How many times have you thought to yourself, ”Monday comes round too quickly’ or ‘I wish I could find a job that had low hours but good pay’? Let’s be honest, very few of us would choose to go to work and wrestle with the daily grind if we didn’t absolutely have to but what if you could find something to make it all a little easier?

One of the most popular books around at the moment is The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. The book suggests that if you outsource and automate everything you can sit back and enjoy life a bit more.

And Affiliate Marketing fits perfectly into this model.

Affiliate marketing involves you setting up a relationship with a merchant that sells products or services that are in-line with the content on your site. You then place a URL on your site that links to the merchant’s products or services and in return you get a share of any revenue that they make through traffic driven through that link, usually in the form of pay per sale (PPS) revenues although occasionally as a pay per lead commission. Well done – You’ve just outsourced fulfilment to the merchant. No product inventory, no staff required to deliver services.

The earnings potential from affiliate marketing is potentially limitless. For some, it’s a great way to boost the revenue of an existing website, for others it is their main business. It is surprisingly easy to set up. Ferriss claims that by outsourcing and automating everything you can simply sit back and reap the rewards and that is almost exactly how affiliate marketing can work. When starting out you can either sign up to an affiliate network or go it alone and forge relationships directly with relevant merchants. The benefit of joining a network is that it gives you access to thousands of potential affiliate programmes and you get some degree of help and support from the network itself. This includes decision making data such as the average earnings per hundred clicks (EPC) or per thousand clicks (EPM) for a given programme, allowing you to start to calculate average visitor values once you have some data as to click-through ratios on your affiliate links.

The networks take care of the accounting and provide you with the links or data feeds you need to publish products and services on your site or sites. Once this is all set up, feeds can be automated and the links continuously updated as needed. So now you have outsourced all of the tracking and accounting to the network and merchants.

What about traffic?
There are essentially two ways in which you can drive traffic to the site in order to generate clicks (and thus revenue). One is via search engine optimisation (SEO) to create strong rankings for relevant keywords in the natural (unpaid) search engine results pages (SERPs). The other is by pay per click (PPC) advertising through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and the like.

To take PPC first, there are numerous specialist search engine management (SEM) firms who will, for a modest percentage of your monthly spend, help you to identify the relevant keywords and a suitable bid strategy. They will then entirely outsource the PPC campaign for you. So, for example, you could ask them to drive X thousand clicks per day for keyword Y at no more than an average cost per click of Z. To do this, you will need to test – refine – test – refine repeatedly to understand what the click through ratio on your affiliate links will be for a given term and thus the average visitor value once conversions and commissions (including factoring in commission reversals etc.) have all been accounted for. Most PPC affiliates would suggest that it takes at least 90 days to get a clear picture on a given campaign — and you will get some of it wrong and lose money along the way! You will also need to work closely with the SEM firm to identify the right keywords, balancing relevance with cost. However, once the campaign has been suitably refined, you should be able to leave it largely in the hands of the SEM firm whilst of course continuing to monitor visitor value to ensure you are actually making money!

SEO is more complex but equally do-able. This needs to be considered in three parts: site creation and optimisation; link building and ongoing content creation.

Site creation is a huge subject in its own right – skip this paragraph if you already have a site! Depending on your technical skills and interests, you may or may not decide to handle this yourself or internally if you are a firm. If you look at offshore options, remember to double the original bid (yes double it – ask just about anyone that has actually had a site built abroad) and account for management time to cover the language barrier, time difference and micro management that these projects seem to need. There are many other options including pre-built templates (rarely very well optimised) and leading edge CSS divisional layer sites from a handful of firms that understand not only web design but SEO (shockingly few web designers have much of an understanding of even basic SEO). Have a look at some of our other articles here at lammo.net for more on on-page optimisation.

Once you have a decent well-optimised site and have added relevant programme links and set up the data feeds, you can start to look at content creation. Unique, fresh, regularly updated content is probably THE most essential factor in long term ranking You can entirely outsource your website content writing to specialist firms who can write SEO friendly, unique and relevant content. Off-shore firms produce . . .errrm . . offshore content and the search engines are sensitive to grammar, spelling and context so this is one place not to be penny wise and pound foolish. Go for reputable in-country firms.

With rich enough content you can then start to build links. Once again, look for in-country firms with a proven track record. We have all had “those” link building emails and let’s face it, how many of us have responded? Modern linking firms will handle the campaign in a professional, ethical manner in accordance with search engine best practice. Some of them can even handle the campaign “as you” which greatly boosts conversion rates. A couple of UK firms can also trade content in return for inbound links (the holy grail of linking) — all perfectly legitimate and very powerful approaches. Almost all major affiliates outsource link building – as anyone who has ever tried to go it alone will tell you, running a linking campaign is a great way of turning a 4 hour week into a 104 hour week!

Many affiliates combine both SEO and PPC approaches in driving traffic.

So with your site set up, your SEO and SEM firms beavering away on your behalf, the affiliate network handling the accounting and tracking and the merchants handling the serice or product fulfilment, you can literally sit back and watch the money come in. This is an example of automating; setting it up and then letting the system work for you. As Ferriss’ book states, minimum effort, maximum results.

Where’s the catch I hear you say? Well if it was as easy as Ferriss states to work a four-hour week and make millions of pounds everyone would be doing it instead of trying to do it. Although you don’t need any great technical expertise or know-how to run a website or set up as an affiliate — in fact anyone can teach themselves how to do it — it does take a lot of patience and bucket-loads of passion and determination.

The catch is that you will need to put the work in, and a LOT of work in most cases in the beginning. It’s a hard graft identifying programmes, keywords, average visitor values and constantly refining. It can also take a great deal of time and effort to identify the right SEM and SEO partners and to set up the relationships. Unless you are starting with deep pockets, you will also find yourself doing more of the work than you would like at the beginning. You need the patience of a saint combined with the impatience of a premiership footballer at a Maserati dealership. Commission rates can sometimes start off low, maybe 3p for every £1 sold. This is great if you’re flogging Boeing 747s and Jacuzzis but if it’s the odd DVD here or cooking utensil there it can take some time to reach a hundred pounds, let alone a thousand or a million. That’s not to say it’s impossible but it IS realistic. The benefit of being patient and taking your time is that you can refine, refine, refine, all the time making sure that you are (or are going to be) in profit.

Affiliate marketing IS an extremely lucrative online business and can make the four-hour week a reality but only if you do it properly, put the effort in where needed and keep on top of changing trends in the market. And you don’t even have to give up your day job until you are ready to!

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