So to turn this into a post: how do I plan on banking enough money to retire at 25? And first off, how much money are we talking about here?

My number that I want in the bank is a mere $5 million. Taking some very rough estimates, the bare minimum in which I can survive off of is around $40,000/year. It’s most likely higher than that now since I like to live comfortably, but I could easily live off of $40,000/year. If I had $5 million, I’d put 1 away into a savings bank or something like that as my living fund. Assuming the bare minimum, I could live for 25 years off of that money. So where does the other $4 million go? Most of it probably into long-term investments. Things like mutual funds and CD accounts, and then other things like real estate and other business ventures. Hopefully in 10-20 years I could turn that $4 million into $8-10 million (again just guessing here and thinking out loud), and then I could live very comfortably for the rest of my life.

Now how will I get there?

• Keep doin’ what I’m doin’. Affiliate marketing simply makes too much money to put on the back burner right now, even if I do spend a lot of time on it. People make $30/hour at their full time jobs 40 hours a week. Affiliate marketers make $300/hour; the average Joe would have to work 400 hours a week to make that much money. Given only 168 hours in a week, it’s completely impossible for them to make half that much even if they spend all day and night at their job with no sleep :).
• Take some time to expand into other areas and businesses. Like I said, affiliate marketing will continue to be the bulk of my income until it slows down (which I don’t know when it will). But it’s never bad to spread my eggs around, even if it’s only an extra $1,000/week. Money is money, and I can take that money from other projects to pay for living expenses, while banking and/or investing 100% of my affiliate profits.
• Help more people. Karma is real, and the more I help people, the more I end up getting in return. I’ll continue to run this blog, as well as go into some other projects that’ll help you guys make money.
• Relax. I can’t think of making $5 million as a struggle, or else I’ll overload myself with too many projects and get overwhelmed and non-productive. I need to keep things in perspective, take one project at a time, manage multiple projects effectively and relaxed, and take vacations when I need one.
• Engage in offline businesses that I enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with having as many safety nets as possible, and it would actually be fun to do something that I enjoy. In my recent interview at Can’t Get Rich I talked about how I’m becoming a certified personal trainer, and how I want to eventually maybe start up a gym. I also love golfing, so who knows I may take some money and invest it into a golf course. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I want to end up doing more things that I enjoy.

Alright just some usual uber thinking out loud, maybe you’ll take something from the post.

Reason #1 : Fear

Probably the most common reason people don’t succeed, is because of fear. They don’t believe that a person can make $1,000/day online, and don’t want to risk their hard earned salary in taking a chance to do the impossible. How many times have I said on this blog that you can’t be afraid? Many. You need to stock up some cash, and just go for it. Go all out, bid high, test keywords, test ad copy, test landing pages; and see what works. That’s the hard part, after that you just take what works and keep optimizing it to be more profitable, it’s all gravy baby.

Reason #2 : Cash Flow

I see this a lot in e-mails or on forums, a complaint is “I keep running out of money so I have to pause my PPC campaigns.” I always say the same thing to people…CREDIT CARDS! Get the most simple Amex, something like a Blue Cash (that was my first card), and if you can’t get approved with Amex try and get a MasterCard or something with a decent limit. This way you can spend money and not have to pay until the end of the month. Just make sure you either have enough money in the bank to cover it, or are profiting with the campaign.

Step 2 to this equation is getting better payment terms from your affiliate networks. Just explain to them that your cash flow is tight, and in order to continue the campaign with them you need to be on bi-weekly payments at least. As long as you’re making more than $5/day, they should be able to help you out because they want your business.

Reason #3 : Payout Problems

Many times the thing keeping your campaigns from profiting is the payout on the offer. Networks take a lot (20% on average) of the commission that you’re earning for them, they ALWAYS have room to increase your payout when you first start an offer. Negotiate and explain to them how much more you need per lead to be profitable and keep the campaign running, and you’d be surprised at how much they “can do for you.”

Reason #4 : Improper/Lazy Tracking

I’m even subject to this a lot, I start a campaign and I’m either too impatient or too lazy to set up proper tracking. I just let it rip and lose $1,000 and don’t even know what keywords converted and what ones didn’t. Don’t be lazy in getting your campaign set up, take your time and make sure you’re tracking everything. The “successful affiliate marketing formula” is really pretty simple, launch a test, track which keywords and ad copy convert, and get rid of the crap ones while optimizing the profit/breaking-even ones. So make sure before you launch a campaign that all your pixels are placed and other tracking things are in line.

Reason #5 : Distractions Distractions

I’m not gonna lie, right now you’re being distracted from directly working on your campaigns and making money. Things like reading blogs, visiting forums, blah blah. All these things can take up a lot of time, time that you could be spending making more money. I’m not going to write a story about this one, because I’ve said it a million times along with everybody else out that that’s ever given advice. Keep the distractions to a minimum and just focus on testing, tracking, and pulling out the trends.

Are you victim to any of these things?

I talk about a few things so it might be interesting for some of you. Lord Brar (domainer from Wickedfire) is before me, so if you want to skip to me I’m like 23 minutes into it.

Twitter on Quantcast

I took a quick look over at Quantcast on Twitter to see what the demographics looked like.

The site caters to a more educated audience.The typical visitor subscribes to New Yorker and reads realclearpolitics.com.

Ok so we have more educated people on Twitter, and it looks like the audience is a little older than the 13 year old Myspace crowd. So this kind of makes ringtones or something like that not the best choice.

So what do older people want? I don’t know, the really old chaps like wine, cigars, etc. Mid range people maybe want Starbucks coupons, New York Times subscriptions, maybe a better mortgage. All of these things have affiliate offers. It looks like 30% of the users have a child in their household…maybe you coupon guys can find a Toys ‘R Us coupon for them, haha.

Do I have any idea that this will work? No…it just came to mind as I was on Twitter earlier. I’m in the whole webmaster crowd on Twitter, but I’m sure there’s normal people out there that don’t know what affiliate marketing is. It’s just a potentially large traffic source that looks untapped; perhaps people are doing it already and I just haven’t gotten any spam.

Good luck and don’t blame me for any of this.

DISCLAIMER : These are my ideas only, and I am not recommending you take action on anything I say. If you piss Twitter off and they sue you or something crazy, don’t point the finger at me. I’m only thinking out loud here, if it sparks any ideas in your mind then so be it.

Once again, when again guru preaches (and once again including me), it’s the sermon that “Google is king of volume” and “If you want any high volume campaigns, it has to be Google.” To be honest that’s pretty much what I thought and how I made my campaigns - until now. I never really paid that much attention to YSM after my Google campaigns really started taking off. I’d take my big Google campaigns and just copy and paste them into YSM, and not really look at it. Well after re-creating some old campaigns last week, my philosophies have changed a bit and I’m now going to look at my Yahoo campaigns a lot closer. Take a look at my campaign from one day, May 4th.
 

 
Pretty crazy? I never thought a Yahoo search campaign would rack in 1,700,000 impressions in one day. Once I work on CTR and double that, I can be looking at 40,000 clicks/day to just this one campaign - on Yahoo!

Lesson here, don’t overlook Yahoo at all. Their system may be horrible and make no sense at all, but there’s definitely volume there to work with.