Does Affiliate Marketing Still Work? 1 Year Income Report From Affiliate Marketing Case Study Site
does affiliate marketing still work because i hear this question a lot some people think the market's too saturated i think it's wide open so i put my money where my mouth was and i started a test a year ago now here's exactly what you're going to learn first how much money my affiliate site made in the full year okay the whole year combined and how much it's making per month right now you're also going to learn how to get started on a budget without wasting money on any of the affiliate guru courses there's way too many fake gurus in this world i have five separate profitable websites i've been doing this successfully since 2003 so i give away all the how-to information free here on youtube you're gonna learn exactly how much time and energy and work that this took to build right like how much time and energy did it take for me to get these specific results and then i'm gonna break it down looking at websites versus real estate as an investment which one is actually a better investment and the reason i'm doing this is because if you learn the skill and the craft of building affiliate websites what you're actually able to do is build assets and the most similar type of asset that i can think of is real estate is a rental property so we're going to actually compare the numbers side by side to see how this world of building affiliate websites stacks up to the world of real estate investing i'm an active real estate investor investor i've been investing for over 10 years my wife and i met at real estate school so i've got some experience there now the affiliate marketers credo this is our motto right you will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want as affiliate marketers before we move forward here our job is to help other people get what they are searching for how do you do it okay so this first we're going straight to the free affiliate marketing training here in youtube if you type in my name miles beckler and you type in affiliate marketing in the search bar above okay so search miles back to affiliate marketing click enter there's the video that says start here it's affiliate marketing in 2020.
It's an hour plus video it's a deep dive it's a no pitch there's no webinars there's i'm not selling anything i teach the entire process there but before you run away and jump over that let's get into the actual data and how about we show you some of the money okay what is this website doing right we've put a lot of time energy building this thing how what are the results so this is from amazon affiliate commission right this is my amazon only i am generating commissions from other networks as well beyond amazon but this is the biggest one and in the last 30 days this website has brought in 5 824 from amazon alone it's brought in over 300 from the other uh platform so it's brought in about 6 100 or so dollars in commissions in the last 30 days and i want to remind you that this is after amazon has made their affiliate program kind of a commission change which we'll talk about a little bit here so the goal was three thousand dollars per month within one year and we hit six thousand dollars per month within one year this stuff works is the first thing you know but i want to go deeper because now we're looking at the last quarter so this is a 90-day window i think it's maybe like 88 days it's not perfectly 90 days this is essentially the most data i can get out of amazon in one shot i've got a big red arrow that shows you exactly where amazon cut their commissions and if you notice my commissions were on the rise until amazon made the cut and then it dropped down but if you notice we're on the rise again and it's growing and in the last quarter this website has brought in over 16 000 from this network over a thousand dollars from the other network so it's brought in about 17 000 or so and you can see we've actually sold something to the tune of 438 000 worth of product here from this website so that's that's what we affiliates are doing right i'm helping so many people learn and figure out exactly which one they want to buy that i'm helping amazon generate nearly a half a million dollars per quarter in sales right now and for that activity i've earned about 16 000 now this is the full year commission okay so this is a graph i made this graph i can't get a year of data from amazon unfortunately so i made this graph inside of excel and really what i want you to see here what's really really most important is to notice that it didn't really start to scale it didn't really start to get into momentum i think momentum is the right word so we didn't get into momentum until about month 9 month 10.
Now in months 0 through month 10 we were full on and i'm going to talk about how many hours we went into it how much money we spent and how many posts we made i'm going to get you that data but i want you to know that we were aggressively massively taking action as much action as we possibly could and at month six it didn't look like a damn thing was going on month five nothing was going on month four it was nothing but stress and this is the first big lesson for you if you're an affiliate marketer if you're starting an affiliate marketing is that somewhere around month three through month six people are like ah does this really work i'm not really seeing any results and i want you to remember i started making money online in 2003. i have five very very very profitable websites out of my profitable websites this one is the least profitable by an order of magnitude okay so that's a little perspective i knew what i was doing i'm good at this and it still took me about nine months to get this going now if it takes you longer than that because this is your first website build does it really matter is it worth however long it takes to generate a cash flow of three thousand four thousand five six thousand dollars per month to me personally it is which is why i put my time money energy in this direction for you you got to make that decision on your own i got to make sure it's clear like i'm not saying anyone's going to make any specific amount of money i'm not making any claims i'm literally looking at the exact data that i was able to create because i'm the only person in this world i can control i don't know what you're going to do moving forward i hope you take action but it's on you from there so you can also see where amazon cut their commissions it really didn't affect my business much i maybe would have gone up to a little bit higher octave i may be at eight thousand dollars a month before the cuts but hey at six thousand dollars per month revenue when i thought or when my goal was three thousand a month i think it was a big time victory for me and my team so the really really important question right how much time or energy did this take now i'm in a position and i'm blessed to be able to apply other people's energy here to this website and ultimately we've invested about 2500 work hours into this which is more than a full-time job for someone for a year but before we get into that too much i want to show you this graph which is essentially showing how many posts we publish that's the red line on top and you can see the red line the the numbers for that graph are on the right side and i've circled 75 so it was at 75 posts that we published that's when the income really started to get into a momentum phase okay and again i gotta repeat this is not my first rodeo i've built multiple other websites i built this channel that you're on here in a very very quick period of time i knew from day one that we were going to be entering a world of six months or eight months of very very very low results but we went full speed ahead and you can see it took about three to four months for us to get our publishing um stuff together to where we were quickly publishing really good posts and then from there we were consistent as could be three posts per week starting month four on it took 75 of the best posts that we could put now we also circled back through a lot of the original posts and we improved them when things hit the search engines we started seeing traffic come in we went back in to just make sure they were really truly were the best topic the best post on the topic that we possibly could put out because that's what google wants that's what your searchers want when you go to google you don't want to read some crappily written article you want a really great article so we have to produce that level of content now this is a graph from my youtube channel when i started this youtube channel in august of 2016 i started it with a challenge and i documented every 30 days how far i was getting what were the results if you notice i'm kind of a data geek and i like to track these numbers so in youtube the red arrows show you right about where my channel got into what i call momentum if you notice the blue line which is the number of subscribers that's the important metric here on youtube that number really turned up at about month seven how many videos had i published at month seven it was about 175 so it took me publishing 175 videos in seven months six months is 180 days that's 210 days so it was damn near a video day every day for seven months straight is what kicked my channel into momentum most people who start a youtube channel they'll do it for three or four months and they'll think this stuff doesn't really work because it's a lot of effort you see the line for my subscriber growth looks like it's at zero practically until month four it didn't even start to turn up until month four but it really hit momentum after 175 videos i'm going back to the previous slide it's the same sort of a thing here right we were nine months in on the written word 75 i'm talking thousands of thousands of words in these posts super detailed research super well written posts it took us nine months to catch that momentum phase here i put even more content 175 pieces of content up and it took seven months for me to get there to get into that momentum phase the key to your success long term online whether you're building a youtube channel an affiliate site whether you're just going to be an authority blogger you just got a lifestyle blog they're putting out a mom blog whatever it is you're doing it's going to take hundreds of amazing pieces of content and it's gonna take years not months okay i was able to do it in seven to nine months but again i've done this stuff a couple of times before if it's your first time it may take you a year or two it took my wife and i three years on our first website we were broke we started for 95 dollars and 40 cents and we were able to grow that thing into a multi-million dollar website over the course of several years so let's move on i mentioned before this we've invested 2500 hours into this website now at the one year mark so this graph that you're looking at here is from analytics this is the google analytics graph for one year exactly and i'm showing you it looks like nothing happened right back in june of 2019 july august september you literally can't even see data registering on the graph we were publishing like crazy that first arrow in the middle 40 posts were published that was when we made our first sale we made a dollar fifty after 40 posts and yes that is six months in right there then at the nine month mark which is right where i was showing you it started to turn up you can see our traffic turned up which really corresponds almost directly to our income turning up right this income turning up here on the blue graph where that arrow is that's at month nine well look at what our traffic did at month nine it just takes that much time to build the trust on google to get the processes and get get comfortable writing great content to publish great content so at that point we had 76 pub posts published and we had made 450 dollars and then in the last quarter we've made about 16 500 and we now have 113 posts so we're doing less work now right from the middle arrow to the far right arrow we only published about 40 posts that's the same thing we did on the beginning of the graph too and i've made magnitudes more money because the power of compounding all of my efforts over the last year all of these 2500 hours of effort that my team and i have put in to build this thing all of that compounded and now we're getting maximum results for minimum input so how do you write epic posts fast because what is the work in building one of these sites right well the work is literally writing great blog posts that answer the specific questions that your audience members are searching for and i got videos that will teach you exactly how to do this again they're free i don't pitch you things i'm not trying to sell you in these videos i'm trying to teach you what you need to know to truly build a site as quickly as you can because i'll tell you honestly those months of not getting results they're not very fun like i'll admit that but to me the rewards of crossing that gap and making it to the other side are worth it so if you search here in youtube miles beckler how to write affiliate post in the search bar and you search that you're going to see this one that i've circled up top that says get my exact template free now that is the template that is super specific i'm going to show you exactly how to write it out down below the one that says no one shares this with me with a stupid look on my face unfortunately those thumbnails do work better than the other thumbnails which is why i do it yes i'm a glutton for clicks that's why i'm here on youtube but that will show you the broader perspective process what do i mean by that how we when and how we research the keywords when and how we research the products who touches what at what point in the process because i do utilize a researcher and editors so i share the bigger process in the lower video the nine step blogging process but then the how to write seo optimized affiliate review post fast you've got to watch that if you're doing affiliate marketing because it's going to help you speed up the process of writing a post from three four five hours for one post down to maybe 90 minutes or less it's really powerful stuff okay so i've proven that it works okay 2 500 hours 2 500 hours is more time than the average nine to five worker puts in in a year so the average person working 40 hours a week they're going to work 2 000 hours in a year we put in 2 500 hours on this website in the first year so we went beyond full time maybe you can't do that amount of time i get it maybe you don't have that much free time you got kids you got family you got this you got that going on i totally get it you're gonna do what you can with the time you have available but when you think about it if you're able to put in 10 hours a week great how many hours is it going to how many weeks is it going to take you to get to 2500 out because that's what it took me so that's why i used that time metric in the beginning but now i want to talk about this from an investment standpoint because my personal question here the the question within the question was i had 50 000 to invest and i was curious am i going to invest this in rental properties or am i going to invest this into what i know which is the world of digital marketing and really just invest and do another website right if i'm actually good at this why wouldn't i just do more of these that's my question of the fake gurus who do nothing but sell you courses if they were really actually good at it they would just stack cash flows and stack assets like i'm doing but instead they they scam people and it's just a shady slippery slope of fake guru dumb don't go to their webinars unsubscribe from their email lists so let's look at it from this perspective now i was looking what's called turnkey real estate so what is turnkey real estate this means it is 100 managed for me the essentially i go buy a completely rehabbed house from a company that specializes in buying them rehabbing them they put renters in them and they also run the property management for me now when i took the approach for this website i did maybe one percent of the work myself maybe 25 hours of work over the course of the year involved in this website it was 100 outsourced through my team and that's why this is a fair comparison from an investment perspective so you'll see here these are three actual houses that i was looking at they're sold to someone else but you can see that um the top one is an 89 000 house 427 a month cash flow 68 000 house with about 350 a month cash flow 91 000 house with 450 dollars per month cash flow that's positive cash flow above and beyond the mortgage okay this is actually the return what they don't put in here is a that's a very aggressive number it's not taking into account any repairs it's not taking into account any vacancies and it's not taking into account their 10 per month on the big number the 895 a month rent um that's their 10 for managing it okay so so this is a real world comparison and by the numbers here's how turnkey properties would work for those three houses combined bundled together it would have been about 250 000 purchase price 248 grand which means it would have been 49 000 uh and six and change down okay there would be closing costs on that we're not talking about inspections there's there's a little bit more but but i'm just using a rough number uh 49 000 down the estimated potential cash flow okay this is after the management fees after the mortgages get paid is 978 dollars per month that would be what actually comes in as revenue and the cash on cash return on investment so how many months would it take to get my cash out so if i put that 49 000 in my big question as an investor is how long does it take for me to get that money back out because then i can go do it again and again right and that's what wealthy people do is they they buy an asset that generates extra cash flow they stack the cash flow up and then they buy another asset they don't buy liabilities they don't buy expensive lamborghinis that have four thousand dollar oil changes they buy rental properties and they buy assets and then they let the assets build cash flow to buy more assets 50 months is when i could cycle that money over again that's the most important thing and the risks obviously there's vacancies there's damage to the house pests termites all that kind of stuff water heater blows and you get water damage to the house and if i wanted to sell the house i could sell it but it would cost eight percent to sell it those are kind of the closing costs and right now it is worth no mentioning there's a whole like cancel rent movement going on we're living in very interesting times uh so that's absolutely kind of a unique uh risk that is is faced here so the affiliate site build by the numbers now you can obviously use your energy to build this you don't have to invest a ton of money you could build that entire site that i built for about 500 bucks my wife and i built our first site from nothing with a 95.40 investment and a whole lot of work and we've made millions with that website so it's possible to bootstrap this through energy but for those interested in in my overall investment numbers i spent forty nine thousand three hundred and sixty three dollars to date on this so it was about three hundred dollars less invested on the website than i would have invested on the houses um that's probably undercutting it on the houses because closing costs and there would have been some other things my current cash flow is 5 500 per month we have literally stopped investing money on the website at this point i now want to see can i get my money back out of it so i might do another update to this video once i'm at break even so after the tech fees and the minimal amount of management fees that are left month after month which is under 500 per month at this point i really think it's about you know a hundred dollars per month to be honest but i'm being uh conservative with my numbers here my cash on cash return is 5.8 months that's almost 10 times better than the cash on cash return from turnkey property so what are my risks here because there are risks right algorithms change we saw a big major google update uh recently but i get that that's just a risk vendor changes amazon totally changed our commission structure and we survived that obviously there's competition is is another thing but i do personally believe that uh the world of digital marketing and affiliate marketing is still absolutely in its infancy it's still absolutely wide open and i'm pretty confident in my skills as a marketer having done this for for 17 years plus now that i'm i'm the competitor right i'm the fish in the pond that gets the guppies at this point in time um so then what about the liquidity of a website right uh so it's a website great i've got it but what if somebody wanted to sell it so this is a screenshot from a website that they're a broker they broker websites now in order for them to give me an actual value on the website that i created it needs a 12 month average of income and my 12-month average of income as you saw it income didn't really start till month nine so this is a future projection okay so in one year from today that website will have brought in if nothing changes if i just stay steady at fifty five hundred dollars a month cash flow to me the website will have brought in 83 000 of income it will have paid itself back right my cash on cash return is there and i'd be sitting with a 34 000 profit at the end of year 2 essentially does that make sense to you so at the end of year two this thing is positive cash flow three thousand dollars per month for me as an investor who was hands off and you noticed what circled i could sell this thing for over two hundred thousand dollars that would be a nice big payday but then i just pay taxes on that which i don't want to do and then what would i do with that money i just reinvest it so i'm a cash flow investor i like the cash flow and i'm after the cash flow so that's what i'm really investing for is cash flow but i want you to see that there absolutely is a second hand market for these types of websites there absolutely are people out there who just want to buy the cashflow website they just want that 5 500 a month cash flow stream month after month they would love to buy this thing from me so what's the moral of the story does affiliate marketing work in 2020 oh my gosh like it exceeded my expectations to be perfectly honest with you like it like it has blown me away with how well this website has actually done and i knew it was going to be a long slow journey that was frustrating until we hit an inflection point i didn't know when that inflection point was going to come for us it was month nine and it just turned and you saw the graphs it just went up from there and for some websites and for some people on their first site build my wife and i that inflection point happened a few years in and that website has gone on to make millions of dollars was it worth years of nights and weekends for us absolutely undoubtedly the life i live today unquestionably yes for for what i put into this the investment that i put into this specific website undoubtedly yes but that's just me and i can only speak and vouch for me so i think that the most powerful kind of idea for you to latch on to from this here is that you're building assets and you're building skills this is what wealthy people do if you want to create wealth in your life you need to become you need to understand the power of assets you need to understand that building assets and buying assets is key and when you learn the process that i teach in the video that i'm showing here the start here video which you can find by searching miles beckler affiliate marketing above when you go in and you learn that process and you build your first affiliate site and it actually works and you make some cash flow and then you build another one what you're going to realize is that you have built skills by self-education you don't need to buy any crazy courses i don't have a 2000 course you just need to do the freaking work to figure it out how it all works for years not months but then you have this ability this skill to go build assets and i'm telling you you can create wealth in your life in ways that you maybe just flat out don't understand or don't realize yet and that's it so the affiliate case study is in the book i i challenged myself i had members and and visitors like you who are like hey miles does this stuff still work you got a personal brand here on youtube that you grew really fast but i'm a nobody can can you just make a site around a brand around a thing indeed i chose a random niche that i'm not an expert in they weren't even the people who built this thing the actual people hands on they've never built a successful website in their life by any means they are all as blown away by this this was done by 20 15 18 an hour help to actually put this all together and it was the plan it was the strategy that we used on my wife's site first that's been running since 2009.
It's the same strategy that i used on this youtube channel here that has been doing 30 000 a month plus for a very long time it's that same strategy again and i taught it in that one video and now you know that it's possible it's wide open it takes a lot of work you're going to be working for many many months and it's going to feel like nothing's going on and that's totally normal even for somebody who has 17 years experience in this industry even for somebody who has 50 000 to throw at this kind of a a project it still took us nine months for momentum so if you're in the process of building your affiliate site good on you keep going it might take you nine months it might take you 18 months to get into momentum but it will happen and when it happens your life will never be the same again if you have not yet started please get started that's the one thing because the day you start is the day you get to march that path towards the momentum moment whenever that happens to be for you i'm around i'm here in youtube all the time i'm happy to answer your comments as you have questions feel free to put them in the comments like subscribe share this video if you think you know people facebook groups subreddits that would get value from seeing this case study laid out like this i know for a fact you can build this with a very minimal investment in a domain in hosting and just a lot of hard work and if you're an investor i think it's a brilliant place of a brilliant use of capital as long as you've got that domain knowledge and if you're bootstrapper who's learning that domain knowledge you will learn how to build assets and build wealth and it's pretty amazing through the skills you can learn here thank you very much for your time i will catch you on the next video until then be well
