5 ms·

I made $622,322.96 in 2009 from affiliate marketing.

130 points by sadiq 17y ago

axod 17y ago
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974# http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974# is also a good read. This is from a few years back, but he was getting £100K+/month, mainly from PPC in the UK. It's fairly easy to find a niche and iterate until profitable. However, it can all go horribly wrong as well.
- sadiq 17y ago
  A quick investigation of his company's published accounts for 2008 say he's actually making even better money now than he was back then. Interesting.
  - axod 17y ago
    I'm sure he is. Most of it is PPC... eg Find a good niche - say "order flowers online" Find all the best keywords on Google Setup landing pages if needed, or just send direct to affiliates. Profit from the commissions
- Timothee 17y ago
  How horribly wrong can it go? Do you mean spend a lot of time for barely any return, or actually losing a lot of money? If the latter, how so?
  - axod 17y ago
    If you're doing PPC type things, then generally you have to pay your advertising bill reasonably quickly. But you may have to wait months for revenue from affiliate networks. Also it's not unknown of for leads/sales to be disputed later on, or be reversed, or advertisers to go under, or affiliate networks to go under. Also if you're paying for traffic in the hope of directing it to affiliate links, those affiliate links may be down/broken/messed up in other ways. So you have to be pretty sure everything is working exactly as it should be, especially if you're spending a lot on traffic.
warfangle 17y ago
Anecdotally: Just about everyone I've met who run affiliate marketing and/or direct marketing companies (not necessarily their employees, but definitely the owners) are probably the most shady individuals I have ever dealt with.
- patio11 17y ago
  It is sort of like SEO: it gets a bad rap from a contingent of the market who perpetuate abuses. This man, for example, made hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales by facilitating theft. (There is no other way to describe rebilling if you understand what the game is.)
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - va_coder 17y ago
      "For me, the biggest money makers.....2008, 2009 were rebill offers" He stole money. If you don't know what rebill means look it up. Example of rebill: 10 years ago I bought a computer from Best Buy and got free internet from AOL for 6 months. I never used it. After 6 months AOL started billing me. Somewhere in the fine print it mentioned they would start billing me automatically after 6 months. Many rebillers don't have contact info so cancelling is difficult.
      - tjoozeylabs 17y ago
        Rebills are beginning to fade in the affiliate marketing industry. This is a major part of their money making on these networks. Should be interesting
        Psyonic 17y ago
        They are, but mainly because banks are revoking merchant accounts of those who use rebills and have high chargeback levels. The FTC, banks, and Google are all cracking down on shady affiliate stuff right now. As you said, the next few years should be interesting.
maurycy 17y ago
One thing that always surprise me about most of the web startups is why we're so reluctant to the affiliate marketing. The industry has a bad name, I agree. On the other hand, it's just selling something for a provision. It does not have to involve sneaky get-rich-quick schemes. Most of the world sells something for someone and does (financially) better than many startups. It's relatively easy to start selling for someone and when it turns out to be profitable, creating your own product. For instance, it's hard to get into booking industry, w/o some partnership initially. Once you're big, though, you can drop the middle party and speak with GDS or hotels directly. EDIT: I know that many startups are about changing the world. I'd say, however, that many are just about making money. And affiliate is a good path.
- patio11 17y ago
  It is difficult to scale affiliate marketing like you can scale products, at least in a way which makes sense. For example, typical affiliate payouts for many products are in the 30% range. Many startups want to have many, many millions in revenue. Once you start talking about a million here and a million there you have to ask yourself what it is about the affiliate that the merchant can't bring in house. In some cases, the answer is that the affiliate's aggregation capabilities provides value -- hotels would be a good example of this. In many cases, the answer is NOT pleasant. Sometimes the right hand doesn't really want to know what the left hand is doing. The other alternative is somehow making a scalable business out of bundling lots and lots of little merchants together and providing scalable affiliate services to all of them. By that metric, Google is almost the biggest affiliate in history. (You can even do CPA bidding!) Relatedly, Google takes huge, huge amounts of money from advertisers whose hands are less than clean. (Ringtones, for example: essentially 100% of these are rebill scams. Ditto diet, weight loss, acai berry, teeth whitening products, whatever the flavor of the month is.) Think ScamVille times two or three orders of magnitude and perpetuated under the curiously unseeing eye of the most beloved tech company in history.
  - maurycy 17y ago
    That's true. I think, the affiliate is a good start. Once you're big, it's silly to leave money on the table. Obviously, you have to be careful with the industry you pick, so it's big enough. What I'm speaking, though, is about relatively small companies. I don't mean VC backed companies with well researched markets. There's a lot of kids dreaming about big buck doing #31337 clone of Flickr. It's basically a waste of time, in most cases. You have to be careful with the real products. They have their drawbacks, too. You have to do the support, reply e-mails from the actual customers, sometimes forecast the demand etc. Another thing I literally love in the affiliate industry is their experiments driven approach. The best test (it even rhymes!). That's what Google do obsessively, too. (see Marissa Mayer vs Doug Brown thread) I think there's a lot to learn from the affiliate industry. It's silly to get into usual moralistic standpoint: usually they have less skills than a regular wizz kid, and, somehow, manage to make better money. EDIT: It's also good to have a broader perspective. When you're speaking with a client directly and agreeing on the fee, you're doing affiliate, too.
ja27 17y ago
If you're interested in this, definitely check out ShoeMoney and his story. I've had his Google check photo hanging up in my office as motivation for 2 years. http://www.shoemoney.com http://www.shoemoney.com
c00p3r 17y ago
wow. I thought they're using it only in porn CJs. Progress is going on, and seems like I'm getting old.. =) If this is an evolution of a porn technologies it works for sure. It is just a ponzi scheme where newcomers loses some money and established players gets them.
javery 17y ago
When did "build something people want" turn into making money at any cost? This is the 2nd or 3rd highly voted article about ways to make money without building a startup that provides meaningful value to it's users.
- compumike 17y ago
  The tech / startup world is filled with lots of people who are interested "building something people want" but with no clue about monetization. (Twitter, or just about any company with no revenue/profit model...) Articles like this provide contrast -- people who've figured out how to monetize the web (but aren't necessarily adding a ton of value). Affiliate marketers have at least figured out that "unique visitors" or "active users" doesn't pay the bills like it did in the late '90s. It does seem shady / etc, but I think there's lessons to be learned. I think many in this community are hoping that there's a middle ground, with both value creation ("building something people want") and extracting that value via monetization.
  - javery 17y ago
    There is plenty of information out there from great companies who are making money from day 1 while providing value, it seems like it's pretty damn simple actually. Create a product that does something useful, charge people for it.
- il 17y ago
  When did "start a business" become "build something that you can't monetize"? The goal of business is to make money. The people you should be most concerned about building value for are your shareholders.
  - javery 17y ago
    That's quite a leap you made there, the businesses I run have been profitable from day 1 and also provide value to people. Making money is one of the best ways to know that are providing value, if people will pay for your app on a monthly basis then you know they find it valuable and are using it. These recent posts, this one included, are about making money through shady tactics (there is a reason they have to create adsense accounts every two weeks).
vinhboy 17y ago
Amazing, simply amazing. I've had some success doing Affiliate Marketing myself, but this is at a scale I could never imagine. Great, now you guys have depleted all my weekend hours....
csomar 17y ago
Can't agree more that marketing weight losses products is sh*t and will very likely end by spamming people (like the 50 or 60 SPAM Gmail catch every month). But let's look from the good side. You design a new website (with flash for example), fancy and nice, good customer supports, easy transactions, product delivery management... and you take a % in sale. You can end up earning something like $100K a month. Nothing weired with that, it's innovative and amazing and you are improving the user experience. The real problem is that the current marketer are too busy earning money from ebay/email/twitter SPAM to build something innovative that solves buyers problems.
parka 17y ago
Wow. How I wish I earn that kind of money. I'm an affiliate marketer also but I prefer to refer to myself as a product reviwer. My mission statement is "To help buyers understand exactly what they are buying". It brings job to me when my readers comment on how my reviews helped them save money -- they avoided a bad product after reading my review. To me, affiliate marketing is just another revenue model, part of the business model but not the business itself. Whether your business is shady depends on how you're abusing the model. That said, all other revenue models can be abused. Currently, I'm earning US$1500 per month, after a years of work. I work 2 hours per day and have a full time job besides that. My web marketing sucks but hopefully next year I can quit my job and explore other ways of building businesses around affiliate marketing.
parka 17y ago
If you guys don't already know, Firefox and other browsers also make major money through affiliate marketing. Every sale that's make through that little search box nets the company a little commission. Imagine how many people are using web browsers, and which web browsers.

130 points by sadiq 17y ago

axod 17y ago

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974# http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974# is also a good read. This is from a few years back, but he was getting £100K+/month, mainly from PPC in the UK. It's fairly easy to find a niche and iterate until profitable. However, it can all go horribly wrong as well.

sadiq 17y ago
A quick investigation of his company's published accounts for 2008 say he's actually making even better money now than he was back then. Interesting.
- axod 17y ago
  I'm sure he is. Most of it is PPC... eg Find a good niche - say "order flowers online" Find all the best keywords on Google Setup landing pages if needed, or just send direct to affiliates. Profit from the commissions
Timothee 17y ago
How horribly wrong can it go? Do you mean spend a lot of time for barely any return, or actually losing a lot of money? If the latter, how so?
- axod 17y ago
  If you're doing PPC type things, then generally you have to pay your advertising bill reasonably quickly. But you may have to wait months for revenue from affiliate networks. Also it's not unknown of for leads/sales to be disputed later on, or be reversed, or advertisers to go under, or affiliate networks to go under. Also if you're paying for traffic in the hope of directing it to affiliate links, those affiliate links may be down/broken/messed up in other ways. So you have to be pretty sure everything is working exactly as it should be, especially if you're spending a lot on traffic.

warfangle 17y ago

Anecdotally: Just about everyone I've met who run affiliate marketing and/or direct marketing companies (not necessarily their employees, but definitely the owners) are probably the most shady individuals I have ever dealt with.

patio11 17y ago
It is sort of like SEO: it gets a bad rap from a contingent of the market who perpetuate abuses. This man, for example, made hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales by facilitating theft. (There is no other way to describe rebilling if you understand what the game is.)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - va_coder 17y ago
    "For me, the biggest money makers.....2008, 2009 were rebill offers" He stole money. If you don't know what rebill means look it up. Example of rebill: 10 years ago I bought a computer from Best Buy and got free internet from AOL for 6 months. I never used it. After 6 months AOL started billing me. Somewhere in the fine print it mentioned they would start billing me automatically after 6 months. Many rebillers don't have contact info so cancelling is difficult.
    - tjoozeylabs 17y ago
      Rebills are beginning to fade in the affiliate marketing industry. This is a major part of their money making on these networks. Should be interesting
      - Psyonic 17y ago
        They are, but mainly because banks are revoking merchant accounts of those who use rebills and have high chargeback levels. The FTC, banks, and Google are all cracking down on shady affiliate stuff right now. As you said, the next few years should be interesting.

maurycy 17y ago

One thing that always surprise me about most of the web startups is why we're so reluctant to the affiliate marketing. The industry has a bad name, I agree. On the other hand, it's just selling something for a provision. It does not have to involve sneaky get-rich-quick schemes. Most of the world sells something for someone and does (financially) better than many startups. It's relatively easy to start selling for someone and when it turns out to be profitable, creating your own product. For instance, it's hard to get into booking industry, w/o some partnership initially. Once you're big, though, you can drop the middle party and speak with GDS or hotels directly. EDIT: I know that many startups are about changing the world. I'd say, however, that many are just about making money. And affiliate is a good path.

patio11 17y ago
It is difficult to scale affiliate marketing like you can scale products, at least in a way which makes sense. For example, typical affiliate payouts for many products are in the 30% range. Many startups want to have many, many millions in revenue. Once you start talking about a million here and a million there you have to ask yourself what it is about the affiliate that the merchant can't bring in house. In some cases, the answer is that the affiliate's aggregation capabilities provides value -- hotels would be a good example of this. In many cases, the answer is NOT pleasant. Sometimes the right hand doesn't really want to know what the left hand is doing. The other alternative is somehow making a scalable business out of bundling lots and lots of little merchants together and providing scalable affiliate services to all of them. By that metric, Google is almost the biggest affiliate in history. (You can even do CPA bidding!) Relatedly, Google takes huge, huge amounts of money from advertisers whose hands are less than clean. (Ringtones, for example: essentially 100% of these are rebill scams. Ditto diet, weight loss, acai berry, teeth whitening products, whatever the flavor of the month is.) Think ScamVille times two or three orders of magnitude and perpetuated under the curiously unseeing eye of the most beloved tech company in history.
- maurycy 17y ago
  That's true. I think, the affiliate is a good start. Once you're big, it's silly to leave money on the table. Obviously, you have to be careful with the industry you pick, so it's big enough. What I'm speaking, though, is about relatively small companies. I don't mean VC backed companies with well researched markets. There's a lot of kids dreaming about big buck doing #31337 clone of Flickr. It's basically a waste of time, in most cases. You have to be careful with the real products. They have their drawbacks, too. You have to do the support, reply e-mails from the actual customers, sometimes forecast the demand etc. Another thing I literally love in the affiliate industry is their experiments driven approach. The best test (it even rhymes!). That's what Google do obsessively, too. (see Marissa Mayer vs Doug Brown thread) I think there's a lot to learn from the affiliate industry. It's silly to get into usual moralistic standpoint: usually they have less skills than a regular wizz kid, and, somehow, manage to make better money. EDIT: It's also good to have a broader perspective. When you're speaking with a client directly and agreeing on the fee, you're doing affiliate, too.

ja27 17y ago

If you're interested in this, definitely check out ShoeMoney and his story. I've had his Google check photo hanging up in my office as motivation for 2 years. http://www.shoemoney.com http://www.shoemoney.com

c00p3r 17y ago

wow. I thought they're using it only in porn CJs. Progress is going on, and seems like I'm getting old.. =) If this is an evolution of a porn technologies it works for sure. It is just a ponzi scheme where newcomers loses some money and established players gets them.

javery 17y ago

When did "build something people want" turn into making money at any cost? This is the 2nd or 3rd highly voted article about ways to make money without building a startup that provides meaningful value to it's users.

compumike 17y ago
The tech / startup world is filled with lots of people who are interested "building something people want" but with no clue about monetization. (Twitter, or just about any company with no revenue/profit model...) Articles like this provide contrast -- people who've figured out how to monetize the web (but aren't necessarily adding a ton of value). Affiliate marketers have at least figured out that "unique visitors" or "active users" doesn't pay the bills like it did in the late '90s. It does seem shady / etc, but I think there's lessons to be learned. I think many in this community are hoping that there's a middle ground, with both value creation ("building something people want") and extracting that value via monetization.
- javery 17y ago
  There is plenty of information out there from great companies who are making money from day 1 while providing value, it seems like it's pretty damn simple actually. Create a product that does something useful, charge people for it.
il 17y ago
When did "start a business" become "build something that you can't monetize"? The goal of business is to make money. The people you should be most concerned about building value for are your shareholders.
- javery 17y ago
  That's quite a leap you made there, the businesses I run have been profitable from day 1 and also provide value to people. Making money is one of the best ways to know that are providing value, if people will pay for your app on a monthly basis then you know they find it valuable and are using it. These recent posts, this one included, are about making money through shady tactics (there is a reason they have to create adsense accounts every two weeks).

vinhboy 17y ago

Amazing, simply amazing. I've had some success doing Affiliate Marketing myself, but this is at a scale I could never imagine. Great, now you guys have depleted all my weekend hours....

csomar 17y ago

Can't agree more that marketing weight losses products is sh*t and will very likely end by spamming people (like the 50 or 60 SPAM Gmail catch every month). But let's look from the good side. You design a new website (with flash for example), fancy and nice, good customer supports, easy transactions, product delivery management... and you take a % in sale. You can end up earning something like $100K a month. Nothing weired with that, it's innovative and amazing and you are improving the user experience. The real problem is that the current marketer are too busy earning money from ebay/email/twitter SPAM to build something innovative that solves buyers problems.

parka 17y ago

Wow. How I wish I earn that kind of money. I'm an affiliate marketer also but I prefer to refer to myself as a product reviwer. My mission statement is "To help buyers understand exactly what they are buying". It brings job to me when my readers comment on how my reviews helped them save money -- they avoided a bad product after reading my review. To me, affiliate marketing is just another revenue model, part of the business model but not the business itself. Whether your business is shady depends on how you're abusing the model. That said, all other revenue models can be abused. Currently, I'm earning US$1500 per month, after a years of work. I work 2 hours per day and have a full time job besides that. My web marketing sucks but hopefully next year I can quit my job and explore other ways of building businesses around affiliate marketing.

parka 17y ago

If you guys don't already know, Firefox and other browsers also make major money through affiliate marketing. Every sale that's make through that little search box nets the company a little commission. Imagine how many people are using web browsers, and which web browsers.