Gadooney.com

(This is a bit of a downer of a post, so I’ll pre-apologize and get that out of the way. But it’s something that needs to be talked about at some point. So, umm, yeah. Sorry.)

As discussed here at various points, affiliate marketing can take many, many forms, which is one of the things that interests me most about it. You can create a site about just about anything and, to greater or lesser extents, make some money. Not only can you write about a virtually endless number of things, but you can tackle it from any number of angles, creating mini-sites, building huge, honking sites, engaging surfers directly, pretending surfers aren’t there, and so on.

In the end, though, your goal as an affiliate is to make money. If you simply wanted to create websites and thought money was of the Devil, you could do that and choose to never include affiliate links. So, by definition, if you’re including affiliate links on your sites, your goal is to make money.

In some cases your desire for money meshes perfectly with your audience. Let’s say you geek out over digital cameras and start a site that reviews digital cameras you’ve had in the past. Someone searches on “digital camera reviews”, lands on your site, and they buy a digital camera using your links. They get great advice on the best camera for them, you get a fat commission, the online retailer sells a digital camera, and everyone is happy. Win-win.

But if you play the affiliate game long enough, you run out of no-brainers like that at a certain point. Or you build a different sort of site on a whim and find that it’s much more profitable than your digital camera site. Regardless of the reason, most affiliates arrive at a point where they find themselves building sites solely to make money, without necessarily adding any value to the experience of surfers who land on their site. The affiliate makes money from the surfer landing on their site, but the surfer doesn’t take much away from the exchange. It’s not really a win-lose situation, more a win-push situation.

The Cisco certification site I’m building is a good example of this. If you look at the content there (and are blunt and prone to speaking your mind), you can’t help but say something along the lines of: “If I’m looking for info on CCNA classes and land on your site after searching for “CCNA classes” in Google, that’s not really helpful. You’re just repeating basic stuff I already know, not telling me where I can take classes at, what they cost, or anything useful like that. Sure, you’ve got Google Adsense ads right there which link to actual programs offering classes, but that’s annoying for me to have click two extra times to get to some place that actually offers CCNA classes.”

And you’d be exactly right. On every point. Guilty as charged. I’m intentionally creating content that is solely designed to rank well in search results for terms that I know are profitable when Adsense ads are clicked. Even worse, if you look at all of the posts on the site so far, I’m basically just regurgitating the same basic, very broad information over and over. I’m optimizing each page for best traction in search results, making it unique enough, and using different combinations of commonly-associated semantic terms, but it’s basically the same damn stuff.

Even worse than all that, I’m intentionally making the Adsense links look like normal navigation links on the site, with the sole intention of hoping that less than savvy surfers won’t even realize those are ads and click on them, thinking they are navigational links to the sorts of things they wanted when they searched for “CCNA classes” in the first damn place and landed on my page. Again, guilty as charged.

Why, then, am I being an ass like that? Why am I cluttering up search results with pages that are designed to add no value to a surfer’s experience and only designed to trick them into clicking links that make me money. Because it works. Because I like money. Because I can.

If that sounds cold and heartless, well, it is cold and heartless. I’ve made the decision that I like money more than I like always being warm and fuzzy in everything I do. Sure, I could justify the above in all sorts of ways (I’m refining their search by getting them to a central page where multiple CCNA programs/boot camps are accessible via a single click; some less savvy users appreciate general, broad overviews; compared to outright spam and sites that scrape keywords and would otherwise appear in search results, my pages are actually useful and helpful) but in the end that’s a silly exercise and we all know it.

It’s important to note, though, that the last thing I’m suggesting is that it’s an all-or-nothing decision. I build lots of kinds of sites and will continue to do so. Some will be mercenary and heartless, designed to just make money and concerned with little else. Other sites I build, like this one, will be much more useful and more akin to the win-win situation outlined above in the digital camera scenario. I seem to work more efficiently when I’m mixing in a variety of types of sites, so that’s usually how I work.

Where you draw your own line in the sand is obviously up to you. My goal in bringing all of this up is to not only be open and honest about the realities of some of the things that go on in the affiliate world, as well as pointing out that the canvas you have to work with is very broad. You might stick solely to projects that you believe are useful and better the Web as a whole, and you can still make tons of money. Conversely, you might decide to be very mercenary and to only build sites that make you the most money, with no regard to anything else. As long as you sleep well at night, the sky’s the limit.

I’m finally getting around to reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!, which is pretty interesting despite it being ten years old or so. I’ve got a pretty good working knowledge of assorted financial/accounting/investing issues, but it’s more based on mucking my way through things and learning as I go, so I’m planning a reading binge in the near future to get up to speed on a pretty wide range of topics related to the above, especially in regards to investing in real estate and the various vehicles to do so.

One interesting point he hammers home in the above book is a very stripped down approach to looking at your assets and liabilities. In his eyes (and this is a bit debtateable but still interesting) your primary residence is a liability, not an asset. It takes money out of your pocket on a daily basis, as far as the mortgage, maintenance, property taxes, etc. Sure, many people profit from their home when they sell it, but that’s not guaranteed and the profit appears when you no longer possess the liability of a home, as you’ve sold it. It takes large amounts of money and time from your pocket, so it’s a liability.
Let’s say you start a business of your own, a bakery, that you work long hours at every day. It’s profitable, you pay your bills, but you’re there ten hours a day. It’s a liability, not an asset. Your time has value and it’s robbing you of an enormous amount of time.

To be considered an asset, something must not only put money in your pocket but it should do so even when you’re absent. Assets can’t require all of your attention, as they typically turn into liabilities at that point.

That doesn’t mean that working at the bakery is bad, just because the business is currently a liability. Or that it will always be a liability. If you hire a great manager and pay them all of the bakery profits minus $100, then go and start a new business, say a car wash, where you work at ten hours a day, suddenly your bakery becomes an asset (it’s generating $100/month in profits for you, with no work at all required of you) and the car wash is a liability. And so on. Assets don’t appear out of thin air, and usually the way to get them is to work hard at your day job, save money, and invest that money in assets. Grow your assets to a certain point and suddenly your job becomes managing and expanding your assets, not working at a day job.

(I’m simplifying his viewpoint a bit there for the sake of brevity, but that’s the basic gist of what he’s getting at.)

All of which made me immediately ponder the affiliate stuff, as far as whether my affiliate sites are assets or liabilities. Remember, something can make money for you and still be a liability, if it consumes too much of your time. So you could have a site that made you $3,000/month in income but it could be a liability if it required constant updating and attention and you worked on it 60 hours a week, while a site that made just $20/month could be an asset, if you never touched it and it simply ran on auto-pilot.

It’s interesting, too, as nearly all affilliate sites start out as a liability (you put in much work but make no money for the first few months, due to the nature of search engine traffic), but “successful” ones are those that tip over at some point and become assets, when the income they produce is greater than the value of the time you put into them, resulting in a surplus.

If I look back at all the affiliate sites I’ve done and isolate the ones that became assets, they pretty much fall into two major categories:

1) Sites that were narrowly focused and had a well-defined beginning and ending point: The key here, methinks, is that there’s an ending point for these sites, when you hit the finish line and say “Done, been nice knowing you, go make me some damn money.” Part of that, though, is being realistic and savvy from the very beginning, and tackling projects that are focused and defined and don’t require Herculean efforts to build and (most importantly) don’t require updating or attention moving forward.

The legal weed site I built back in ancient times is a good example of that. I cringe even including the link to it, as that’s an ugly, ugly site, things are completely broken, lots of links don’t work, and it’s in general something I’d never publicly claim ownership of. But that thing consistently makes me $100-$200 every damn month, without fail, and over it’s lifetime it’s probably make me close to $5,000. Considering I built it in a weekend and have never, ever touched it again, it’s been one of my best assets.

2) Sites that were on topics that I enjoyed writing about: My poker blog is the best example of this, and something I’ve discussed a lot here already. Even though it was very open-ended and consumed a lot of my time, it turned into a major asset. I can’t even begin to count the hours I put into the site and the related projects it spawned, but the income generated greatly exceed that time expenditure. My goal is for this site to follow a similar path, as far as a sprawling, time-intensive project but one that I enjoy, which I can hopefully find ways to monetize over time.

The key thing to take away here is that it’s okay to throw yourself into a huge, sprawling affiliate site that will never end, if it’s something you enjoy and love. There are multiple paths to turning sites into assets so don’t get locked into thinking you have to be mercenary about it, grinding out 25-50 page sites on topics you could care less about, and repeating it mindlessly, over and over.

It’s also interesting to look at a site in progress, such as the Cisco Certification site I recently started. What do I need to do to make that an asset and not a liability? Well, for me the path is pretty clear: hit it and quit it. If I can build a 50 page or so site targeting the most lucrative keywords related to Cisco certification stuff, and I can do it in a relatively short amount of time, it’ll be an asset. It’ll never make tons of money but when I’m done, I’m done. Whether or not it’ll be an asset, then, hinges on if I can build it quickly enough so that it consumes less of my valuable time. If it took me three months to build, working every day, it’d probably be doomed to be a liability. If I can build it in a week or two, it’ll be an asset.

Much of that reasoning, though, is based on the fact that I get no thrills out of writing about Cisco stuff and, honestly, don’t know much about it and have never taken a single class in that field. So for me it’s a chore to grind out content for that site. I knew that going on, so I designed the project to be very close-ended, with a very obvious finish line.

Let’s say instead that I had a bajillion Cisco certifications and loved that stuff, and felt strongly that there should be a site that was a comprehensive, useful recource for anyone looking to get a Cisco certification. If that were the case, I might instead decide to create a site that was a daily blog about my work with Cisco products, with a forum for users to discuss different networking issues, personal development, etc., as well as reviews of programs and schools offering certification classes so that users could find the best programs, and on and on and on. It would literally be a site with no end, as there would always be new features and content you could add.

And, more importantly, it would have just as good a shot at being an affiliate asset for you as my stripped down, mercenary approach to the exact same topic. For me, building a site like that would turn into a liability. It’d be a chore, I wouldn’t be excited, and that would show in the half-assed product I turned out. For you, though, it’d be a labor of love and that would show in your work, as you constantly improved it and generated more traffic and turned it into a major asset.