Can you even make a living as an affiliate anymore?

Just because you make 200K in 3 months doesn't mean you are a millionaire. There is a huge difference between NET and GROSS. Affiliate stats show you what a person GROSSES. What they actually NET / PROFIT is whole nother story. These days don't expect that Profit % to be huge either. Some people might have to spend 180K to make 200K. Certainly doesn't make them a millionaire.

+ tax

If his stats are from members areas then they suck serious ass no matter how much it shows he made. I still do not have to worry about converting less than 1:5 with that traffic.

PS - not hating on his stats.

who wants to go halves on a hot dog cart?

Some of his traffic is from members areas. Probably only a small part.
I was simply saying that's the best traffic - nothing about his or your conversions.

My non members conversions are similar to his and so is my approach.

unbelievably there's NO taco bell in Thailand!
the only taco bell in all of Asia is in Singapore.

keep trying to talk my wife into opening one here lol

or at least a knock off, since everything in Thailand is a knockoff or pirate copy.

Not in the affiliate game. They would do better licensing content, and doing clip stores. You can still easily do $100.00 a day if you are doing updates, and know how to market some.

Jay, how much traffic did you loose? What did you do to get it back on the same level as it was? OR did you focus more on OCcash and was hoping the same tricks would still work for you as it did before for the link site?

Don't get me wrong I am not bashing you, just wondering. We also see a drop in sales but we still work hard with all 10 of us at the office (plus 5 parttime from home) here to make sure we all can continue to make a living out of this.

Times are changing and people need to get of their ass, this is not 1999 anymore and times are getting harder. The days of putting up a banner and see the sales flood in are over for a while already.

Is it harder, yes it's harder. I do a LOT of traffic and my ratio this month is creeping towards 1:3500, some programs that gave a few sales a day have simply not converted for weeks on end with ratios of 1:10k even some over 1:20k from SE traffic since thats most of my traffic.

Though I also partner in 2 paysite programs and have access to the reports. One of the main reasons I am sure is the huge CC declines, some guys even trying 3-4 legit cards before finally getting their join through. I can no longer signup to ccbill using any 5 of my cards, and have trouble with other processors too! Declines are up 300-400% from where I am sitting across the 4 processors we use, and thats not even mentioning the rebill declines from longstanding members!

Can you still make money as an affiliate? Fuck yeah! Sales are still being made, and traffic is still growing, and while we are in a bit of a rutt at the moment it will not always be like this. Quality porn sites are still making sales, people are still buying porn in droves and with so many big players getting out of the industry there is opportunity! Hell you can still make the magic $100k a year within 1-2 years with some hard work and dedication, and by hard work I mean not posting on the boards all day, and chatting on icq, I mean getting your hands dirty, pumping out 2-3 good sites a day, trading, tweaking, submitting, pushing and networking hard.

I joined with 3 other still very successful webmasters to start a free newbie training project, mostly because we all had family and friends keen to get into the biz. We have around 50 participants now, many how started from absolute scratch with almost no knowledge and in the space of a couple of months many of them are starting to make sales! Some do a site every few days, some maybe a blog a day, some are charging ahead really using the methods that we teach, the methods that work for us and are starting to see a weekly rise in traffic and sales. On top of that they work together, doing projects and trading links and helping eachother. The future of the affiliate model isn't in an isolated affiliate fighting against everyone else, its in cooperation and working together! There IS room in this industry for the affiliate, especially the affiliate who simply doesn't insert him or herself infront of an easy traffic source and traffic destination and hold out their hand for payment!

Regardless of the complaining about the shitty state of ratios and signups, this is still a pretty easy industry to get into in comparison to many others! It's still very easy to make $100k a year within 1-3 years, all it takes is some work, something which adult webmasters until recently haven't had to do.

I am a full time affiliate, and you won't believe: i am submitting galleries. i can feed my little family, i am not complaining, but sales do suck at the moment, hands down. i am not sure about the future, but i will diversify for sure. more attention to blogs, etc. but this current situation is motivating me to improve my work on a daily basis. I can't honestly pick any of the above options, as a mix of 2-3 is true for me.

You need to very seriously look into getting a merchant account. And, if you already have one then get a new one. This is a much easier way to make more money than getting more traffic. If you have people wanting to pay, you must find a way to let them.

We do through paysquare, though you are right declines are lower on that. Then again fraud screening is a pain in the rear end for them too, been getting hit by carders hard for the last 6 months.

Yeah I think THIS is the big problem. Thanks for verifying what I also see. I have NATS progs that are selling ok lately. Yet CCBill progs are not converting for shit.

I don't know about any other affils but I am not going to continue to send traffic to CCBill when there are NATS progs I am not using that I know can't do worse!

I know there are a lot of good folks in the industry promoting sites using CCBill and some of the sites are quite good so I try not to beat on CCBill too bad but damn.

Maybe if in a year us affils are sending 1/8 the traffic to CCBill they'll wake the F up. 5 cards declined is just rediculous.

I am at 1 in the last 24,000 hits to CCBill. WHY in the hell haven't I yanked links?

I don't know, I guess I hope suddenly CCBill will wake up tomrrow and lift the scrub.

Anyhow just venting. Pulling all CCBill links is a hell of a step back for me.

I didn't really lose any traffic. Traffic level is not proporional to drop in sales. Of couse, I know what worked a link time ago doesn't work now, trust me I caught a tn of shit for the old linklisters for starting snizzshare.

Like someone else in this thread said, when the median ratios for a paysite go from 1:400, go to 1:2000, to however bad they've gotten now, there is your problem.

A flux in the ratio hurts a lot more than a dip in traffic.