Originally Posted by will76
(Post 13190869)
The most important thing I have learned from 8 years of doing this shit.... The sad thing was that it took me 6 years to figure this out.
This applies mainly to affiliates, but in some ways could be applied to everyone.
I started off (1999) as a membership site owner, spent countless hours updating the sites, adding more content, paying for plugins, dealing with members, etc.. After realizing all the time I put in just to provide a product to sell vs the amount of money I was making from advertising other people's sites, it seemed like a no brainer to switch over to being an 100% affiliate. Now instead of spending 20 - 30 hours a week on maintaining my membership sites I had that much more time to spend on advertising and getting more traffic. This made me a lot more money. Thankfully I was 100% away from my membership sites a couple years before ibill went under, so I only lost about 50K from old rebills. If I would have been going 100% strong with my sites right up until they went under I would have lost well over a million dollars, so I lucked out there.
Where I went wrong and got off course....
When I was promoting my own membership sites I was building something of value. As I made money from them they built a membership base. The more popular they became the more my membership base grew and the more my site was recognized on the net. So not only did I directly make money from my advertising (10 sales a day, say I made = $300 etc...) but I built "x" amount of value into my site as my membership base got bigger, site got more popular, etc. For example, if I would have grown my site to have 1000 active members not only would I have been making 35K a month, but I would have a site worth a lot more then that if I chose to sell it.
When I switched over to being 100% an affiliate, for the most part I used single pages or small sites built around that sponsor... I didn't put any effort into trying to retain people or build up the page/site I was using, I was happy getting sign ups from the traffic i sent to it. Fatal Flaw. Here I am busting my ass, making really good money, but at the end of the day, what did I have? A nice check and that was about it. I had nothing of value. I had grossed over a million in sales the year before just to clickcash but i had nothing of value. nothing. No site like hoes.com or a tgp that had 500K hits a day etc.. i had zero to show for it except for the checks I was being sent.
I always prided myself on the ability to make money off of everything I did and I totally missed the boat on that one. It finally hit me one day, why not make the same amount of money but build value in your sites at the same time. Some simple things to do this would be to add a forum, add blogs that update everyday, give people a reason to use your site and to want to come back and use your site over and over again. Get creative, there are many ways to do this but the point being is don't just make a site to make money, but build a site you are making money from. For the most part I had promoted 1 sponsor, so once the person signed up, if they came back i made no money off of them so I wasnt thinking this way. I missed the fact, popular site, retain traffic = build value in the site not just make money off of it.
That's my advice, if you are an affiliate build value in something while you making money from it. As simple as it sounds, I can't be the only person that didn't realize this. I think back now, if I would have been sending all my traffic to a site like hoes.com it would not only be as popular if not bigger then his, I would have something of value worth a good bit of money. It would have been nice all this time to make really good money and ALSO own something worth milions. It woud be like the icing on the cake ( the cakes being all those nice checks).
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