How to make six figures online with Affiliate Marketing

So I have this friend; by trade he was a web developer that got into affiliate marketing; and with only a few years of practice he started making profits that exceeded six figures. Since he is an open person by nature, he was happy to sit down and do a Q&A session and share his experiences and tell us what it really takes to become successful online and how to make extra income from affiliate marketing.

First of all, congratulations! Now onto my questions:

1. What did you do for living before getting into the internet business?
I did programming & web design and i learned that these mesh extremely well with online marketing.

2. How did you do your first year?
My first year it only supplemented my income as I had a full time job. I made around $40k

3. Can you please give a brief real world example of how you do what you do?
I search for products to promote using tools like OfferVault (www.offervault.com) depending on current trends. I find the best payout, research the product, build a landing page to “pre-sell” it before they actually see the product website and advertise it using Facebook and/or Google. I generally use Facebook for promotional offers, dating, insurance, lead gen and then Google for everything else

4. How does this work? What kind of sites/blogs do you create? How does programming fit into this?
I’m basically an online salesman. I earn commission for selling products or sending targeted leads to clients. The best part is I never have to deal with or talk to a customer and I can flash my products in front of literally thousands of potential customers a day. Most of the time I create “landers,” a fancy name for a sales page. Server side programming like PHP isn’t as important as client side stuff like HTML/javascript and a nice design. On the page I talk about or review the product(s) and link the user to the actual sales page with the client. All clicks and sales/leads are tracked by a middle man called an “affiliate network” who has a direct relationship with the client. Think of affiliate networks as a store who gets their inventory from wholesalers and then sells it to the public. An affiliate network gets advertising campaigns from merchants at a certain amount per sale/lead and distributes them to the affiliates (people like me) to market at a lower payout so they can create a margin.

5. How can I make a landing page if my web development skills are very limited?
You need to learn more about making a website. You can always start by creating a blogger account or installing wordpress and create landing pages through blogs.

6. How does design help sell a product? Does color/font/whatever have much of an impact on what people buy?
Yeah, all that goes into affecting the decision of the end-user. I try to be as clean and simple as possible. I’ve found that landers that are more personalized or information based do well than commercialized. People who are looking to buy something online almost always look around for reviews. My strategy is to feed them the review, information, etc BEFORE they see the product site.

7. Would you recommend this path to others that have similar skills to your own? What advice and warnings would you give?
Anybody can do this. You don’t need any special skills. Programming and web design just allowed me to be able to earn faster than probably the average affiliate marketer. The best advice I could give is to:

a) Don’t be afraid to take risks.

b) It takes money to make money (at least if you want to earn real money)

c) Attend any of the major affiliate conferences like Ad:Tech or Affiliate Summit and you can learn a lot from keynotes in just a few days.

d) Test, discover, repeat.

8. What were your 3 most successful products last year?
Weight-loss, stretchmarks, and biz-opp (specifically Google biz-opp) products.

9. Can you name 3 things a beginner in the business should avoid doing – sort of classic mistakes?
1) Avoid new networks, only go with the known/proven networks.
2) Don’t get advice from affiliate marketing forums.
3) Don’t give up when you lose money. You will lose money, it’s part of the process.

10. If you were to start today, what would you do, how much time would you spend and how much would you make?
I got my start by building websites revolved around certain niches. I didn’t sell products… instead I wrote articles and manually created back links to the sites by trading links with other sites in the same niche and by submitting my links to social media sites. I monetized the sites with Google Adsense and banner ads. This is tedious because it can take a long time to make money as you’re solely depending on organic search engine rankings and back links. It’s a lot easier to do now though with programs like http://onlywire.com. When I started I had a full time job and I still dedicated 10-20 hours a week writing articles, creating back links, and optimizing my pages for the search engines.

However, if you were to start in this business today I would highly recommend skipping all that and getting right into marketing products through PPC with Google Adwords. It’s probably the easiest way to make money online and you can make a lot if you only knew the basics.

11. Has it gotten more difficult over the years?
It actually gets easier. Probably like mostly anything in life, the more you do something, the better you are at it and the easier it is to do. I still work a lot though… 50-60 hours a week. I could work a lot less if I wanted but it’s too fun.

12. 50-60 hours per week sounds OK. What do you do on a typical day?
As far as work goes I spend a lot of time reading affiliate news and following trends. I spend most of my time optimizing ads.

13. Speaking of optimizing ads… How many times have you been banned from Google AdWords?
They crack down the shady stuff which I no longer participate in. Google cracks down on account holders who are involved with all the shady rebill offers. Lots of marketers would simply create new accounts that they would use to make money for a few weeks at a time until those got shut down.

14. How much do you pay per click on adwords? Highest? Lowest?
I aim for the lowest I can get, but I’m currently bidding up to $3.00/click on one of my campaigns up right now.

15. How do you leverage Facebook?
On Facebook, I generally start by creating several ads targeting various demographics, different ad texts, different pictures and then letting them accumulate clicks. The ones that don’t convert or have a shitty click through rate, I delete. I keep filtering based on conversion rates and profits. Once I find the ads that work, I make more to target other demographics, etc. I keep doing this until I feel I have exhausted the targeting. You can use this method with Adwords too.. except with Adwords you’re targeting based on keywords.

16. How many domains do you own?
70-80

17. When you create a new campaign, how many variations of your ad copy and sales page will you split test at once? Do you split test both at once or one at a time?
The most I’ve ever split tested on Facebook would be 80. I spend days filtering though. Sometimes I will create tons of ads and find that none of them worked causing me to lose money. I don’t give up on it though, I’m at it again the next day.

18. Any websites/forums/blogs to get started? Can you mention any of the affiliate programs you’re using, or any you’d recommend for someone starting out?
Check out www.affbuzz.com and read/follow the bloggers in this industry. I don’t recommend getting advice from forums but some of the ones to check out would be www.digitalpoint.com, www.warriorforum.com, www.wickedfire.com but be careful there.

19. Do you have an offline network of colleagues you meet up with and talk about the business, trends..?
I know a lot of people in this business but the only times I see them face-to-face is at affiliate conferences. I usually attend 2 or 3 of them a year.

20. Isn’t it possible for someone who is working for the same affiliation site as you and selling the same product, to just google the product, find your website, and rip it?
That’s a big problem in this business, affiliates ripping other affiliates hard work… However, it’s part of the game. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. In fact, I live by multiple eggs, multiple baskets. I’ve contacted the web hosts on some of the people who have ripped my pages and successfully shut one down.

21. Ever had a network reneg on payment due to a client going defunct/bankrupt?
I’ve had problems with getting paid in the past. After that happened I made sure to stay with the proven networks. I will, however, from time to time join new networks if I find it to be the most direct connection with a client.

22. Do you do all your deals through networks or do you have some deals directly with companies?
I have recently started going over and above the networks directly to the client. You’d be surprised at how much money some of these networks are taking.

23. Why do you make so much when most people lose money trying to make money on the internet?
I’ve lost thousands and thousands of dollars online doing this. Most of the money that I lose is by testing and filtering my methods against different products. I may spend a couple thousand testing a product’s marketability until I can find that sweet spot in targeting. Once I’ve found the perfect target and I start seeing profits, it’s not uncommon to profit $2-$4k a day just from one campaign.

24. Do you pay taxes?
Yes.

Well there you go. I hope you learned something today. Thank you for your time and good luck.