
I made $622,322.96 in 2009 from affiliate marketing. - sadiq
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/azcni/i_made_62232296_in_2009_from_affiliate_marketing/
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warfangle
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
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.)

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maurycy
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
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.

~~~
dabent
" Sometimes the right hand doesn't really want to know what the left hand is
doing."

I agree. There's a level of plausible deniability with using affiliates. They
can resort to some black-hat tactics and when they are caught, you can claim
you didn't know, and ban them.

"Google takes huge, huge amounts of money from advertisers whose hands are
less than clean."

I agree with this, while noting that almost all ad networks do. No one wants
to admit it, but a lot of the internet was built on rebills and affiliate ads.
Now Google is bigger and has some large clients to keep happy, so they push
back harder on scams as they crop up. But as long as rebills exist, Google and
others are stuck playing "whack-a-mole" with the latest flavor of rebill.

The latest FTC moves have put some pressure on affiliates, but it's just a
matter of time before they come up with something else.

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axod
<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
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
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

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javery
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
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
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.

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ja27
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>

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parka
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.

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csomar
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.

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parka
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.

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vinhboy
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....

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c00p3r
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.

