Having a Blast at the Affiliate Summit, Part III
July 14th, 2007 by 
Amit
Day 2
On day 2 I had a chance to see Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney), and Lee Dod’s presentation on Monetizing Communities. This talk was basically about how to develop viral sites (forum/membership sites in particular) that slowly overtime build up a solid membership base all from free search engine traffic.
These sites are monetized with well chosen and well placed contextual advertising.
It was a fascinating talk. In fact, I been talking to Tom (my business partner) about purchasing sites like these. A well monetized site that has a large active membership base can be a solid residual source of revenue for years to come.
After the talk, I had a chance to take a picture with Shoemoney…
Shoemoney is really a very nice guy, always willing to help people.
The next blockbuster talk was by Kris Jones, CEO of Pepperjam, on the “Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing.” What an AWESOME talk! He talked about the power of search arbitrage, and gave an excellent outline on how a newbie affiliate can get started in the world of search arbitrage.
As you know search arbitrage, or ppc affiliate marketing, is my specialty! So I was very excited to hear the CEO of Pepperjam talking highly of this method of affiliate marketing.
LESSONS LEARNED
At dinner that night I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!
Not only this, Kris Jones had mentioned during his talk that he became a super affiliate by promoting 2000 affiliate programs, generating $50/month profit for each! Amazing.
This approach to affiliate marketing is definitely contrary to everything I’ve been teaching. That is, you should focus on a few big affiliate offers and build several authority sites and work towards generating a $100k+/month per affiliate offer.
That’s what’s cool about affiliate marketing, there’s so many creative ways to make it work!
Nevertheless, I will continue to advocate building a handful of affiliate sites instead of 1000s. Here why:
- Long Term Profits - once you build an established large affiliate site, it more likely to make long term profits than a small campaign making $50/day profit
- Google’s landing page “quality” score - Since paid search and natural search are converging, small mini sites won’t last long term-especially on Google
- Competitive advantage - having just a few big affiliate sites gives you the ability to continually improve your sites, split test your landing pages to improve conversions, revamp the site design every six months, etc, etc. With 1000s of sites this could be a near impossible task, certainly impossible for most affiliates. With rising ppc costs, continually improving site conversions is a necessity!
- Low maintenance - Once you have a large site optimized, maintaining it is easy, especially compared to monitoring the performance of 1000s of smaller affiliate sites
Would you rather try to keep 1000 plates spinning or just a couple?
affilaite summit kris jones monetizing websites pepperjam shoemoney
Posted in Industry News, affiliate marketing | 
Hi Amit,
Definiely a variety of different approaches out there.
To add on to your point about authority sites, you can build up the brand value of rich content sites and have the ability to flip a big, established content site, in the same way Lee flips forums too.
I think there’s nothing quite like building up a PlentyOfFish.com or a eHarmony.com and selling it for a nice stack of cash…
Amit,
Thanks for attending my presentation and for sharing with me some of your perspectives on affiliate marketing.
From my experience over the last eight years I’ve found that those individuals that are able to build large authority websites are programmers / web developers or businesses with skilled programmers /web developers on staff.
Think about it - some of the names you mentioned like Marcus from plentyoffish and Jeremy Schoemaker from Shoemoney Media…these guys are skilled programmers and / or have skilled programmers on their staff. Moreover, like yourself, these programmers also have impressive marketing insight - that’s key.
Kudos to you guys!
However, the typical entrepreneur does not have programming and web development skills - that’s a fact, which are essential to building the kind of websites you mentioned in your talk at Affiliate Summit and on your blog.
The truth is you can make a ton of money by building out authority websites and monetizing them with affiliate offers - there’s no doubt about that!
However, I’ve yet to meet someone who has done this successfully and isn’t an experienced, skilled programmer / web developer - these skills are learnable, but not easily learned.
From my experience speaking at conferences, I typically advocate that affiliate marketing search arbitragers find something that works on a small scale, replicate it, and then scale it.
What I advocate is about approach and discipline, not technical skills.
For instance, if the affiliate can figure out a way to generate $100 per month profit from 1,000 merchants that’s $100K per month profit, $1.2 million profit per year.
During my presentation at Affiliate Summit I offered a very simple strategy to do this, but it will require discipline. The tip was to develop an affiliate strategy around trademark typos. Develop your campaigns around misspelled trademarks, not the actual trademark itself, and either direct link using the affiliate tracking URL or build out landing pages and send the traffic through there.
I provide insight on how to build those landing pages that should pass Google’s Quality Score algorithm at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/2007eastpreso/5a-The-Confluence-of-Search-and-Affiliate-Marketing.pdf
The typo analogy is only meant as an example of how an average entrepreneur, with or without technical skill, can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing search arbitrage by doing something simple and scaling it.
My guess is that over time your presentation will appeal mostly to people who have the technical skills to build out the kind of authority websites you speak of - I will be there to listen because that approach is very exciting and over time potentially extremely lucrative.
Either way, there is a ton of money to be made by entrepreneurs willing to understand and apply proven affiliate marketing search arbitrage skills.
It was my pleasure meeting you in Miami!
Hi Kris,
Again you’re absolutely right. When I first got started and didn’t have a team of people and expert programmers, I was doing direct linking to the merchant and focusing on a handful high converting keywords.
I recommend direct linking to newbie affiliates as a great way to learn adwords. I actually launched 16 or so campaigns when I got started, although most of them failed I learned a ton about adwords and affiliate marketing.
In fact I quit my day job with around 10 simple one page affiliate sites all in one niche but targeting different sub-niches.
Only after that did I start building a team and focus on building larger sites.
The longer I’m in this business the more my affiliate marketing strategy has evolved. That’s what makes this business exciting for me, every year I’m always doing something different!
Look forward to speaking to you at future conferences.
Very interesting post and comments. Amit, I like your approach of creating a few high-authority sites and have begun adopting it with a new market I’m getting into. I have the advantage of being a web programmer, so having the ablility to code my own sites, making it very attractive as Kris suggested. But, I’m also wary of putting all my eggs in one basket(or 2 or 3), so I’m not going to completely quit sending clicks straight to the merchant either. I guess that is my way of diversifying. My weakness is the lack of marketing insight. I’ve actually thought about taking ‘Marketing 101′ at a local college. Any suggestions for someone in my position how has little marketing knowledge?
Hey Brent,
You probably won’t learn much in a college Marketing class. I took “Marketing 300″ last year as a required course, but hoping that I would be able to apply some of it to my online marketing. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Maybe “major level” marketing classes would teach some good concepts, but a lot of intro and intermediate college courses are, in my opinion, a waste of time.
I think you would be much better off going to Barnes & Nobles or Amazon.com and picking up a few books on “direct marketing”. That is probably the area that is most applicable to affiliate marketing.
Hi Brent,
I totally agree with Derek, don’t waste your time with college marketing courses. I recommend Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Adwords. It discusses both Adwords and essential direct marketing principles.
As for diversification, I would not worry too much about it. If you build your campaign properly, and choose a solid market and promotion (that won’t expire next week) you’ll be in good shape.
My company’s strategy is to go into a new market every 3-6 months or so, and revamp an existing campaign (optimize and improve conversions) every 6 months or so. This is includes once a month or twice a month campaign “maintenance.” I’ll discuss this in a future blog post in more detail.
Hi Amit,
Another fantastic post. You are a generous and great man! The whole one-page site vs. content-heavy site with offers seems to be a very fundamental question. It seems to me that as more people get into the affiliate game and start throwing up landing pages and bidding on the same keywords, the integrity of Google’s search results will begin to decline. I have heard multiple people complain about how spammy Google’s SERPS have already gotten and that could really hurt Google’s business model over time as well as all honest affiliates who want to fundamentally add value to the web and not just make a quick buck.
The problem with the content sites is of course maintaining them and adding fresh content which you have addressed very well in many of your posts. But how much can you say about ringtones? Or Blockbuster offers? After awhile, you may hit a wall.
Have you ever built a large content site only to find out there wasn’t any kind of market for what you were offering? Pretty frustrating especially if you’re paying others to do all your coding and writing.
Love those posts, man! School is in session.
Peace,
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the kind words.
Yes maintaining a content site is a lot of work if you don’t have a team in place. When I build a large site I usually do it strictly for PPC at first. Adding 15-20 articles, privacy policy, about us, to make Google happy. And anywhere from 1-30 targeted ppc landing pages.
Once the campaign is making strong profits from PPC, I have my team add a few hundred articles to the site every month and start building a real content site.
I’ll be honest, unless you’re an SEO wizard don’t expect many sales from free traffic compared to what you’ll get with PPC traffic. I make 95% of my sales from PPC traffic, and hope to make a larger % of sales from free traffic a few years down the road as my site matures and has substantial content.
Good post and great comments.
Sorry for cross commenting here, but I’d like to comment on Kris’ comment.
Kris, you say that in order to build a large authority website you need to be a skilled programmer or hire a programmer.
I fully agree, but I would think that driving PPC traffic to 1000 or so affiliate offers would require a sophisticated backend, which would also require significant programming skills.
I just can’t imagine that you could keep that many campaigns alive - let alone monitor them - without an automated process.
So dare I say that you need to be a skilled programmer or employ a programmer/webmaster either way you?
Steve
Hi,
Content sites take time to get indexed, but if you include blogging and other social media into the mix, you can get them indexed within 48 hours.
As for generating quality content sites, you can do it pretty easily, if you outsource the content generation.
I have my own inhouse content creation team, but if I were looking at generating an authority site, I could outsource the work at about $5 a page from places like elance.com or need-an-article.com.
A 100-page site would only cost $500, and I’d be able to recover that in 1-2 months in a “worst case scenario”.
[There are some insider strategies to maintaining the quality control and knowing how and whom to outsource to. A newbie content creator might get burned a couple of times at the outset.]
My content sites typically generate about $1,000 - $2,000 per month, so it’s typically about a 1-2 week ROI for me.
Then it’s merely a matter of rinse and repeat.
Thanks Amit and Derek. I’ll skip that marketing courses and head to the book store for Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Adwords instead.
Andrew,
Thanks for addressing the issue of content creation. I’m curious to know where you are finding writers who work for $5 a page. Most of the eLance article writers I have seen who actually have a good command of English and write well charge a lot more than $5 a page. Maybe I’m not negotiating enough.
It would be great if you could share your “insider strategies” on quality content control and selecting the right people to outsource to. I’ve found some great people on eLance, but they’re not insanely cheap not do I want to insult them by nickel-and-diming them down to nothing. I think what Amit has said is that if you find someone good, expect to pay them well because they’re in pretty high demand.
Hi Andrew,
Yes, $1k-$2k/month is fairly typical for the amount of revenue that I generate from my content sites just free traffic. Small compared to what I make from PPC from these site, but it’s a great source of long term revenues & profits, especially if you continue to add content and get backlinks to your site.
That $1k-$2k/month can grow to $1k/day, I know one affiliate who have done this in 6 months by ranking high in Yahoo and MSN.
Thanks for your insight!
“That’s what’s cool about affiliate marketing, there’s so many creative ways to make it work!”
Not to take away from the rest of what you’ve written, but that sentence (plus the lead up to it) is the best thing you’ve written on this blog. It’s a good thing for all of us to keep in mind.
[...] interesting discussion arose over at PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta’s blog: Is it easy to create content, which ultimately drives traffic and generates profits, at an [...]
Tim: I think you might’ve seen it, but I gave some content creation suggestions on my blog.
Amit’s also flagged my post in his recent update (thanks Amit!)
This is Amit’s recent post:
http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/andrew-wee-headhunting-for-writers-and-crowdsourcing/
I love reading your blog and appreciate your time to help others. I’ve spent the last two weekends learning about affiliate marketing and all the different programs on how to make money on the internet so I’m a major newbie but eager to learn. It has been a great blessing to find your site which I know will fast track my education.
I am a web developer of 10+ years and am finally coming out of “The Matrix”. In my real job I make over 10k/month but I realize that being tied to a desk for 40+ is not a fulfilling life.
I’m creating five websites but my sites are more services or application sites that solve a problem for people or provide quick look up services. I was going to count on monthly subscriptions and not PPC or affiliates but I’m rethinking this concept.
My apologies for the length but I wanted to make a proper introduction and it’s my hope to meet you one day and shake your hand as your site has already given me great hope.
My question to you is, in your opinion, is it worth my time to finish these sites and try to make money with subscriptions? or should I try to strictly go with a free service and utilize PPC or affiliate programs?
Please remember that no content will be written specifically for affiliate products but to give you an idea of what one of my sites is doing, it’s called whereskaraoke.com, the site will be a directory listing of karake bars around the world. Users will look up karaoke times, directions etc. for when they are looking to sing. Again, no real content but hopefully much traffic.
With Gratitude
Hello,
I enjoy your writings immensely. I also find them very inspirational. For any other n00bs that may be listening I would like to give a “testimonial” to the effectiveness of what you write about.
Actually some of the “esoteric” stuff is just as valuable if not more so than the traditional advice. For instance, I’ve read alot about visualization via personal development literature. I got a Copeac account on May 12th. I put up a “vision board” where I work saying “$100/day made online within the next 30-60 days).
Keep in mind, I know absolutely NOTHING about AM, I didn’t even know what a “landing page” was until April. Anyway thus far I have made $4,506 in commisions, the bulk of that happened in about 4 weeks — in other words I met my goals.
To be fair, I had launched about 15 campaigns (and I do this pretty much full time…yes to screw with my graduate school professors, lol)….but to be honest with you I don’t think the time was as much of a factor as my studying the best practices of people like you Amit and following the advice religiously.
I have not replaced my old goals with a new vision board that says “I make $500/day within the next 60-90 days). When I have met that goal for a continuous period of 30 days or more, I will move on to a more ambitious goal of $5,000.
Also to testify to what you said, I want to make a career out of this so I concentrate on one niche - a huge multi-milion dollar niche - and I planning to run multiple campaigns with different marketing angles.
OK, I know that post is long but I really wanted to give some newbie inspiration that if they stick to what you guys say and follow it and read it and ACT and test and fail and try again (15+ campaigns I failed out before I hit my first successful one….when I did I make like $200 my first day)…they will succeeed.
NOW FOR MY QUESTION!!!
I want to master the art of “learning while I learn” i.e. direct linking to affiliate landing pages. I work in online education and I have found that people pretty much already know what they want they just need to be guided to the sign up page (I only do leads no sales this is another “focus” I decided upon).
However my problem is that I don’t have any coding skills and if more than one person is displaying the same url there are problems in Google.
I really, really, really wish someone would provide a tutorial about how a non-techie can still pull off direct linking via Adwords.
For instance I have heard stuff like buying a new domain then using that as the display url, but what happens if Google goes to the url of the display and they don’t see anything.
I made most of my profits through blogging but with the merchant’s landing pages already good, it doesn’t make sense to make another landing page.
My strategy is that I really need to get good at 1)keyword research and 2)writing ads….when profits roll in I can pay for content. Actually I figure that 1) and 2) are my highest income producing activities and the 2 things I CAN’T hire out so it makes sense to focus on learning/doing these in the beginning.
And if the merchants already have good landing pages, why try to recreate something that is already working.
Any just to restate my question:
CAN YOU PLEASE DO A POST OF HOW TO GO ABOUT DOING DIRECT LINKING VIA ADWORDS?
If this post could address such issues as:
1) QS and quality score optimization
2) display url vs. destination url
3)how do do redirects if you are a non techie
Anyway Amit, thanks so much for your wisdom. I have my visualization board up and I can’t wait to write back with a “testimonial” as to how your advice really works!
When you give you truly do receive 10 fold…
Thanks!
I have a n00b question tha
p.s. I meant to say “EARNing while I am LEARNing” i.e. using direct linking to make profit as I master keyword research and ad writing….then eventually focusing in on content sites that I can get indexed to promote my offers….
[...] I learned that there’s as many ways to do affiliate marketing as there are to painting a picture. I’ll be the first to tell you that some ways of doing this business are much more effective, stable, and long term than others, but I’m not getting into that debate again. [...]