The Affiliate Journey

I watched a breif video today by Mark Ling (creator of affilorama.com an affiliate training program).

I have never bought one of his products, nor have I ever watched a video or recieved one of his newsletters (I’m not big on buying into IM or Aff. marketing products).

How ever something struck a chord with me in that video this morning, he talked about his method of going full time in affiliate marketing, making $10,000 a month in total commissions, and living off about 60% of that.

I realized that not enough people talk about the importance of not “taking the money and running” when you see a profit. It’s important to scale with profits, outsource, build new sites etc.

The 50/50 or 60/40 split

I personally follow about a 50/50 split with profits and re-investment. I take 50% of my earnings each month and use that as my personal income (I continue to keep my living expenses consistent and save/invest the remaining for slow months and retirement etc.).

I take the other 50% and that’s what I run my network of websites on. This money is spent on template and graphic design, content creation, link building, article and directory submissions etc.

You can’t do it all

It’s very tough to be a one man show in this business, unless you are a successful blogger of have a huge authority website in a market that has a huge problem(s) to solve.

In order to hit that 10K a month mark you’re likely going to need between 5-50 sites (50 is a big overage, but if you’re doing it with adsense it’s quite possible).

To build, maintain and grow that number of sites is going to take some help. Where people help is up to you, but you’re going to need to hire some contract workers (aka. freelancers).

Start Practicing this Now

If you’re not currently outsourcing, or you feel stressed about how much work you’re continually doing on your network of sites, try this for the next couple of months.

1.) Make a list of all the tasks you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis
2.) check off which ones you can release control of to outsource
3.) Post projects for those jobs on sites like getafreelancer.com, rentacoder.com etc.
4.) Hire 2-3 providers for each project to do a small test job (i.e. if it’s article submission have them submit 2 or 3 articles not 10 then choose the one or two providers to keep working with that seem to do a good job)
5.) Allocate 40% or more of your monthly earnings towards outsourcing these tasks.

So what do you start spending the time you’ve now free’d up on?

Well, you will need to manage those people that will take time. But now you can also start to plan expansion, growth and new sites.

Start to think about long term goals, new sites you could build, tests you could run to improve conversion, revenues, and traffic on your current sites.

The sky is the limit, and this is where the real growth begins. You’ll make more with your mind and ideas then you will with submitting articles, writing content, and coming up with ways to manipulate link building.

You can always pay someone to handle the mundane tasks.

As John Reese once said, “Write small checks to collect bigger ones”.