I feel the need to share this with someone

bump, can someone in the marketing field showcase their earnings, and give us some background into what went into building your site?

Bloggers whoring out product links can easily make that on commissions, but you're limited to traffic. A new site you'll be lucky to have ten readers a week.

It takes time for SEO to work. It takes time to build an audience. It can be done very easily, and you can be selling herbal snake oil at 4am to desperate people, but it's not something you're going to turn overnight.

Check directly with the manufacturer of the products your going to hawk. You can often get signed up as an affiliate with them directly. Amazon are stingy fucks, but snake oil companies often pay out good shares to get more suckers.

As a long-time affiliate, I wanna give you some insight...

First, there are a number of skills you'll need to do this right, especially involving studying your stats and doing landing page optimization. If you're not familiar with that, don't know how to set up something like Google Analytics or tracking202 to conduct split tests, have no experience with keyword research, or think copywriting is a misspelling of copyrighting, you need to take some time to learn these things because affiliate marketing is live-or-die by 1) niche research and 2) optimization.

Realize that any niche you can imagine, no matter how obscure, already has competitors. That's okay though: you just need to find them and copy them because they're already optimized ahead of you. Finding them is as easy as doing a google search.

Google hates affiliates, so don't expect to advertise on Google AdWords, you'll be banned quickly. Which means you need another traffic source, and SEO is a long-term deal.

Another really important note: the affiliate marketing space, in terms of affiliates who relied on arbitrage (buying traffic for $1/visitor and making $2/visitor in sales), has really died down over the past 6-10 years. The days of making easy bank are unfortunately long gone.

The strategy that the committed affiliates adopted in place of that is building brand websites, often with fake personas, and developing themselves as an authority in their niche, building their email list and selling their own infoproducts and services, sometimes "white label" physical products (buying a protein powder made in China with no brand and putting your own label on it to sell it). A good example would be wellnessmama.com. It looks like some chick's blog, but waaaay too polished and pitchy. I don't know if "Katie" is a real person, but the marketing of that site is done by spearsmarketing.com.

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One other important note is on this:
>lel, I am a modest man, I just want enough to scrape by, maybe after I'm done with this lifestyle. but for now, I want to take it easy.

I know this might sound like some stupid self-help book's advice, but whenever I had the mentality of, "I'm not trying to be greedy, I'd be happy with just a few hundred dollars per month from this," I never made anything. Aiming small equaled no money, aiming big and making it a lifestyle equaled a lot; there was nothing in between that worked. I've met several people over the years who wanted me to teach them how to do this kind of stuff, but they always had the mentality of, "i just wanna do this a few hours per week and just make some extra spending money." I knew that they would never make anything that way, and they never did, no matter how much I taught them or helped them.

This IS a business whether you consider it one or not, and that was a hard lesson for me to learn. If you treat it like it's not, it's probably going to fizzle long before you come up with a newer idea you like better -- over and over again.

bloop, just keeping this thread alive.

Thanks for the reply user, much appreciated.

>If you're not familiar with that, don't know how to set up something like Google Analytics or tracking202 to conduct split tests, have no experience with keyword research, or think copywriting is a misspelling of copyrighting.

I just set up google analytics two days ago, but I'm having trouble setting up the site. I'm learning all the intricacies that go into making a blog rank, so even though I wouldn't say I understand them completely, I have a general idea.
Php looks very intimidating, and editing the site directly through wordpress gives me little space to work with since there's not much I can do. How did you manage to learn php? any good guide reccomandations?

also what does one usually spend time on when managing a blog, aren't 2-4 hours sufficient after all the content's been written down?

also what do you do when you've covered all there is to cover about one topic? do you just recycle the same thing over and over again.

fudge, I like dat,
shit, i eat dat

>I just set up google analytics two days ago, but I'm having trouble setting up the site. I'm learning all the intricacies that go into making a blog rank, so even though I wouldn't say I understand them completely, I have a general idea.

That's cool. There are a lot of auxiliary skills related to webdesign/css/javascript/linux/server administration/etc. that you'll just kind of find you pick up over time. You'll run into lots of problems that quick Google searches will help you with, so don't be intimidated. Anything you can't figure out yourself, don't be afraid to hire a freelancer to do for cheap. Don't let a roadblock stop you before you even know how much it costs to pay someone to solve.

>Php looks very intimidating, and editing the site directly through wordpress gives me little space to work with since there's not much I can do. How did you manage to learn php? any good guide reccomandations?

Well, let me say first that PHP is actually a pleasure to use as far as programming languages go. It's really made with the web in mind, and has a lot of built-in things, plus everyone uses it so there's tons of examples and code samples out there, so that's big. I had some programming experience before PHP, not a lot I guess, but jumping into PHP wasnt so bad, and the nice thing is you probably won't really need to do much heavy lifting in PHP for webdevelopment (you don't have to bother learning object-oriented programming features for example). So really it's kind of the same answer as above: i kind of hacked my way through things when I could, and occasionally paid someone to do something I couldn't. Wordpress, while easy to use for retarded people to make a website, very much complicates the use of what would otherwise be simple tasks in PHP-based websites that are NOT running on Wordpress. I'm not saying not to use Wordpress, but what you'd wanna study is PHP programming FOR Wordpress because it's almost like you're 1/2

2/2

using more Wordpress' "hooks" system than you are PHP (even though that is PHP too it's just like its own set of rules). But you can start with any simple PHP guide really, just make some simple scripts so you understand variables and how importing other scripts works and the scopes of variables, then go into the PHP for Wordpress development stuff.

>also what does one usually spend time on when managing a blog, aren't 2-4 hours sufficient after all the content's been written down?

Marketing stuff like interacting with the community, researching the community, trying to make deals with other people/blogs in the space, studying your traffic and where your visitors come from and how to get more traffic from there, improving your conversions (getting people to do whatever you want them to do, like entering their email address to your newsletter). You should start by creating a free product, like a 15 page ebook, with insomnia explanations or cures or something. Offer it free to anybody who signs up to your email list. Just put in stuff that's shown to work or is recently being tried by people. You can make this in like a day.

>also what do you do when you've covered all there is to cover about one topic? do you just recycle the same thing over and over again.

That, yes, but also, trawl forums or plebbit to see what people are talking about, and write articles on those things. I mean think about it like this: if insomnia had been cured, you wouldn't need to make a website about it, so clearly it's not a simple fix. If there were only x number of questions that people had, there'd be a master FAQ somewhere. But forums exist because people have questions with a near-infinite amount of specificity and variation:

>"anybody try this new Sleepy Faggot powder?"
>"why does this happen when i..."
>"new study suggests insomnia is caused by shit waifus"
>"i haven't had a good night's sleep in 3 years"

It just goes on forever, you can write about anything.

You would earn more money as a grubhub/postmates/whatever contract delivery driver if all you want is to be your own boss and not be a wagecuck.

thanks a lot user for the time, I just got a push of motivation to get this stuff going, let's hope your wise advice doesn't go to waste on a bum like myself. I'm really glad I got the chance to talk to you :P

that's basically a glorified wagecuck, tell me what the difference is exactly?

you don't have to learn PHP or any other programming language to build a website on wordpress. 13 year old can do it without a problem and achieve great results without nearly no expenses.

>find yourself a decent host
>purchase a domain
>use nulled theme for free
>3 hours of CSS course on any programming website
>install seo plugin
>backup website before doing anything questionable.
>protip: you can use public domain content

complete a research on the steps mentioned above to avoid costly mistakes. thank me later.

whats a nice niche topic ?
Don't worry, I'm from germany, I will only advertise in my country

sell hip hop baseball hats for young turks wannabe gangstas. thank me later

someone will get rich off this

I hope it works out for you, and don't be afraid to change things up if you see yourself going in a different, promising direction. I ended up in affiliate marketing in the first place after I was just working on some website as a hobby and put ads on it.

Also, i like 's answer better. Don't worry about PHP until you need to.

thanks guys/gals.

>I'm really self-conscious, and can't get the motivation to initiate the plan, and can only imagine and dream of how well it plays out in my mind.

stay poor