Read on to see all the details of the new guidelines and learn why it probably won’t make a difference.

The New Guidelines

First, let’s go through the guidelines, accompanied by some comments from yours truly:

Most importantly, please do not significantly alter your Pitch Page after approval. We recognize that some changes are necessary for testing, but if you need to make significant changes to your page (such as earnings claims or images, sales messaging or video content), please notify your Account Manager so we can ensure the new page is also in compliance.

For Internet Marketing products: Per the new FTC information, sales material shouldn’t create the impression that customers can easily earn money without putting in much work, and should give specific ideas of how they’ll earn the money (e.g., content marketing, video marketing, social media, etc). Sales pages should also not overstate how much can realistically be made, or imply that earnings are guaranteed.

The FTC also strongly discourages false urgency/scarcity messaging (for example, “Only 3 copies left!”) when there is no actual scarcity. Closing the doors to new customers after a specified amount of time and reopening later is fine.

Any Pitch Page references to ClickBank sales stats need to be verifiable by ClickBank, and need to have been earned by the methods being promoted. For example, selling an affiliate training product using sales snapshots from a vendor-only account is not allowed.

For vendors using video Pitch Pages, if a Buy Now button appears during the course of the video, the price must appear as well. We also request that vendors provide transcripts of video sales letters when submitting a product for approval.

For upsells, the initial product purchased must be valuable and usable on its own, without requiring the purchase of the upsell offers. Customers must also be able to immediately access their original purchase upon completion of their order, before being presented with upsell offers. An access link may be placed on the first upsell offer page, but the link must be very clear and conspicuous (i.e., not hidden or in a small font). We highly recommend that vendors use ClickBank’s official upsell flows to present upsell offers to customers.

Please submit product approval requests at least several days before your launch, so that ClickBank has time to thoroughly review the offer and request changes if necessary. This is especially the case for products with video sales letters, since making changes to these can take time. We may not be able to accommodate last-minute requests.

To prevent customer complaints, vendors should not close refund request tickets or switch tickets from Refund to Tech Support more than once, and the latter should only be used when actually trying to help the customer and save the sale.

What Happens Next?

Does this mean there will finally be peace in the kingdom of IM? The rules laid out would mean that about 95% of all the current make-money-onlin offers on ClickBank would no longer be approved and most of them would have to drastically change their offer pages and entire sales-structures for a chance to pass.

Call me a pessimist, but here are some reasons why I doubt this will make any difference:

Saying vs. Doing

Even before this update, there were regulations in place that should prevent a lot of the bad things that were (and are still) going on on ClickBank. The first point in the new regulations addresses the practice of switching out the sales-pages, after ClickBank approval. This is something that “everyone” was doing and the people at ClickBank knew about it. They were absolutely aware of the terrible sales-pages and scammy offers in their marketplace and therefore they were also aware of the fact that vendors switched out sales-pages. They simply turned a blind eye.

Who’s to say that they won’t just keep turning a blind eye?

No Public Statement

Something that strikes me as peculiar about these new guidelines is that they are nowhere to be found on the ClickBank website. They were mailed out to all (or most?) of the CB vendors. I got the list from Jon Volk’s blog and apparently, the list is genuine. But it’s not published on the CB blog, or in the newsfeed or anywhere else on the site.

I don’t know about you, but that seems pretty strange to me. It’s almost like they want to scare the vendors into behaving, but not put themselves in a position where they’re publicly accountable for the new guidelines.

It may just be too early to tell, though and for all I know, the new guidelines will be published in the coming days.

Nobody Needs ClickBank

Even if CB are absolutely serious about these new regulations and even if they are adamant in enforcing them, that doesn’t mean the scammy offers will stop. There are other affiliate networks. In my opinion, almost all of them are better than ClickBank in every possible way except one: ClickBank has the best name recognition and largest user base.

And even if they all crack down on crappy offers, vendors can still just run their own affiliate programs. In fact, they may just discover how great that can be. Sure, there are benefits to having your offer on an affiliate marketplace. But let’s just say: I’m not exactly a huge vendor, but I’ve already saved five figures in fees by running my own affiliate program, instead of going with ClickBank.

The Bright Side

Whether or not we will see a big difference in the ClickBank marketplace anytime soon is uncertain. The mere fact that these new rules were drafted and sent out is already a good sign, though. It means that there is some kind of a response to scammy offers and some kind of movement against them. There’s hope that vendors who sell hopes and dreams instead of legitimate products will find find themselves in increasingly unpleasant circumstances and may even have to rething their position at some point.

Until then, my universal rule for purchasing IM products remains the same as always: buy from people who’ve given you reason to trust them, not from people making fancy promises.

Cheers,

Check out the video below to see the recording of the launch webinar, where I explain all the details:

Webinar Recording:

Click here to sign up to the affiliate program!

A page with a written overview of the affiliate system and a short video explaining the highlights will follow shortly.

For now, get in there and start earning! ;)

Any questions and comments are welcome, as always!

Cheers,

As I was thinking abou this, I decided to make a video containing as much useful and essential information about making money online as possible, aimed at a complete beginner (basically me, a year ago). I wanted to keep it short and to the point (attention spans are short, these days), so there could only be a very limited amount of information in the video. I had to cut it down to what I believe are the most important things a newbie needs to hear.

Here’s the result and I’d love to know what you think about it:

In case you’re interested, here’s the link to the report mentioned in the video.

So, what do you think? Is this a good place to start, for a newbie? Would you (will you) recommend this to beginners who ask you about how to make money online?

Let me know in the comments!

Here it finally is: My extensive Google Sniper review. If you are already involved in Internet marketing, then you have very likely heard of Google Sniper. There is a lot of hype surrounding this program and it was promoted and discussed by many in the make money online business. I have been testing this system for about two months now and in this review, you will get the complete run-down of every feature, every strength and every weakness in Google Sniper.

Overview

The Google Sniper package consists of one main, 99 page manual, eight training videos as well as a document with process maps laid out for you, so you can easily follow the system step-by-step. There’s also a short introduction ebooklet, but it’s pure fluff. You can just ignore it and get started with the manual right away.

The premise of the system is as follows: George Brown says he can teach you how to build simple, small WordPress websites in just a few hours and get them ranked on page one in Google without having to build any backlinks.

So, the idea is that you can do some keyword research, build a site like this in a very short time and then move right on to the next site because you don’t need to do any article writing, backlink building, social bookmarking or anything else like that, once the site is built. A pretty bold claim, to say the least. Of course, these sites ranking on page one for their keywords can then be easily monetized by promoting some kind of affiliate program.

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Hard Selling

Let me get one thing right out of the way: GSniper is very sales-heavy. Right after the purchase, you’ll encounter two upsells, the first one for $97 and the second one for $77. As per my reviewing guidelines, I didn’t buy or test either, but especially the first one looks really scammy to me. The reason being that it’s a “niche marketing course” that will teach you how to make lots of money online. This begs the question: Isn’t that what the product I just bought is supposed to be?

In addition to this, you are signed up to a $37 monthly membership when you purchase GSniper. If you don’t want to be part of this membership site, you have to opt out of it after the fact. To be fair, the first month is free, which is a good thing. But I’d still rather opt in to something like this than have to opt out of it.
I was only a member for about six weeks, but in that time, I didn’t see anything in the membership section that warranted $37 a month.

Finally, the keyword research tool Keyword Elite 2 is promoted/recommended within the Google Sniper course and the membership and download areas contain advertisements and affiliate-promotions.

In short, there will be a lot of product pushed your way once you sign up for Google Sniper.

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What’s it About?

As already outlined above, the system will teach you how to build a WordPress powered site in a very specific manner. The final site will only consist of around 5 to 10 pages of content and all of it will be focused on one keyword that you pick beforehand. The site will be promoting one product and one product only (no Adsense ads or multiple products) and the goal is to get this site to rank on page one in the Google results for the targeted keyword and convince as many visitors as possible to buy the promoted product through your affiliate link.

The system covers a wide range of topics starting from how to set up the website and what kind of content to add, how to find the right kind of keywords to target and walking you all the way through the process until you have one completed GSniper site. The detail in the instructions is usually very good and easy to follow. The videos support what’s written in the manual quite well, although some of them are pretty redundant after having read the text.

I particularly liked how much emphasis was put on how to create content, how and where to place affiliate links within your site, and how to test for optimal conversions.

Something I noticed is that the manual often contains a piece of advice followed by something along the lines of “…this is only a guess” or “…not sure but it works for me”. It would have been nice of George Brown had actually run some tests instead of including a bit of guessing and unfounded claims in the ebook. On the other hand, I think it’s great that he is honest about the things he doesn’t know and didn’t test instead of just pretending like they’re all rock-solid facts.

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Pros and Cons

Google Sniper does many things right and gets some things wrong. Here, I want to lay it all out for you, so you can decide whether this product is worth your money or not.

One thing that needs to be mentioned is this: Yes, it really works.
You can get a simple little WordPress blog listed on page one, getting free traffic and making sales. So, fundamentally, the system works and you can and will make money if you follow through on it.

The greatest strength of the course lies in how the creation of the website is laid out. The manual and the videos give you a very clear idea of what the final website should look like and what it should contain. There’s also a lot of thought put into what kind of theme you should use and what kind of story you should tell about yourself on the website, all carefully tailored towards getting more sales.

One part where George completely drops the ball, however, is when it comes to choosing a product to promote. There is no really useful information about what criteria to choose products by and the video on this subject consist of George browsing CBengine, seemingly at random, and basically saying: Pick a ClickBank product with high gravity. I bet you couldn’t have guessed that by yourself.

Another little issues comes up with the keyword research component: Finding the right keyword is absolutely essential for making this system work. You have to find a very particular kind of keyword if you want to stand any chance at all of getting a page ranked for it without any backlinks.

Google Sniper contains detailed information on what kind of traffic volume, number of competing pages and criteria in the pages already ranking for the keyword to look for. You will also be presented with three suggestions for picking keywords:

1. Find a keyword using the free Google Keyword tool and spreadsheets.
   This method is free but requires quite a bit of work with copying data into spreadsheets and manually sorting and filtering it.
2. Find a keyword using Keyword Elite 2.
   Makes it a lot easier to find good keywords, filter them and analyze the competition for each one of them, but the program is quite costly.
3. Simply use the product name as your keyword.

The third method, using the product’s name as your keyword, is presented as the quickest and easiest way to pick a good keyword. It’s true that a product name is generally a good keyword since people who search of a product name already know what they want and are quite likely to buy.

But, and this is a big BUT, in combination with the product selection advice from before, this becomes absolutely terrible advice for Google Sniper sites. Why? Because you can bet that for any ClickBank product with a high gravity, there will be tons of marketers out there, targeting the product name and building search engine optimized sites, creating backlinks to them, bookmarking them and so on. In this kind of environment, a Sniper site with zero backlinks doesn’t stand a chance to get a permanent listing on page one.

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What You Need to Know

I realize that I’ve been very critical of this product so far. It remains, however, that the system fundamentally works and that you can make money using it. I don’t mean to bash this product or George Brown in any way.

There are two things you absolutely need to know if you decide to try Google Sniper and these things are:

1. Finding the right keyword is the most important part.
   Needless to say, you won’t be able to rank for highly competitive keywords with a zero-backlink site. Therefore, it’s absolutely essential that you find the right kind of keyword: A keyword that gets a good amount of traffic, consisting of potential buyers, but that has the kind of profile that will still enable a Sniper site to be listed in the top spots in a Google search.
   Since using product names won’t work for very popular products, you either need a way to find ClickBank products (or other products) that can get good sales, but that you can still compete for, or you need to do the keyword research. And be warned: Finding a keyword that matches all the criteria outlined in the course can be very difficult. Even using a tool like Keyword Elite or Market Samurai, you can easily spend an afternoon sifting through results before you find a usable keyword.
   –
2. It’s a numbers-game.
   If you start with the GSniper system, plan to build at least five sites before drawing any conclusions. Some will work, some won’t and you can’t always tell beforehand whether a site will stick or not. Google moves in mysterious ways, after all.
   If you stick to the system and build five sites according to it, you will definitely have at least one or two winners in there. And for the sites that don’t quite make it to page one, it’s worth considering biting the bullet and building some good old-fashioned backlinks to them anyway.

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Conclusion

There is some fluff in Google Sniper, but it isn’t rampant. Apart from the completely useless introduction manual (clearly just padding to make the feature list a bit longer) and the almost non-existent advice about selecting products to promote, the course is quite action-oriented, though. The system is laid out quite well and the process maps are a good addition.

Two instant “one-time-only” upsells that seem to devalue the purchase just made and a thin, paid monthly membership that you are signed up for without any real choice and have to opt out of if you aren’t interested certainly get the scammy-and-crappy alarm ringing. That, plus the advertisement and promotions in the member section are really too much. Overall, the excessive product-pushing significantly devalues this product.

Overall, I can’t really recommend Google Sniper. The prodct isn’t downright bad, but it certainly lacks polish and the aforementioned product-pushing just leaves a bad taste. It could have been a lot better and more newbie-friendly if some blunders in regards to keyword research and product selection would have been avoided. I also feel that the content and delivery of the videos could and should be a lot better.

Someone made the suggestion to me to make some tutorials about Squidoo, an interesting article/webpage publishing service that many online marketers use for a bit of article marketing and backlink building. I will be publishing a series of Squidoo tutorials here, shortly. Before that, let’s take a look at some of the top-ranked lenses out there to see what we can learn about making great Squidoo lenses.

Method

To learn about the best lenses on Squidoo, I simply took a look at all of the top ranking ones within Squidoo itself. The site has it’s own ranking system that evaluates the lenses according to how many visitors they’ve had, how frequently they are updated, how many ratings they get and probably many more factors.

I spent some time browsing the top entries in every category as well as some random, not highly ranked lenses to get a feel for what contributing factors to a high rank might be.

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Content

While I will be talking about some objectively measurable metrics in just a minute, you always have to keep one thing in mind: There are many factors that play a part in getting your lens noticed, liked and ranked highly, but above them all is the quality of your content. If your content is not compelling, interesting and generally worth reading, it doesn’t matter how much you tweak other aspects of your lens, it will simply never fly.

Having said that, let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the other factors that I found the most popular Squidoo lenses have in common.

Length
This one is quite surprising, actually. It turns out that the majority of Squidoo pages that are getting a lot of visitors, are very long. Since Squidoo is very multimedia rich, I didn’t do a word-count. Instead, I just counted how many pages I had to scroll down on my screen in order to get to the end of the page.

The shortest lens among the top ranked ones I analyzed was 5 pages long.
The longest one was a whopping 32 pages long!
The 20 top pages I analyzed had an average length of 17.5 pages.

Image Density
With only very few exceptions, the most successful lenses all feature a lot of images and the occasional video. I didn’t count the images in the Amazon ads modules or the user-pics in comment-modules, only the images and videos the author inserted themselves, by hand.

On average, the lenses I analyzed have exactly one image or video per page. So when you go through them, you’re never just staring at text.

Here is how the image density (imaged per page) was distributed for the lenses I analyzed:

What this shows is is that there are some exceptions with lots of pictures and some with very few (steep bits at the beginning and end of the curve), but the majority of the lenses have around 0.8 to 1.2 images per page. So, having at least one image per page seems to be a good rule of thumb.

Interactive Modules
On Squidoo, you can include different interactive modules in your articles. From simple comment boxes to polls there are lots of possibilities to get the readers involved. I noticed that practically every successful lens contains at least one interactive element. Practically every lens I looked at had a comment section. Most of them also included a poll or some similar type of interactive module. I can imagine that these modules motivate readers to return to the lens several times, to see whether someone has replied to their comment, for example.

On average, the analyzed lenses had 1.7 interactive modules. Most of them had two.

Trending Topic
Finally, I noticed that around one third of all the top ranked lenses are about a topic that is something of a trend. For example, you can find quite a few highly ranked lenses about twitter, the new Twilight movie, celebrities and, currently a real winner, Christmas.

This is no big surprise. Content about current and trending topics tends to do well and Squidoo is no exception.

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Build That Lens!

So, there you have it. Head on over to Squidoo and build a lens. Add lots of images, make sure your readers get to have their say once or twice on the page and write about a current issue and you could potentially have a traffic-driving winner on your hands. Give it a shot!

For more instructions on how to go about building a lens, check out my upcoming video series.

Cheers,

Affiliate marketing is probably the number one thing that most internet marketers do to make money. As you might have already read in the RQR Glossary, affiliate marketing comes down to promoting and selling someone else’s products in exchange for commissions for every sale made. In this RQR Basics article, you’ll find a more in-depth explanation of what affiliate marketing is and how to get into it.

Example

It’s often easiest to understand a process by just looking at a concrete example, so here’s an example of what an affiliate sale constitutes:

1. You sign up with an affiliate network (more on those below) or sign an affiliate contract with a manufacturer.
2. You choose a product to promote. Let’s say you choose an ebook that teaches people how to improve their golf swing. (There are thousands of products in hundreds of categories to choose from, out there – I’m just picking a random example out of the air here). Let’s also assume that the ebook costs $25.
3. You receive a “personal” link. When someone clicks this link, they will arrive at the sales-page for the golf ebook.
4. You place this link on your blog, in an article, on a website, in a forum or where ever else one can place links. As a concrete example, let’s say you write a post about golfing on your blog and add the link and a recommendation for the ebook.
5. Someone reads your blog-post and is interested in the book you recommend, so they click on the link.
6. They see the sales-page of the golf swing ebook and decide to buy it.
7. Since they arrived at the sales-page through your personal affiliate link, you get paid a commission for the sale. In the case of a $25 ebook, you would probably get around $15 for this sale.

That’s basically how one affiliate sale could happen. It’s actually quite difficult to make a good example of an affiliate sale because there are so many different products that you can promote and there are just as many different ways of promoting them. Let’s take a step back from this and look at the abstract of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing always involves a manufacturer (buildings to the left) with products on offer. The affiliate (A) promotes these products to potential customers (guy on the right). The customer buys the products and pays the manufacturer. The manufacturer in turn passes part of the proceeds on to the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a true win-win situation between you and the manufacturer of the product you are promoting. You get paid without having to manufacture and ship products yourself. The manufacturer benefits from your marketing efforts, without taking a risk. Since he only pays part of the money he makes from each sale you refer, this is basically risk-free marketing. Compare that to more traditional marketing methods, where you might spend thousands or even millions for large billboard, TV or newspaper ads and not get a buying response from the customers at all, and you quickly see why manufacturers like to offer affiliate deals.

Affiliate Websites

As I mentioned briefly above, you need some place to put your affiliate link, so that people can find it and click through to the manufacturer’s sales-page or shop. There are many options for link-placement, the most popular being:

• In an article.
  You can publish an article (e.g. “How to Improve Your Golf Handicap”) and publish it on an article directory. In this article, you can endorse a product and place an affiliate link (see Article Marketing for more details).
• On a blog.
  Maybe you blog about golfing or you start a blog about golf specifically to affiliate-sell golf products. On your own blog, you can basically place the affiliate links wherever you want. In posts related to the product makes most sense, of course.
• On a mini-site.
  A mini-site is a small web-page built around your affiliate link. In the case of our example it could be a mini-site focused completely around improving your golf-swing. It could be just one page, promoting the affiliate product or it could include a handful of pages, including some free tips, maybe a survey or some other content to keep visitors interested.
• On a forum.
  Most forums won’t allow you to place affiliate links directly in your posts. You can use a forum as a stepping-stone, though. If you post relevant and interesting content in a golf-forum and link to your golf-blog in the signature, you can increase the visitors to your blog. These visitors will then find the affiliate links on your blog.

Volume

Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Any potential customer will need to pass through several “gates” before they make an actual purchase. It begins with the potential customer being somewhere “out there”, with a general interest in the product you’re promoting or perhaps with a certain problem they need a solution for.

The first gate they need to pass is that they need to find you and your site or article somehow. Usually, this happens via search engines. One of your articles, forum-posts or blog entries could show up in the search engine results when someone enters a golf-related keyword.
The second gate is that they need to visit your site/article/blog. After all, the search engine serves up multiple choices and even if yours is among the first to be listed, they might not decide to click on your particular entry.
The third gate is when they see the affiliate link on your website and decide whether to follow it or not. You have to get them interested enough to actually want to click on that link.
Once they’ve done this, it’s up to the manufacturer to get them through the fourth gate: Actually deciding to buy the product.

As you can imagine, there will always be countless visitors who jump off and don’t pass one of these gates. Out of a thousand people who search for a solution for improving their Golf handicap, maybe 400 will find one of your articles. Out of those, maybe 100 will follow through to your blog. Out of those 100, maybe 30 will decide to click on your affiliate link and of those 30 people left, maybe one person will actually buy the product. These numbers are hypothetical, of course. Depending on your market and how well your websites and articles are written and designed, these numbers can vary greatly.

The number of “gates” customers must pass through can vary. It is worth noting that fewer “gates” doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. Often, the opposite is true: Some customers need a lot of convincing and won’t buy if they get directed to the sales-page too quickly. If they get to read up on the subject first, see a couple of pages and many different arguments, they might be much more willing to buy, once they arrive at the sales-page.

Bottom line is: You need to get a lot of people to see your affiliate sites. This is why most internet marketers are also very interested in SEO (search engine optimization) and other techniques for maximizing visitors to websites.

Benefits

• It can be free.
  You can use paid methods for promoting products and increasing traffic, but it’s absolutely possible to rely completely on free methods.
• Saves you a lot of hassle.
  You don’t have to make products yourself. Especially for material goods, this saves you a ton of effort that otherwise goes into production, storage, shipping etc.
• It’s very scalable.
  See my post titled The Nr. 1 Reason to Get Into Affiliate Marketing for more on this.
• It can be risk-free.
  Since you can promote products without spending any money (or with spending only very little), affiliate marketing can be practically risk-free. If your campaign fails and no one buys the products you’re promoting, you don’t lose any money.

Drawbacks

• No guarantee.
  The flipside of the “no risk” factor is that there is no guarantee any of your campaigns will be successful. You might try to promote the hell out of something but never see any good conversions.
• Time consuming.
  Setting up affiliate sites, filling them with relevant content, writing good sales-copy, optimizing your pages for search engines, publishing articles… These are all things you need to do to a certain extent, as an affiliate marketer. They are all more or less time-consuming and it can take a while before you see any pay-off. Expect to put in many, many hours before seeing your first sales.

Where to Find Affiliate Deals

There are so many affiliate networks out there, I doubt I’ve seen even half of them. And apart from the networks, many companies offer affiliate deals individually, if you just look for them. Finally, you can strike your own affiliate deals with practically anyone if you know how to implement them and can negotiate.

Let’s begin with affiliate networks. These are marketplaces where manufacturers/authors can list their products and affiliates can choose which ones to promote. Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks. Further popular choices are Commission Junction, Paydotcom and Shareasale.

Some companies offer their own affiliate programs. A good example of this is amazon’s “Associates”, which offers affiliate deals on all their products. Not so great for books (they’ll net you a few cents per sale, at best) but pretty good for some of the other, higher-priced products that amazon offers. To find more affiliate deals, simply look for manufacturers and online stores in your targeted product niche and search their websites for affiliate pages. Or write them an e-mail and ask them about it. If they have an affiliate program, they’ll be more than glad to help you sign up and get started (remember: More affiliates means more money for them).

I will be posting mini-reviews of different affiliate networks and programs in the near future, so stay tuned.

Okay, I think that about covers it. If you have any further questions, let me know down in the comments.

That’s it for now,

Affiliate marketing is an attractive business model, although the real reasons for this are rarely stated. They tend to get drowned out by all the hype. Contrary to what your average sales-pitch would have you believe, affiliate marketing isn’t super-easy and it very rarely, if ever, makes anyone rich over night. It also involves actual work, actual investments and actual effort. Just like a “real” business. Go figure. In spite of all this, there are still many reasons to love affiliate marketing. The foremost can be summarized in just one word: Scalability.

Why Scalability and What’s With the Awful Graphic?

With scalability I specifically mean how your return of profits scales against your investment of time. And yes, there is an actual reason why I chose the most clichéd, worn-out, caricature of a graph representing success. When you see that graph, you assume that the upwards trend pictured is a monetary one, right? Time advancing from left to right, we see that more and more cash is rolling in and that’s what us greedy bastards are all ultimately after.

So far, so good. What’s more important than the information given, though, is the information omitted. A very important question to ask is: How much am I investing to get this increase in profit? And I don’t mean the investment of money. As long as the returns are climbing at a higher rate than your investments, it’s all good. It’s your investment of time and energy that will have the greatest impact on your quality of life.

If your investment of time and energy scales 1:1 with your profit, that’s bad news. This is the predicament you often find yourself in when working 9-5: You can make more money, but only if you work longer hours. As long as the money you make is directly linked to the time you invest, there is always a cap on how much you can make. Much worse, the more you make, the less time you have to live, so unless what you do for a living is already your favourite thing in the world, it means you have to trade in life-quality for money. And that sucks.

Enter Affiliate Marketing

Let’s just look at affiliate marketing as a pure numbers game, for a minute. You are selling a product and you have a certain conversion rate. Let’s say you have a 1% conversion rate after refunds. In other words, you make exactly one sale for every 100 visitors to your website. Obviously, in this situation, there is still a link between time invested and profits made. But here, you can be clever about how you invest your time. While you do have to set up a site worth visiting, provide some content worth seeing, perhaps spend some money on advertising and much more, the number of visitors your site has is largely still independent of the time you spend. For one thing, people can be visiting your site and buying products whether you are present or not. More importantly, if you find the right angle, if you target the right keywords and if you invest in the right advertising, your site’s visitors can potentially sky-rocket. You can get ten times as many visitors (and therefore ten times as many sales) as last week, if you invest an hour or two cleverly.

To achieve this, you need a lot of experience and/or a good deal of luck. We often forget that overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work. But working in a highly scalable business such as affiliate marketing, you know that the time invested can eventually yield exponential results.

That, for me, is the Nr. 1 reason to get into affiliate marketing.
That, and the fact that I have a natural talent for writing scammy, overblown sales-hype.