Hillary Weiss recently posted an article on Medium titled: 8 observations from a crumbling niche – and how to avoid getting crushed.
“Deep within my chosen industry a massive change earthquake is underway. As we weave nimbly between clients, projects, and launches, we watch the trends, systems, and strategies come and go like seasons, and we watch the mighty rise … and the mighty fall.”
Hillary then goes on to say:
“It’s impacting a number of once-heavy-hitters in the space — industry giants who, coincidentally, are watching their businesses tank while continuing to teach business and branding to the unsuspecting masses.”
I would suggest you read her article before you continue. It’s a great read. It’s pretty accurate, and it’ll give you some context for the rest of this page.
Go read it. I’ll still be here when you come back. I promise.
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Okay, you read it?
Affiliate marketer today (read: Opportunity Seekers) earn less, not more.
It requires a ton of work.
They need an ever-growing tricks, gimmicks and sales promos to pull off even fewer sales than they did a few months ago… when they had much less followers or email subscribers.
Before you could simply build a following on IG or Twitter and do sales promos almost daily to earn 4-5 figures a month easily.
That was before everyone and their mother jumped on the affiliate bandwagon and saturated the market with their $17-47 commoditized ebooks, peddling them like candy at a baby shower.
They greedily gorged on the teats of the golden affiliate cow, until the responsiveness of the market tanked under the weight.
But instead of stopping, or evolving towards a more value-first and customer-centric approach, they just threw more “sales promos tactics” at the problem.
Insanity.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein
Countdowns and urgency, salesy high-pressure emails, and polluting the DM with discounted offers.
Make no mistake, pulling off a “successful” affiliate marketing side-hustle now COSTS A LOT.
In time, labor, stress, and opportunity cost.
I “air quoted” successful because it’s relative. It’s perceived. This is the part few ever hear about.
We are bombarded with the sexy “vanity metrics” bandied like status symbols. But those numbers are BS. They tell none of the real stories.
Let’s look at what a typical sales promo looks like when the vanity metrics have been peeled back to reveal the “ugly truth”.
Vanity Metrics
Spend enough time on Twitter or IG and blogs in the “make money online” niche and you’ll quickly see Gumroad Payout or PayPal screenshots popping on many of these “affiliate marketers” accounts.
Yeah bro, I did $500 this week baby!
That’s called a vanity metric, sunshine. And it never tells the whole story. Ever. It’s never the NET money-they-earn-relative-to-the-time-spent-pushing-their-offers-in-the-DM at the end of the story.
EXAMPLE ($500 a week in affiliate income)
Vanity Metric: $500 week in affiliate commission
But now let’s break down the ACTUAL numbers after time costs.
The average price for a digital product is between $27-$47 and the average affiliate commission is 50%. So if someone promotes a $47 offer, he’ll make $23.50 per sale. So in order to make $500 in one week, he’ll have to sell around 21 of these.
Knowing the average user on IG has between 100-300 followers and about 700 on Twitter, someone would have to convert about 7% of their followers on IG and 3% on Twitter PER week.
That is if they’d want to reach $500 in affiliate commission (excluding refunds). Entirely possible for any one week, BUT, thinking of doing every single week is delusion.
But, let say it is possible. How many hours will you have to spend to earn $500 in ONE week?
You can’t obviously tweet 27 sales promos every day and then expect your followers to keep respecting and trusting you, right?
A popular way among affiliate marketer hustlers is to promote their affiliate offers in the DM.
Knowing that the typical sales page will convert between 2%-5%, then someone would need to convince 420 people to click on their affiliate link at a 5% conversion rate to make 21 sales and reach their goal.
That means that they would need to message around 60 people (420/7days) EACH day.
And that is assuming that every single one of the people they messaged:
- Open the message
- Read it
- Click on the link
How much time does it take to message 60 people per day?
Even if they copy/pasted most of their messages, it would probably take them about 5 minutes per DM. At just 5 minutes that’s 5 hours EACH day spent pushing offers.
Okay, let’s run the numbers:
Vanity Metric: $500
Hours Spent: 35
NET Per Hour: $14.29
(Remember, these are very conservative numbers.)
Hardly “screenshot worthy”, right?
And what happens if they stop promoting?
Their commissions stop flowing to their bank account.
Hardly passive income if you ask me.
(Welcome to the real world, bro!)
What’s more, this is also not factoring in the opportunity cost.
Like followers burnout from 3-4 weeks of constant promotion, and the months of waisting time pushing offers down everyone throats.
Selling 21+ affiliate products $47 this way every week requires a LOT of work.
I’ve already seen well-known influencers or Twitter gurus now abandoning this craziness. I’m friends with some of them. And recently one told me in a DM:
“I’ve been messaging other creators and most are saying business is slow. Prices are getting driven lowers. And a lot of people are getting shaken out now. Times are getting tougher so they’re giving up.”
Here’s a little contrast:
In 2019 I decided to do something different and so I created a simple website where I shared a lot of value for free to a very specific Minimum Viable Audience.
There was no gimmick involved. I only cared about providing lots of free content in the form of articles and if people wanted to steepen their learning curve, I invited them to join my email list.
With time I wrote tens of articles, weaved in some relevant affiliate offers, created 5 segmented email lists, wrote some sales copy, then put everything on autopilot, and let people know what I shared on my website wherever I could.
RESULTS:
Pinterest: 20K followers
Emails: 5K subscribers
Affiliate Sales: $3K per month
Total Expenses (email service provider, hosting): $49/month
NET: ~$3,000 a month
Sure, $3K isn’t a ton of money for a month, but it’s completely automated and stress-free.
Instead of DM spamming 5hours a day on SM, I used those hours to create a valuable asset that now earns for me 24/7.
This asset now brings in about $3K every single month. Whether I work or not. On average I work around 4 hours a week.
That’s an effective hourly rate of just over $187.50.
Here’s the perspective that’s important though:
My 4-hour workweek makes roughly as much (and probably more in many cases) as a typical super-spammy affiliate marketer hustler.
I don’t burn my list to shit each time I run sales promo. In fact the opposite happens (but more about why this is later).
Which would you rather have?
Here’s a suggestion:
Leave the status quo to run their sales promo tactics and treat their followers as a commodity, and then do the opposite.
Instead of, “let’s get paid first, then we’ll deliver value (the affiliate product),” what about flipping that thinking on its head?
Towards more transparency and customer-centric value-first.
Put in other words:
It’s about putting the needs of our audience front and center BEFORE ever asking for the sale…
BEFORE we bribe our followers to opt-in to our email list to trigger the salesy-autoresponder…
I’ve been doing the “value first” thing to the best of my abilities since 2019 after being exposed to something that completely shifted my mindset and behavior.
With hindsight I probably just got lucky.
So I want to share what I found with you now. The rest of this letter is about how you can do the opposite and thrive as a result.
Because what I discovered back in 2019, completely shifted how I approach business.
It changed everything. And perhaps it can help you, too.
