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I’ve spent the last year learning a ton of shit doing affiliate marketing. I also have previous experience with e-commerce selling physical products. If we take a quick look at the two:

E-commerce: An online store takes alot more work to begin, but once it’s running provides a very stable income.

Affiliate marketing(via paid traffic): Fast results, instant traffic and instant conversions, but there are a zillion things that can go wrong and bring you back to square one. Not to mention everything you do is a ’secret’, everything can be stolen and copied, reducing your chance of long-term success.

So if you combine the two, in theory we have a recipe for domination. Why? Because you OWN the product, you can outbid any affiliate, your only competitors who can compete with you know nothing about online marketing.

It’s amazing to see how much the affiliate marketing game has changed in the last year, it’s been pretty epic. A common theme I seem to be seeing among affiliate marketers at the moment, is they seem to be seeking more stability. We cannot continue to base our businesses on forever-changing advertising guidelines and platforms. We need to be in control, and we need to dictate the success or failure of our business, not Google, Facebook or the FTC.

This is just a blueprint, outlined in steps. Of course each step involves lots of hours of hard work, but this is business after all… You can outsource a lot of this work if you have the cash to spare.

I have my own project in the works at the moment, and I’ll expand on each part of the process with live examples in future posts.

So here we go…

Step 1 – Research: Find a product, check your competitors, consider logistics, target market, local laws/regluations etc.

Step 2 – Find Suppliers: I already wrote a post on How to source products from Asia.

Step 3 – Order Samples: This is for 2 reasons, firstly to sample the quality, secondly so you have a few of the products to actually sell and test the market, it may be wise to order more samples than you think you’ll need.

Step 4 – Build Your Site: There are a zillion options here from hosted shopping carts to self-hosted and so on. Think about the the future, and choose wisely. It’s a lot harder to change once you have a live site with orders going through and affiliates sending paid traffic.

Step 5 – Setup Payment Processing: Credit cards and PayPal. I think this is a lot easier for people in the US.

Step 6 – Test Some Sales: Now that your site is working, remember those samples you ordered earlier? Yeah, throw up some campaigns and sell that shit! Based on how this performs, this is your last chance to back out.

Step 7 – Order Goods: Most likely your suppliers Minimum Order Qty will set you back a few thousand or more, depending on whatever you agreed on. Here’s where you put your money where your mouth is and commit.

Step 8 – Make Some Money: Now that you have the goods, load up some campaigns and start moving that shit!

Step 8.5(Optional) – Make Life Easier: If you can’t be bothered sending the shit out yourself, enlist the services of a fulfillment center to do it for you.

Step 9 – Make More Money: You now know what works and what doesn’t, get some of your affiliate friends to join your program, now you are their affiliate manager!

Step 10 – Scale That Shit: There are 2 main ways to scale this up to the big-time:

• Go international: If you went with the optional Step 8.5, you don’t really need to be in your home country, do you? Now go live in London for 3 months while you repeat the process there, then Australia, etc. Think BIG.
• Launch a new sites with a new products: You already figured out your shopping cart, you already have your merchant account. You have all the infrastructure set up, make a new site, bring some new products in and your ready to go!

The potential here is fucking huge, and I hope you can see it. It’s only 10 steps, but once you start, you will hit a lot of road blocks, but remember the end result and nail each problem as you come across it.

This could work with digital products as well, I just prefer physical products because the competition is generally stupider. Digital products can be copied and become obsolete. There will always be a need for cufflinks, for example.

All of the operational workings of this business can be outsourced relatively easily, providing you with an income and lots of time… These 10 fucking measly steps can help you achieve your dreams.

I will lead by example, my project is currently up to Step 7(has taken 1 month to get this far), soon I will share everything as a case study.