Be Like the Shark that Doesn’t Fear Failure, Not the Risk-Averse Tree Sloth

One tendency when first starting out in the affiliate world is to focus all of your efforts on your first site. It’s your brainchild, your baby. It’s a very natural tendency and one that I recommend embracing, as narrow focus is a very good thing when first starting out.

In true annoying fashion, though, I’m going to muddy the waters by immediately contradicting that statement. Ha. Deal with it.

Love your first site, embrace it, cuddle it to your bosom and call it George, but also keep in mind that the odds are great that if you stick with the affiliate marketing business, it probably won’t even exist five years down the road. Things change pretty rapidly in the affiliate world and sometimes sites and projects don’t pan out, and it’s cheaper to simply pull the plug instead of paying to renew the domain.

It’s less true these days with PPC programs abounding, as you can monetize nearly any page, but the underlying principle is mostly intact. Affiliates typically churn through sites and projects like crazy. They’re always circling, shark-like, trying this, then trying that, but always moving and churning out pages.

The absolute first affiliate sites I created five years ago were for various porn sites, as I was lured by the crazy $100-$150 payouts for every customer that signed up for even a $2.99 trial membership. I spent much time on a few of these sites, trying to create the most awesomest porn affiliate site the world has ever seen. All those sites are long dead and gone as I wasn’t able to make much headway in that ultra-competitive space.

Over the next few years I tried all sorts of things, building sites for prescription pet medications, online car quotes, survivalist gear, knives, bonsai trees, legal herbs, body jewelry, you name it. These were increasingly successful, largely because I started treating them as less-than-precious and disposable, focusing on getting tons of content out there and casting a very wide net. Visually these sites looked like a hunk of junk and the content was fairly skimpy, geared towards getting search engine traffic and getting them to click through affiliate links, with no real attempt to build a sticky site or to develop a core audience. i’d build ‘em, move on, and forget them, never returning to update the site or content. While a few are still alive, the shelf life of sites like those is usually 6-12 months, at which point they fall out of search results and become pretty useless.

The last few years I’ve focused on online gambling affiliate sites, admittedly a bit too much in light of the recent legislation that led to me selling off nearly all of those sites and/or simply shuttering them. Had a very nice run there while it lasted, though, so it’s hard to completely second-guess going down that particular path.

The point of that personal detour is that if you’d told me back in the beginning that I would have built all those sites leading up to the present, I’d have laughed. I was pretty convinced that I knew exactly how my first affiliate site was going to make me lots of money. I don’t really regret that, as I learned a ton throwing myself into working on that site, but the path for me ended up ultimately being a long and winding road, with many pit stops that I never would have imagined.

So yeah. Give your first site your heart and soul but remember to keep a suitcase packed underneath the bed.

Be Like the Shark that Doesn’t Fear Failure, Not the Risk-Averse Tree Sloth and related information can be found in Getting Started