Top 10 Ways to Be a Dead Broke Affiliate

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Written by Amit / Post in Super Affiliate Mindset

Don’t stick with one affiliate marketing strategy for very long. Once you’ve tried something for a month with no results try something else. Keep jumping around constantly : SEO, PPC, facebook, article marketing, etc.
Check your sales stats every 5 minutes, and be sure to agonize about it. If this doesn’t COMPLETELY distract you and suck up all your emotional energy, then get one of those tool bars or alert programs that shows you or beeps every time you have a sale.
Bid on the most obvious and competitive keywords in your market, then spend 75% of your day checking your ad position for your main one or two keywords vs your competitors.
Take that last tip to the next level – constantly check if someone is ripping of your website by continually checking the Google search results for those one or 2 keywords your making sales on. If you find someone copying your site, make a federal case out of it, contact Google, your affiliate manager, and everyone you know to complain about it. Be sure to get REALLY emotional about it.
Here’s a big one : spend 80% of your time bitching and complaining on affiliate forums. If you’re at a loss for ideas, here some popular things to bitch about : Google slaps, why your stats are not showing a sale for the last 2 hours, my favorite : how you think the affiliate network your working with is secretly stealing sales from you. Recommend forum : WickedFire.com
When you’re REALLY out of things to bitch about on forums start making personal attacks against big name affiliates in the industry. If you’re not sure which affiliates to shamelessly attack, here’s some popular targets : myself, Shoemoney, John Chow.
Do ZERO market research before launching an affiliate offer, just pick out something that looks good and start promoting it.
Spend all your time buying expensive information products and ebooks on how to do affiliate marketing. Go through these products and learn everything you can, then sit on your butt. Whatever you do DON’T take immediate action on what you’ve learned. Keep waiting for the right time to get started.
Have the firm belief that they only reason super affiliates are making big money is because they have some special backdoor deal with merchants, or because they have AMAZING account history so they can buy keywords for 0.20/click that would cost you $1/click.
Anytime there’s a slight discrepancy between your Google conversion tracking and your actually affiliate sales – let’s say conversion tracking show more sales – make a federal case out of it. Contact your affiliate manager and Google, absolutely demand you get credit for those 2 sales you “lost”. Make sure to spend several hours (minimum) REALLY agonizing about this, and how the world just isn’t fair.

nate says:

April 7, 2008 at 7:23 pm

I follow all of those steps perfectly.

Justin Chelf says:

April 7, 2008 at 7:42 pm

LMAO first post of your’s I will actually link 2

JustinM says:

April 7, 2008 at 7:55 pm

Hehe, how often do you check your sales stats? I can’t help but to check it every couple hours.

Deron Sizemore says:

April 7, 2008 at 7:56 pm

I’m very new to affiliate marketing and to say I don’t know what I’m doing would be an understatement. I signed up with Yahoo Search Marketing and got a free $100 from Yahoo to test the waters and see what it’s all about (or attempt too). I’ve just been promoting affiliate offers and linking directly to the merchant landing page. One thing I’ve not done (and don’t really know how) is market research. How do you go about doing your market research so you can take a very educated approach to what offers to promote?

I feel like I’m doing everything wrong. I’ve yet to make any money so I assume I’m doing it wrong; wrong offers, wrong bids, wrong keywords? I get some clicks, but not converting.