someone else is being honest about how this enterprise is going for them.

Perhaps I’m too optimistic but I tend to think of things in terms of doubling (on the basis that if I find something that works, I should be able to duplicate it in another field within a couple of months). From 400 to 2000 by the end of the year: that’s 2 and a bit doublings. I would have thought this should be possible but I am at an early stage where I seem to be able to roughly double my affiliate income every 3 months. Still, twice pennies is still pennies and perhaps I’m just too small to have found the ceiling for this yet!

Anyway, best of luck. I will be following your blog so next time you findn yourself losing motivation, just remember there’s another starving affiliate out there keeping an eye on you!

Hi there

I have posted a comment or two before (under another name? can’t remember it).

I have looked at one or maybe two of your sites. Please accept what I have to say as constructive; its meant to be.

I have a hunch that your sites might have a “credibility” issue, which leads to poor conversion rates. Am I right that you use .org sites … and that you design the sites yourself? My view is that you lose credibility, in that the sites are not (graphically) designed well enough and the design encourages people who land on your pages to say, “this is what I want, but it looks kinda dodgy, I’m not buying here’ and they move on.

I think that’s the result of you having too many sites … and not enough time to put into all of them.

BTW, I started the same time as you and have just one site … and are tracking you in that I have 300 pounds per month in commission. I’m too narrowly focused.