It's a Serious Business
Posted On: 2008-01-30
I'm sure that one of the things that attract so many people to this industry is that it all looks so easy. All you have to do is build galleries and free sites and keep on churning them out and the money will start coming in.
You don't have to keep too many records; you don't have to worry about filing and indexing or any of those other office duties that can bore crap out of you. All you have to do is check your mailbox each day and then rock on down to the bank and cash your checks. It's just the sort of lifestyle that you could ever hope or wish for.
And yes, in the beginning it can be like that and years ago that's just how it was. Tales of people making many thousands of dollars a day from galleries are not myths or fables ... it really did happen. I even know of people who made thousands of dollars a month simply from referrals.
But if you want to make serious money in this industry from affiliate marketing then those days are gone. These days if you want to make serious money you have to treat this as a very, very serious business and you have to be prepared to do all those boring and mundane tasks that you once thought you had escaped.
Of course, if you're making serious money you can employ others to do some of those tasks for you but there will always be some boring tasks that you will need to do for yourself. One of those tasks is something that no free site or gallery builder would have to worry about ... but then if you're ready to make serious money you will have gone beyond just being a gallery or free site builder.
Now you'll be into developing your own traffic sources and you'll be working the search engines. You may even be into pay per click advertising and you'll almost certainly be working in both mainstream and adult. You won't be just building throw-away sites like galleries or free sites and so you'll be into tweaking your sites and adding pages of content as well as developing strong back links to your sites.
And that's when you'll want to start keeping records of what you're doing. Yes ... at this stage you'll start doing something that you would never have even considered when you were just building galleries and free sites. At this stage you will need to start keeping notes on what tweaks you've made and what pages you've added to your sites and you'll want to know just when you made those changes or added the extra content.
Why will you want to keep records? Simply because your empire will be growing and it won't take long for it to reach the point where you won't be able to remember all the changes that you're making. And you will want to remember those changes because they can be so critical to your future success.
A word here or a link there can have a major impact on the way a site performs and, if a site begins to sink in the search engines or the sales begin to slow, you will want to know why those changes are occurring. You will want to be able to look back at the things you have done to see if they are the cause of the problems and you will want to be able to undo those things so that you have some hope of getting the site back to what it was like before you made the changes.
So you're going to be keeping records ... and you might even think about keeping copies of your sites so that if a change you make has a negative impact on the site you can quickly upload the old pages so that you have some hope of removing the problems.
Yes, the longer you stay in this business and the more money you want to make the more this free and easy business model that attracted you in the first place changes and becomes far more serious than you thought it would be.
In fact, those days of a free and easy lifestyle here are probably just about gone forever no matter what level you're at. Making money online - whether it's in mainstream or adult - is becoming harder and harder. That's not to say that there isn't money to be made here in affiliate marketing because there is. It just means that you have to be prepared to put in a lot of very hard work to make the level of income that you're dreaming about.
It also means that a lot of that hard work will involve quite boring and mundane things but no matter how boring and mundane they might be those things are vital to your survival.
So be ready to treat this as a very serious business if you genuinely want to succeed.