Levelling Up Your Affiliate Game

byrudi

67 followers

Updated 5 years ago

This information is designed for those who have completed all of the training and are at least making a few bucks from affiliate commissions.

Before I carry on, I will point out that to be genuinely successful and achieve the freedom that affiliate marketing can offer you, you need to treat it very much like a business rather than a hobby.

Harsh Truth #1: No, you CANNOT make money for FREE online

I can almost hear you scoffing at your monitor while reading that, either in disappointment, because that's not what you have read or in anger because you feel like you have never spent a dime to make an affiliate income.

However, before you start writing an angry post reply hear me out, and I will explain what I mean. Yes, some of the costs are negligible but are expenses nonetheless. But, the last one is a BIG expense and should take the centre of attention in your planning for affiliate campaigns.

Costs (In Ascending Order)

Domain Name Costs

Sure, you can get a free domain name or a very cheap one for 12 months, but it is a cost nonetheless.

Sadly the days of big incomes from sites like Squidoo and HubPages have long gone. Sure, you can still create free blogs etc and get a bit of traction and income but you are risking big. The reason for this is if the domain gets penalized by Google (think Ezine articles, tanked big time overnight), or shuts down Squidoo style. I lost a considerable amount when that happened. Sure, the content was re-published on HubPages, but it was never the same. Then Google stopped showing as much love to Web2.0s and traffic died off.

Hosting Costs

Hosting can be picked up for pretty cheap these days, and yes you have hosting included here at WA. But, of course, there is an associated cost.

Some things to remember about hosting is that you get what you pay for.

If you have a small website that you are just growing out, then you will be fine throwing it on Hostgator or Bluehost etc. But as you are scaling shared hosting has inherent risks. Speed is one of many, but ever more important ranking factors. Shared servers with thousands of websites suffer in terms of speed.

The reason for this is that if many sites can draw on the server at any one time. This it will slow all of those sites down. If just one of those sites gets a DDOS attack, it will affect every single website on that server that is sharing the IP address.

I wouldn't worry too much about that at the moment but with faster hosting (I use Amazon, Digital Ocean and Kinsta) come higher prices. However, it is all relative because when you are at a level to spend on these, you will already be earning.

The most crucial part of understanding how to level up your affiliate game is the value placed on your time. Your time is the biggest expense you will have, and it most certainly has a physical $$$ value attached to it. Let me explain.

When you are starting out

When we start in affiliate marketing, it is something we do in our spare time, whether that is reading and learning, crafting your first article or just researching. But, using your spare time has a cost. It's time you could be spending with your family, actually sleeping (don't expect much of that in your first 12 months of AM) or even at work earning a guaranteed dollar.

As you grow to say $100 a day (that was the point I quit my job), you need to scale rapidly to shift that up to $1000 a day. It can come in time just plodding on, but it can take what feels like forever.

To scale, you need have in place processes for success.

Once you have these well-defined processes, you can outsource much of the grunt work. 95% of things in affiliate marketing can be outsourced. However, there is an initial expense before you see the ROI.

When I first started outsourcing, I couldn't afford to get a team to do almost everything, so I stuck with what I was good at which was Niche and KW research and writing and started to outsource the parts that took me too long to do such as web design, logo design.

I will eventually get to writing a post about designing your roadmap, associating your processes with it and costing out a project.

For the moment, I go back to treating affiliate marketing as a business. A business would project plan and create a profit and loss, so why not in affiliate marketing. Trust me, it is the only way that you will be able to scale on a massive scale.

I only work on organic traffic, ie the passive income so this is how I generally cost out a project.

1. Research. Pick the niche and define the cornerstone and pillar content keywords.
2. Research those keywords and what it will take to rank at the top for those terms. (i.e. content and # of Links).
3. Cost the links, whether in outreach time or physically buying links. I'm not advocating that before you moan, but its a tactic.
4. Work out potential traffic from defined keywords and note the number. This is always a loose figure, as....well, Google lies.
5. Find the best affiliate product for the customer (not always the highest paying) and find out how much you get per sale.
6. Work on a conservative 2 to 5% conversion rate from traffic, dependent on how well you align search intent with the pages it could be far higher. Define that figure.
7. Do the math. So, if for example, you get $20 a sale, potential traffic of say 2000 a month to a particular page. At a low 2% conversion rate that is 40 conversions at $20 is $800 per month.

In general, my costs are around $4000 to $5000 per site build when I am at No1 for competitive terms. So at that rate payback is achieved in 6 months, although I pulled those figures out of the air. Generally, I make payback/profitability between months 6 and 9. If I cant, achieve that, in most cases, I won't go for the niche.

Ok, so obviously I could do a great deal of the work myself and bring that figure down to 0.

But, as you will realize as time goes on and you become more proficient, your time is better spent on tasks to grow your business exponentially.

For instance, for me to build said the site, i.e. design, content writing etc. would take me around 70 to 100 hours all in all (including link building etc.). Not to mention frustration and the stress etc for doing things I hate.

I consult at on average $400 an hour. To me 100 hours is worth $40,000 so it's just good business sense to outsource. Even at $50 an hour I would break even on the project creation and after 9 to 12 months, anything the site would make would be profit.

Mature the site for a few years (its generally passice income now) and then flip. If a site makes around $5k per month (always my aim) then you will be looking to flip for around $150k to $250k for a good mature site.

So, as I mentioned earlier to level up your game, accept that there is an associated cost, do the math and plan your business methodically.

NEVER undervalue your time, when you scale you will truly see the possibilities of earning large amounts without really doing much more than project management.

PS, Kyle and Carson, I would love to see some sort of project management system in WA. So processes can be defined, figures entered, and progress tracked. Just a thought though!

Any Q's give me a shout

Rudi