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Originally Posted by RawAlex
Perhaps as a paysite owner. As an affiliate, unless I truly believe that the customer will keep coming back and buying over and over again, I just want to see the money.
If a program is convinced they will make mondo dollars with a new client, pay me and I will walk away, and you can do what you like with your client.
Paying me 50% of a $1 movie play isn't exactly going to make me a ton of money, I would have to hope that the guy comes back 70 times to equal a single $35 signup.
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Welcome to Netpond
I posted this on another board a few months ago. It is somewhat relivant to the conversation in this thread in regards to what can an affiliate do to build a customer base even though he is advertising another program.
This applies mainly to affiliates.
I started off as a membership site owner, spent countless hours updating the sites, adding more content, paying for plugins, dealing with members, etc.. After realizing all the time I put in just to provide a product to sell vs the amount of money I was making from advertising other people's sites, it seemed like a no brainer to switch over to being an 100% affiliate. Now instead of spending 20 - 30 hours a week on maintaining my membership sites I had that much more time to spend on advertising and getting more traffic. This made me a lot more money. Thankfully I was 100% away from my membership sites a couple years before ibill went under, so I only lost about 50K from old rebills. If I would have been going 100% strong with my sites right up until they went under I would have lost well over a million dollars, so I lucked out there.
Where I went wrong....
When I was promoting my own membership sites I was building something of value. As I made money from them they built a membership base. The more popular they became the more my membership base grew and the more my site was recognized on the net. So not only did I directly make money from my advertising (10 sales that day say I made = $300 etc...) but I built "x" amount of value into my site as my membership base got bigger. If I would have grown my site to have 1000 active members not only would I have been making 35K a month, but I would have a site worth a lot more then that if I chose to sell it.
When I switched over to being 100% an affiliate, for the most part I used single pages or small sites built around that sponsor... I didn't put any effort into trying to retain people or build up the page/site I was using, I was happy getting sign ups from the traffic i sent to it. Fatal Flaw. Here I am busting my ass, making really good money, but at the end of the day, what did I have? A nice check and that was about it. I had nothing of value. I had grossed over a million in sales the year before just to clickcash but i had nothing of value. nothing. No site like hoes.com or a tgp that had 500K hits a day etc.. i had zero to show for it except for the checks I was being sent. I had sent in tens of thousands of customers to another site to build up that sites value but I gave those same people no reason to come back to my site nor did I offer them anything different for sale on my site in the future if they did come back. Basically it was a one shot deal, I got the traffic, tossed it to the sponsor and hoped the signed up, if they didn't then that was it.
I always prided myself on the ability to make money off of everything I did and I totally missed the boat on that one aspect. It finally hit me one day, why not make the same amount of money but build value in your sites at the same time. Some simple things to do this would be to add a forum, add blogs that update everyday, give people a reason to use your site and to want to come back and use your site over and over again. Get creative, there are many ways to do this but the point being is don't just make a site to make money, but build a site you are making money from. Be innovative, grow with your site, give the people a reason to come back and buy other things from you, etc...
That's my advice, if you are an affiliate build value in something while you making money from it. As simple as it sounds, I can't be the only person that didn't realize this. I think back now, if I would have been sending all my traffic to a site like hoes.com it would not only be as popular if not bigger then his, I would have something of value worth a good bit of money. It woud be like the icing on the cake ( the cakes being all those nice checks i got every week.)