I want to build a passive income stream with digital marketing. One guy on a DM forum has free advice and a blupriint for beginners to build a portfolio of affiliate marketing websites to create passive income using products on the site Clickbank.
I'm keen to give it a go. I already have some DM and programming skills ( not a STEM graduate though ) and experience, but no financial success yet, which I can leverage.
But there is a lot of negative talk onlline about affiliate marketing being saturated and impossible to get started in without throwing lots of money at it and even then...
So I'm a bit doubtful about putting in the time and effort.
If anyone has any knowledge or experience in the field they can share it would be much appreciated.
There was a time when you could put up a site like "dogtrainingexperthq.net", write some over the top sales copy, and link to some ebook on clickbank and make money with no extra work. I haven't kept up but I think unless you can somehow find a niche that is somehow very low competition but also has sufficient volume and something to sell those days are over.
Buyers have become more sophisticated and it has become much more difficult to get traffic in any niche. I don't think it is saturated but it is not as easy as it used to be. That's not to say it won't still work, it just may be a lot harder.
I used to use affiliates to sell my software. In the end I abandoned it because it was a cesspit of corruption. They would go to extraordinary lengths to try and insert themselves between me and my customers including bidding against me on Adwords and offering cracked versions of my software. It doesn't strike me as an area where honest people can make any money.
I will echo tonyedgecombe's sentiment. I had to deal with some affiliate marketing people in my last job and it made me want to stay as far from that industry as possible. From what I could tell, it's a world full of unscrupulous people hawking scams that range from the merely unethical ("buy this book to learn how to make millions with real estate") to the straight up dangerous (shady weight loss pills, etc.)
are some big pitfalls.
1: you're dependent on search engines, didn't a bunch of people get wiped out a few years back when algorithms changed?
I was one of these people but I still think there is money to be had with online marketing. In fact, even the site that was wiped out still makes a couple of dollars a day. I haven't really worked on it for about 7 years now as I ended up going back to work full time so I basically look at it as free money at this point.
If you do decide to get into it, just stay away from the things Google says not to do - like heavy link building and over optimization of on-page SEO. Also, save some money and be ready to go back to work if you do decide to go full time on it.
I was one of these people but I still think there is money to be had with online marketing. In fact, even the site that was wiped out still makes a couple of dollars a day. I haven't really worked on it for about 7 years now as I ended up going back to work full time so I basically look at it as free money at this point.
No, I haven't bothered as it is a niche I'm not really interested in writing about anymore. I'm in the process of starting a couple of new sites now though. I figure at the very least I'll know what not to do.
