Why aren't you an affiliate marketer yet?

Yeah, I just assume people like that are either pissed at the world or are affiliates themselves and are scared that might lose something by educating newbs.
The fact is, nobody is going to give away the entire store to strangers on Veeky Forums. I'm just bored and decided to humble brag a little bit and in the process maybe help a few people out some.
Yeah, I'm mostly doing ebay/amazon stuff right now and it's treating me pretty good but when I sense I've reached a peak I'm definitely going to retool and try to get into some other stuff.

>it's an OP talks to himself episode
Which one is the mobile phone?

We're both using your mom's computer as a vpn among other things we're using your mom for.

You affiliate marketers are really smart and mature, not to mention hilarious and original.

But yeah, keep up the dialogue with yourself. I'm sure some idiot can be roped in and you can make someone else miserable as well. You're human scum and I hope everyone you love leaves you or dies. Asap.

I expected this... Welp have fun believing in the limits society put on you.

Trying so hard, lol.

Okay I'll bite.
>I'm sure some idiot can be roped in
Roped in to what exactly? Making a blog with a 10 dollar domain name that costs about 3 dollars a month in hosting fees then putting some ads on it? Wow, yeah, the huMANity, right?
Look, you can be made at the world throwing tantrums in your basement but that doesn't mean that other people aren't out there making this work. If you don't believe that then fine. More money for me.

Not sure what you mean desu. There is nothing for both myself and op to gain from anyone here. take the info how you want. Scam this scam that, sounds like how my friends acted when I first started doing this.

Hey, thanks for the links to those forums. I've actually only been at this a year and a half now and I know I have plenty to learn. Most of what I know has been through trial and error and reading the affiliate support forums like I mentioned up thread. Another good place to learn is if the phpbay forums. I think you have to buy the software first to get in but they're good. Some blackhats but a lot of people trying to do this right.

Did the forums also say keep samefagging up some threads until someone believes your scam?

It sure seems they did.

Did the forums also advice you to neck yourself?

I sure hope they did.

Hang on, I'll check.
>...
Dang. Nope, just said to tell needy attention seeking jackasses to go fuck themselves.
So I guess I should tell you to go fuck yourself.
Go fuck yourself.

Do you kiss whoever fucks you up the butt with that mouth, you dumb cunt?

I thought you were just here wasting your time but with comebacks like that I can see that making an ass out of yourself on a Tibetan basket weaving board is actually you operating at peak output. Don't post too fast though or Hiroshimoot will start throwing those tricky captchas at you that you can never figure out.
Godspeed and thanks for the free entertainment.

>run out of unoriginal insults
>pretend not to cry and leave
Man you blow. How the fuck do you scam people successfully when you can't even scrape up an original insult?

Kill yourself my man.

Hey thanks for offering out to help.

How did you start your first site? What did you used at the time? How much capital did you start with?

No problem. First site was just a blog I put together on WordPress. It wasn't really much. Just a few posts where I rambled on about basketball and the NBA. The idea was to have something to show when I applied to different affiliate programs.
After getting approved, I just started making more sites on every niche I could think of and putting ads on them.
Right now I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple of thousand generating income. A little from each one adds up!
Hosting is cheap. The first site needs to be dotcom to show you're "serious" but after that, just get the cheapest domains you can find. .trade and .bid go for 88 cents on namecheap with free whois privacy. You can stack 30 of those on a 5 dollar a month shared hosting account.
As far as capital, I believe I was making about 300 dollars a month donating plasma when I started so it doesn't take much. Needless to say, I don't donate plasma anymore.

Hey do you have any successful tips at being wealthy? Since, you know, you are obviously richer than these guys?

Lol these fucking bro scammers are the worst. Please link us to your personal '''team''' page with a pic of you in sunglasses in front of a hotel swimming pool "yo just chillin at my condo."

Good job waiting a few posts to mention your shill site but seriously quit samefagging and fuck off

You need to have money to invest for affiliate marketing, right?

10 bucks per year for domain
10 bucks per year for shit hosting.

what a weird thread.

Yeah, I've learned my lesson not to take Veeky Forums seriously enough to share something that actually works. I guess I should have just ranted and raved about Ethereum or some shit.

Any ideas besides a blog to get some trafic flowing?
Not asking for your recipe, just maybe a small tip?

>Why aren't you an affiliate marketer yet?
i have no idea what's the point in doing that shit.
i know millennial are clicking ads left and right butt they will wise up fast enough as they grow a little older.

>I don't get it
>there's this newfangled internet thing going on, but no flippin' way anybody is making money from it.
>Everybody buys all their stuff from physical shops, right? right?

It's not about whether it's a blog or a comparison site or anything else. The key is backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more Google will see your site and put it in the SERP.
If your site is low quality then you're going to need a lot of them because each one isn't going to make much money. In that situation, look around for services that will spam the internet with backlinks for you. These services are free.
If your site is high quality, i.e., unique useful content, then you won't need as many but it will be harder to get backlinks as you will need ones that are higher quality. One way is create what's called a blog network. The main quality site (money site) is at the center and you create a number of lower quality sites that still have some unique content but you sprinkle those sites with backlinks to your main site.
This is enough to get you started and all of it will cost you nothing but the domains and hosting. You can Google around for the details.

Have you imagined actually needing something advertised? No? OK 6 billion plus other people might. It's not that difficult, a click is not labor intensive.

Do you use Anki to memorize the hundreds of weird tricks to get rich quick and lose wight that you've developed?

What affiliate networks are you guys and how much have you made?

Pic related are mine.
Can only recommend Adludum.

I use it to memorize posts like yours so whenever I feel like it, I can have a sensible chuckle at your style of try hard teenage cynical angst.

>programming ability

see this is the problem for me. I have the time and energy for this, but no knowledge of web development, or coding.

Okay, so I have a little blog I run. It gets about 500 unique hits per day. It's guy stuff, girls, cars, etc...

What can I do with this site that will earn me money?

I'm old school so I go for simplicity. Blogs and ads. Here is what I did for eBay last month.

Learn as you go. Make extensive use of stack overflow when you get stuck.
For a blog to make money with affiliate ads, it needs to rank highly in Google for keywords that people search for when they are actually ready to buy something. That's probably not the case for your site.
If I were you, I'd make another site that actually is optimized for "wanna buy" keywords. I mean something as simple as a shill site for zit cream. Whatever. Then on your guy stuff blog, make some posts where you can of weave a couple of links in somewhere pointing to your zit cream site. You aren't necessarily trying to get people to click through, you are trying to get your zit cream site higher in the SERP results by passing on some link juice.
Make a few more blogs with some unique content that also link to your zit cream site (don't over do it, Google isn't stupid) and in time, your money site will start getting some traffic and you'll make money.

Thanks man.

It sounds like you are saying my little blog can't earn much as it is.

I wish I could just get about 25 - 50 out of it every month somehow. Right now it earns me $2 a month from Google Adsense :(

No problem. The thing is the internet is so saturated that it is very hard to make money by accident. You have to approach this thing purposefully from the beginning when building a site. In that, a blog like yours can still be useful just as an auxiliary, not the main event.

How do you get people to covert?
All the offers look supper scammy, nobody will actually convert, right? And even if they do, they will never again.

Thanks for the encouragement to do affiliate mktng.

PPC and affiliate money are nice. Until you get targeted by click fraud botnets with ability to do conversion fraud using stolen CC

Situation is getting worse each year.

Hey OP, grats on your success. Why not share the cake. I got a pretty niche service. About to launch in 2days. I'll make you a good deal on your commission. Drop some contact data for me if interested

Good thread OP

>Right now I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple of thousand generating income. A little from each one adds up!

Just to clarify, do you mean a couple of thousand ads, or sites?

step 1) get emails from dumps on deepweb

step2) spam emails with amazon affiliate link

step3) get fuckin rrrrrichhhh

welcome to blackhat marketing. easy money.. your main issue will be evading the spam folder o_o

are there any discords for this? i actually own like 35 domain names, just random cool ones ive found are open.. i sold one last year for $800 so i dont really care

>spamming
>blackhat

How do you sleep at night doing these obscene things to people

Couple of thousand sites. Sorry for the confusion.
Be careful as Amazon will drop you if your conversion rate goes below 1% which is what could likely happen in that scenario.

the fact this is being posted here is evidence that its peaked

You could be right. Maybe affiliate marketing has peaked.
Consider this though. What is an affiliate marketer after all? "Affiliate marketer" is a fancy term for salesperson paid by commission. And I'll bet one thing. There isn't a market or economy in the history of the world where good salespeople have gone hungry. That's the nature of the game.
Right now online shopping is exploding. Amazon is selling comparably to Walmart and it's only going to increase faster as more and improved payment schemes hit the scene. People are going to buy no matter what and I'd like a piece of that action.
As much collective autism as there is on this board, Veeky Forums should be the king of stuff like this.

My website went online last december. I still haven't gotten much traffic yet, but I'm not in for the short term.

Maintaining several thousand websites sounds like a massive amount of work, do you have any systems in place to keep on top of them all?

I wrote a script that builds an entire website in its entirety including a years worth of content and ads before it even goes up. Takes about 30 minutes from start to finish.
When it goes live, it's pure set and forget with no further intervention necessary.
That's why I mentioned having some programming skill as vital.

I should mention, I have another script using Selenium that checks each site every 24 hours to make sure the ads are actually showing and all the sites are working correctly.

Thanks for this OP

nice

I have programming, design and SEO skills, currently have 2 websites up (first was a failure but we'll see long term since I was a noob, second one was perfectly made since day 1 and currently 1 month after I have good results) but they are adsense only and with little to none affiliate possibilities (very non material subjects). Since I'm about done with the second (I did the whole website including design and content before launching and spent 1 month on SEO) I'm very interested in affiliate marketing for the third. I just want to know what differs from the ad venue to the AM one and what rookie missteps are common so I can avoid them. Thanks in advance.
Oh and in ads an essential metric is traffic for the keyword vs how much you get payed per click. (1000 searches p/month with 1 click giving 300€ is better than 1000000 with 1 click giving 0.000002€), this still applies for AM but replacing the CPC for the product's cost right? Thanks.

>I wrote a script that builds an entire website in its entirety including a years worth of content and ads before it even goes up.

What tasks did you actually automate?
Admin tasks like apache config for the new site and replacing names/emails I can see.

Do you literally scrape and assemble content autonomously? I'm guessing more likely it does a db import formatted for your site of articles you bought or wrote all at once?

Don't you also have to fiddle with CSS and whatnot for different advertisements (oh scratch that if you're the ebay guy).

Last question, do you use wordpress? I can code and I've used wordpress for sites and it just feels so... dirty. I don't even look at the code just use the gui cause it's there even though I feel like it's locked me into some shitty style or theme. Some of the plugins are nice, but in the future I think I'll just build a base/shell site I'm happy with and use that. I wonder if I'm overlooking good reasons to use it.

>rookie missteps
Much could be written but here's a few highlights
1. There are many types of affiliate moneys to make. Mobile installs, native ads, eBay/Amazon, etc. This is great but it begets a paradox of choice. There are so many that newbs try one, get less than stellar results then jump to the next thinking they just haven't found the right one yet. Thing is, each system has a learning curve that keeps on going. Find one, stick with it and get really good. Long after the typical newb throws their hands up and bails is when you actually learn enough to make the real money.
2. Google hates affiliate sites. If they even think your site exists for the sole purpose of shoveling ads in peoples' faces, they will deindex you. There are a few options if you don't want to have to buy/create genuine content or give a site the care and feeding necessary. The best suggestion I'm willing to share is make sure you have some decent content but, this is key, make sure you have more than one site your affiliate links lead to. Have some ebay and some Amazon too. Have a few others. If you have to, send traffic to sites you aren't even an affiliate for. Just have some variety. You are much more likely to pass a manual review if you don't just look like an ebay affiliate spam site.

>essential metric
When it comes to picking which products to shill, there are so many variables that themselves are contingent on things like experience level and circumstances I'd be hesitant to try to distill it down to any one. Starting out, I'd suggest focusing more on categories of merchandise rather than specific items. You don't want to mess with something super saturated like iPads because you'll never rank in the SERP. You don't want to try selling books because you're dealing with a more discriminating type of consumer that you might need to build some kind of relationship with. Start with something high level like auto parts then as you get more experience, drill down to specifics.

>What tasks did you actually automate?
Literally everything. I use a combination of scripts written in Java, Bash, Javascript, PHP, and Python with a lot of Selenium to do everything from provision a host, get the content together, format it all for the database, you name it. It took me a year to fine tune it to the point where I type the scripts name into terminal and press Enter and 30 minutes later, I have a site up and running. Now when I have new ideas, I just edit whichever script. Pre-automation, it took 10 hours a day of human labor to accomplish what now takes about 10 minutes of human labor.
>Do you literally scrape and assemble content autonomously?
Quality content can make or break a campaign more than anything else. I have a good content source that I'd consider part of my edge. The script does format it into a textfile that is "sourced" into the database.
>Last question, do you use wordpress? I can code and I've used wordpress for sites and it just feels so... dirty.
Yes. Here's why. At least 25 percent of the sites on the internet are run on WP so it is much more easy to blend in and fly under the radar. If you are an affiliate, Google hates you and they hate your business model. Why? Assuming you are using SEO to move up in the organic rankings, you are making money but you aren't paying them money. Ergo, the problem as they see it. So despite WP's, um, shortcomings, I'd recommend using it for this kind of stuff. What keeps me sane using WP is I never modify the source of the framework itself. Anything I need, I either find or author my own plugin.

>I have a good content source that I'd consider part of my edge

what source ? and have you thought to put your script on the market ?

Greatly appreciate your response user, thank you.
It's his edge, obviously not going to tell you and he probably makes more money using it by himself (setting himself ahead of the competition) than by selling it.

The same faggotry is so apparent ITT. Nice try op, sorry you fell for the meme yourself.

i have never clicked on an ad in my life that's why i don't get it. can't imagine how this works.

>have you thought to put your script on the market ?
That's actually a good question and yes I have thought about it. But it's like I suggested up here and I stand behind that. If you are going to call yourself an affiliate market, and you want to be a good one and make lots of money, put every ounce of energy behind that. If you half ass it by splitting your focus you will probably fail. When I'm done with AM, I might look into things like selling my script and content system but in the meantime that would be foolish. Not to mention the fact that there are people out there making a million dollars a month. My measly mid 5 figures barely rates so I have a lot of catching up to do.

>affiliate marketer

Isn't this a meme?

Wasn't there an user saying he made $500-600 in sales and saw like $5?

This is very true and I'd love if you could share your experience of affiliate summit. was it worth attending? I'd really like to go but I don't do much money yet(about $1k/mo)

I'd imagine going would really make a difference in networking, learning new things, and just being around people with like minds. But idk how those kinda conferences work

If either of you are still here I'd love to know how long it took for you to reach a fulltime living.

OP seems to do at least $20k/mo from ebay and the other poster running mobile/app installs is pushing close to that as well. Definitely a fulltime income for both of you.

I've bee at this for a year doing SEO pushing Amazon, Ebay, and a couple other smaller affiliates. In total I do just over $1k/mo and it's been a fucking grind to hit this much.

How many years of time did it take for you to reach a livable income? Like after taxes maybe $5k/mo or something that you can actually survive on? Am I in for another year or 2 of grueling grinding work just to hit those numbers?

Thanks for making this thread it's something that really deserves to be here

And for anyone doubting this, it's absolutely possible. But incredibly soul-sucking work(IMO).

You're basically writing reviews and posts to target people who might buy something. So you have to write about products you don't care about, but make it seem like you care just to earn money.

It takes a very long time to earn anything decent and there's so much competition that it's getting much more difficult(BestProducts, BestReviews, ThoroughlyReviewed, etc)

But anyone can do this. It's not rocket science. It's just that after 4-5 months of work you become numb, and you're not earning anything, and most people just quit. The only way to get there is to never quit

If that's true, how about you link us to one or three of your websites?

People in the affiliate space to not give out their websites because it's really easy to clone & steal someone's idea.

Yes this could happen anyway if someone finds sites in Google. But why make it easier? Especially if people peruse this board knowing it has affiliates on here.

I'm not even a big earner and I would never show any marketer one of my sites or even give away my niche. Someone who's making 20x more than me is definitely not going to show you their site. That's just the business.

I already listed a ton of affiliate sites in my previous post so check those out. Wirecutter and Sweethome are two more that do very well and recently sold to the NYT for millions.

Affiliate marketers are annoying, cringe worthy idiots.

Negative Nellys' at /biz are way worse

>how long to $5k/mo
OP here. It sounds like you're off to a great start. Many people give up long before they reach 1k a month. That's the thing about this though, it will suck your soul straight out of your body if you do everything by hand. How professional marketers with real jobs get up and go to work every day I will never know. I couldn't do it.
In the beginning, at about the 3 month mark, I had almost given up after putting work in every day and making absolutely nothing when lo and behold I checked my account one morning and staring back at me was earnings of $1.68. Triumph! I felt like a Spartan. The 5k a month mark came about 4 months later.
Some systems run at different speeds so you'll get there. You have the right attitude. Never quit.
To keep my soul intact, I use this as an opportunity to expand skills in related areas. My programming ability and SEO knowledge has gone through the roof.
>let's see your sites
I've shown exactly two people a sample of my sites and that was in person. The fact is they aren't anything special. Like user said, this isn't rocket science.
>Affiliate marketers are annoying, cringe worthy idiots.
I used to think similarly until the paychecks started rolling in. Jokes on me!

I had a question. Do you link build using your own sites or do you approach other websites?

If you use your own sites, do you host them at multiple servers?

I use all my own sites and they are spread out on quite a few servers and hosts to avoid a footprint. Google is quick to take down a site of mine if it gets on their radar so I try to make sure there aren't any patterns they can use to link any of them together. I.e., they get one and only one at a time.

>The 5k a month mark came about 4 months later.
That's crazy and if that is the case then I feel I may be doing something wrong.

You're talking about SEO affiliate right? Maybe the SEO landscape is different now but just the thought of ranking a site well in 4mo seems crazy, let alone hitting $5k/mo in that time.

I'm interested if you have any suggestions for scaling and moving beyond "do everything yourself" because I'm just about at that point. I'm using my money to pay off debt and the rest is all getting re-invested into my sites.

I primarily run Amz affiliate and it looks like you're doing well with eBay. Are your sites all SEO and targeted for money terms in Google? I can't imagine going from $0 to $5k in half a year but it seems like you've done it, which means it is possible and perhaps I'm doing something wrong or too slowly

Ah I stand corrected. If you're doing PBNs then that definitely explains how you could rank & earn in 4months

Ah. I'm currently approaching bloggers to link to me. But a lot of them ask money for linking to a commercial website. Some do it for free, but some even ask for up to 500 dollars (which I won't pay obviously)

That's why I asked. It's getting to the point it's becoming more profitable to set up multiple websites. I guess you could even make some money off owning a blog if people are willing to pay 50 dollars for something as simple as a hyperlink.

It is indeed possible for three main reasons. First, I write none of my own content; second, everything and I mean everything is automated; third, I have thousands of sites.
Refining the early version of my automation scripts is what took me from $1.68 to 5k in 4 months.
FWIW I don't actually use PBNs. None of my sites link to each other in any way.

Paid links is a huge underground industry. Google hates it and will ban blogs in a heartbeat if they think they're doing that but it is a legitimate source of SEO. I don't do it myself though.

>I have to constantly remind my partner not to be a criminal
>this is a legit industry, trust me

I think more than half of them even send me a brochure with options I could purchase. So they might as well shut down the internet

Touché. Here's the thing though, incorporating certain blackhat tactics will most definitely multiply your income 10 fold so it is incredibly tempting. Not to mention most people wouldn't see something like cookie stuffing as anything serious. Intuitively, it almost feels on the level of copyright infringement. That is until that knock comes at 3AM and they haul you and all your computers off in the back of a van. No thanks.

Hm interesting. So where do you find writers to hire that do quality work? Do you like Upwork or have any suggestions for finding writers?

I can't really tell you where I get my content for obvious reasons. I'll say this though. If you want to make big money with review sites, you have got to figure out how to scale your efforts and that means acquiring minimum viable content and putting it on as many sites as fast as possible. Note I said acquire, not buy. Figure out the theory underlying a review that converts and find minimum viable content that fulfills the parameters.

Any blog sites I could use for this type of money making?

Thanks man one last question if you have time.

I'm looking to join the eBay affil program and what confuses me is how their cookies work for items that get sold. For example, if you link to an item and it sells that item won't be available to purchase anymore.

So when someone clicks that link does your cookie still register even if they buy something else? Or are you able to link directly to search results for items, rather than to specific auctions that'll expire? I'd like to target used goods on eBay and it makes more sense(IMO) to link to search pages rather than specific item/auction pages... but I'm not sure if EPN lets you build affil links to search pages or how their cookies work just looking for info

If you mean hosted blog, I've heard of people making money on wordpress.org but I'd suggest getting your own domains. It's really cheap and you aren't limited in any way.
>What if I link to an item on eBay that isn't available anymore?
Even if whatever you linked to has already sold, as long as they buy something within 24 hours, you get the commission. The real issue is the cookie is only 24 hours but it is what it is.
>What pages on eBay can an affiliate link to?
When you join epn, they have a tool you can use to link to any page. The way it works is really simple though so you can generate an affiliate link programmatically once you see how it works.
The trick if you are linking to individual items is only link to ones where the seller has been around and it's a listing that has something like "235 sold" somewhere. That way you know the listing never actually dies.

How do all those blackhat fags at blackhatworld do it? They do illegal shit 24/7 and there are thousands of them and they make bank. Ask them and they'll say all they do is illegal...whilee 99% of methods are illegal. What the fuck. If I was more stupid I would get easily baited by this.

I was thinking about doing affiliate marketing and doing other things to get easy money several years ago but then I realised that my cock was going to rock so I decided it wasn't worth the effort. My life wouldn't really be significantly better if I was pulling in serious cash flow by now anyway because there's hardly anywhere worth spending money on aside from the grocery store and gas station.

Actually, besides spamming and copyright issues, most black hat techniques are not illegal.

Google just doesn't like it.

A lot of the dudes on bhw are role players. Most of the stuff I see on that site boil down to legal yet TOS violating things like PBNs. If you haven't read about Shawn Hogan and his experience with Johnny Law, re cookie stuffing, go here: archive.is/JsAgk