Firing your Boss for Affiliate Marketing

28. Mar 2007 | 13 Comments

Fire Your Boss

The two biggest setbacks for anyone who wants to get into affiliate marketing are:

Not enough time to pursue ideas quickly enough
Not enough capital behind you to start new sites or ppc campaigns

One of the other major setbacks is deciding whether to stay in your full time job or not.

I personally am a huge believer in a career that I know will be a solid backup to any affiliate marketing that I do & I also love my job, however it has the disadvantages of point 1. Not being able to spend as much time as I’d like on campaigns or ideas.

There’s always outsourcing but more on that another time.

So, how do you make that transition from working Full Time into Affiliate Marketing full time?

Ebay

I know it sounds stupid but trust me, Ebay was what initally got me into Affiliate Marketing & it still accounts for a good proportion of my online income.

I’ll give you a few reasons as to why marketing on ebay is good:

Automation: You can automate almost every aspect of selling on ebay once you have a product.

Audience: You have a huge audience, don’t have to worry about SEO or Marketing. It kindof falls into the old “Build it & they will come” scenario.

Education: I’ve found that most ebay users & buyers are much less educated than your average Google User so you can sell products that only focus on high level details rather than the nitty gritty stuff.

These three factors alone make ebay the absolute perfect way to market any product you’ve created yourself online.

I’ll quickly give you an overview of what I do to create & market an item on ebay:

Create an informational product in PDF format. Make it as professional looking as I can (spelling, layout & logos). Provide a lot of useful & actionable information, actionable is important if you want to make affiliate sales from within the book.
Lock the PDF file so that people can’t copy & paste the information.
Slightly sprinkle the PDF with cloaked affiliate links, these convert pretty well from ebay sales believe it or not.
Include an opt-in list inside the ebook so that I get them on my mailing list, chances are if they’ve bought the book they’ll buy more from you later. You can use Aweber for this ($19.95/month).
Create a selling page for the item that will entice the user to buy the product (you’ll need to know basic html for this). This should include things like proof of concept, does the product work? Testimonials & even include screenshots of your feedback if it’s all positive. There are tonnes of ebay tricks you can use to get more exposure & get more views however I’ll leave them for another post
Create about 10 listings of the product across a few different categories with varying copy & pricing to split test how it performs. You can easily sell a great book for $20 if the selling page is done right.
Set up Outlook Express or Thunderbird to automatically deliver the ebook to the buyer once the paypal payment notification comes through.
When you send them through the ebook also let them know about other products you’ve got listed, also hit them with the link for the mailing list again.
Once you figure out from testing which copy & categories work best load everything into Turbo Lister & automate the process, you will also need to split test various finishing times for the auctions. I quite like my auctions to finish on Monday morning on Sunday Evening.
If you have a good product & selling page you can easily be shifting 5-10+ copies of it per day automatically & making a nice monthly cheque off any residual affiliate commissions.
Then market a product to the list Bi-Weekly or whenever you find something that you think will interest them. If you’re selling heaps of products at a low price it’s quite easy to use Ebay to build up a quick marketable opt in list.

That’s pretty much it. Each of those steps can be drilled down a bit & streamlined once you get your first product sorted.

Doing this properly you could be pulling in around $2,000+ a month per item.

Once you’ve got the stability & residual income every month you will then have the ability to fire your boss & start working on your other ventures online. It’s all about building your portfolio & diversifying your income streams.

Too many people try to make all their cash from Adsense instead of looking at the bigger picture & really breaking into as many markets as you can.

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13 Comments on "Firing your Boss for Affiliate Marketing"

JT 28. Mar 2007, 3:08 pm

By info product, do you mean an ebook on caring for your cat, or something? You’re selling the books for $20 each? Then getting additional sales based on products mentioned in the book.

So to start, do you check the various affiliate offers first, pick some, and design the content around that? Do you write the books yourself or hire that out? How many pages should they be?

And if you do so – how do you approach the affiliate people about this, and get into their program? When they want to see your material first, or your website…?

Also: Can you give us at least a range of income you make monthly on your projects? You having a career… I don’t know, it undercuts your advice a bit. If these are all just short term, fast money things… well, it would be good to know before getting into it.

Stuart 28. Mar 2007, 3:43 pm

Lets get real here JT, you’re not going to be able to sell a book on caring for you cat for $20.

The purpose of this is to brainstorm ideas & books that you could write that you could sell for that value. It doesn’t have to be $20, it could be $9.99.

Books on “how to make money” always sell like hotcakes. Books on gambling techniques sell well, books on adsense & adwords sell.

Chances are you will ALWAYS be able to find an affiliate program to suit your book, if not write the article to suit the affiliate program, not the other way around. Secondary commissions are a big consideration on ebay.

If you want an idea on how a book should be written then buy one from ebay, they’re all over the place & that’s the best way to get ideas. See what others are doing & better it.

I did mention that using these techniques got me into affiliate marketing & that I’m still doing them today so that nullifies any “short term” longevitity.

Range of income isn’t important, I strive on providing solid techniques & good advice, not waving my affiliate cheques around & then writing crap content like everyone else.

Cheers
Stu

Runa 28. Mar 2007, 8:23 pm

Anyway the main problem is you need to have time to spend in writing on some argument. And you also have to know something to write about it. In that case, you could also earn in other ways then ebay, for example the traditional way of publishing a paper-book with a traditional editor and earn from the sales. Or you could write about that argument for magazines, newspaper, websites, blogs and so on being payed for it.

So the first problem remains to know well an argument and to have time to spend for writing about it.

JT 28. Mar 2007, 10:49 pm

Hey Stuart:

Thanks for the clarification. I did think after I posted that, that realistically there would be a small field of books that you could sell at the $20 level. However something like a cat book, I imagine you could sell for $2-$4 (?), and so long as a) you were grabbing emails for future monetization and b) getting some affiliate sales from within the book, it might be worth pursuing.

But here’s a question, and maybe the answer is obvious: if you create it for eBay, why not sell it elsewhere? Clickbank, etc.? And I’ll wager the answer is you might as well go and do so. Sure, w/ Clickbank you’re giving up 1/2 the commissions, but that’s not a bad thing if you make it on the other two aspects.

And I ask about income because I (and other readers I’m sure) are also wondering about return-on-investment. It seems to me that this would have a potentially shorter shelf life than putting this content on a website (diversification issues aside.)

So if you’re making $2,000 a month (as your example), is that for 5 months? 10 months? 3 years? How often would you have to create new products or revise the content? It’s good to know, because even if someone does decide to diverisfy this way, they should be able to plan out how much time should be spent on this, compared to other projects.

For example: If I have $4k to spend on content creation, and I know that I can make $2k a month for 10 months on this, vs. $500 a month for 4 years on a website… then I can decide I’ll spend $1k on this project and the rest on more profitable stuff. I’m still diversified, but I’m balancing my portfolio to maximize gains.

Last thought: I’ve read several blogs online dealing with ways to make money. Yours is one of a small handful I read regularly. So keep the good stuff coming!

Mark Barrera 29. Mar 2007, 3:49 am

Great post Stuart. I have been doing online and affiliate marketing for some time now, but haven’t really gotten in to Ebay too deep. After reading this though, I am going to dedicate more time to Ebay.

Ryan 29. Mar 2007, 4:41 am

Great post, man. I’m impressed with your array of ideas for making money online. Keep up the good work!

-Ryan

brad 30. Mar 2007, 2:16 am

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Ebay is still a huge online player. And for a few cents you can test out an ad (auction)instead of PPC. I often test sales copy first on ebay. Where else can you get a bunch of targeted traffic for a few measly cents!

Tom Ferris 30. Mar 2007, 3:35 am

I am kind of tired of hearing about the “Create a PDF ebook, and make tons of cash”. I think the people who are doing this are ripping off allot of people. I have never learned anything from these ebooks. They are more or less a waste of time for anyone.

Stuart Read This Please 30. Mar 2007, 1:52 pm

great article stuart. you allways give us almost a “step by step” guide, is because of that i love your blog
Let’s see if this comment is not rated spam again by your blog (i continue without knowing why that happens, it’s jonix again, please contact me when you can, i would like to comment in your blog but i can’t, i’m allways flagged without reason).

Stuart 30. Mar 2007, 2:07 pm

I may have flagged one of your comments previously as spam buddy hence when you post using the same domain it gets automatically put into the filter

Glad you enjoy the blog.

JK 30. Mar 2007, 2:58 pm

ah, that makes sense. But why was that flagged has spam? Is that what i don’t understand. My comments are valid (I think!), and in the comments field, i only puted the address of my site, wich is nothing to do with spam.
Can you deflag it, or i must comment for the rest of my life without putting my site?

Thanks for all the help stuart.

JK 31. Mar 2007, 1:03 pm

are you there stuart? Help? please…don’t let me again without an answer