Is Affiliate Marketing a REAL Business?
May 25th, 2007 by 
Amit
I had my first 30 minute one-on-one with Mr. Adwords, Perry Marshall! And you would think there’s no way you can cover much ground in 30 minutes, but the insights I got from Perry were absolute gold! 
The man really knows his stuff!
We also had our monthly Roundtable conference call today and in the Q&A I got into a little debate with Perry on whether affiliate marketing is a real business or not. And this is not the first time I got this, when I was in Rich Schefren coaching program, he flat out told me to leave affiliate marketing and start a “real” business.
You mean a real business with real employees, real office space, and real headaches??? FORGET THAT!
Don’t get me wrong I have a great deal of respect for both Perry Marshall and Rich Schefren-I just think they don’t fully understand the power of an affiliate business.
Now if you do affiliate marketing wrong, then it really isn’t a business. If you rely on a direct-to-merchant, “googlecash”, approach to affiliate marketing then you’re treading on thin ice and in my opinion you don’t have a real business, but just a promotion.
However, if you have your own unique branded site with your own content and copy independent of the merchant, and you market your site PROPERLY, than you have a real affiliate business.
Perry Marshall did have a good point when I was debating with him, that most affiliate campaigns are very vulnerable to changes in the market-either increasing competition, or change in consumer behavior.
Again, if you build your affiliate business properly and are proactive about maintaining and growing it then you’re as good as gold.
Don’t let anyone tell you you don’t have a ‘real’ business!
affiliate business perry marshall rich schefren
Posted in Industry News, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
Amit,
Yes you are 100% right!
Hats off to you for standing up for what you belive in!
Peter
Hi Amit,
What is happening to your great blogposts? I miss getting a post everyday
Richard
Hi Richard,
I’ve been very busy lately! I will have more blog posts going down the road.
Amit:
I believe an appropriately diversified payor mix is the best approach, as well. On a Brunson webinar, Friday before last, Eric Holmlund espoused the same idea, with a twist. His claim is to mix sub-divide affiliate marketing by marketing other’s products and by marketing PLR’s.
JerryWFranklin
http://www.BlueSkyBrothers.com
as this blog is already very helpfull, are you willing to let us know what other blogs you are writing?
Richard
I’ve heard this argument before, essentially that affiliates are not building a business, they’re running a promotion.
Frankly there is some truth to it — UNLESS, as you’ve pointed out, you make yourself a value-added affiliate. Affiliates are wise to create their own content and landing pages. I’m not talking spammy, junk pages, but good quality content that will get indexed and remain in the search engines.
You’ll hear time and time again that the “money is in the list”. There’s no reason why affiliates cannot also build lists in their niches.
Hi Amit,
Actually given the title of your talk for the upcoming Affiliate Summit (Secrets of a PPC Super Affiliate), I had the mistaken impression that you among other things do incorporate a direct-to-merchant linking approach. So is that not true or are you just implying here that you don’t rely upon it.
Hi Melissa,
Actually I used to do direct to merchant, however, I now have custom affiliate sites built. Direct to merchant is a great strategy to learn the game of affiliate marketing, but I don’t recommend it as a long term business strategy.
Amit, as an aff newbie, can you give me some guidelines on where to start looking for good direct-to-mercant possibilities? The places I am currently looking at only have mercants that will pay you a 5 cents per click fee. Were you looking at these kind of merchants, or were you looking at mercants that gave you money per deal that they closed?
Richard
Hi Richard,
I would recommend a CPA or commission based affiliate promotion. CPA stands for Cost-Per-Action, usually filling out a form and providing a lead to the merchant. Commission based is basically where if you get a fixed percentage of the total sale that your produce for the merchant. This percentage can range from 1% up to 100% depending on the niche.