Become A Dev Or Re-Try Affiliate Marketing?

[BusyBee]

So I am currently about to start learning to code using The Odin Project. I aim to become a full stack JS dev and probably get a front-end junior dev role. But there is something about web publishing with affiliate marketing/display ads just appeals to me IF I can get to $2000+ per month NET and have the freedom to travel the world while maintaining/growing my affiliate income. I worry if I do both that it will just slow down my programming progress and take me longer to get a dev role.

However, if I publish 1 or 2 1,000 word articles per day, in 12 months I could have $500+ per month from display ads on a website or 2. I was a SEO guy a long time ago, no reason why I could not learn again. But, I don't want Amazon for 2 reasons:
1) their commissions are declining and if they ban me I have no income
2) seems harder to rank for review keywords than to create informative content and profit from display ads, right?

I am also curious about traffic leaking with Reddit and Pinterest, so websites that profit mainly from display ads just appeal to me. Do no backlink, information sites rank and get traffic these days?

If I become a dev and focus solely on that, I could become a digital nomad from freelancing, BUT I wouldn't earn money while I sleep and would need to trade time for money. However, affiliate marketing requires capital investment and reinvestment. Also, I could just do some dev projects and take time off to travel in between. In a way it would be less stressful to get a steady hourly wage and then completely switch off from work for a few weeks at a time. But something about earning money from my own sites whether or not I work that day just appeals to me, no matter what.

Am I making a mistake if I learn to code 5-6 hours per day and devote 1-2 hours per day to building my own sites?

 

[bernard]

Am I making a mistake if I learn to code 5-6 hours per day and devote 1-2 hours per day to building my own sites?

No.

I don't know your particular situation, but the two are not mutually exclusive. You can be a coder and an affiliate marketer and build websites.

An example is the use of product feeds. Most affiliates, if they even use them, just use them raw or from Datafeedr or with Amazon or similar. If you're able to code and can just do some basic RegEx, you can create much better feeds with much more specific categories. You can also add info to the feeds that are not there originally by using external data and APIs.

That's just one example of how coding can benefit the affiliate marketer.

One coding site that was mentioned in Authority Hacker podcast is PCPartPicker.com, that's an affiliate site that makes money from coding, not from content.

With coding, you can create a site, that doesn't depend on new content published all the time. You can even autogenerate some of the content.

It really all depends on your skills. Are you best at coding, best at writing, best at managing, best at being creative. Figure that out and create a business model around it and outsource the rest.

 

[CaptainHustle]

I don't know jack about coding but I have a few months of affiliate marketing/web publishing experience under my belt. I was in a similar place a couple of months ago, debating whether to work on getting a day job or work on my site in an attempt to be a full time web publisher.

I guess the choice will depend on how badly you need money right now. If you have the patience to wait 6 months, I would go all in on a website instead of learning how to code. This is because you should be making at least a couple of hundred dollars within six months from your site if you know what you are doing (You did say you have previous SEO experience).

Once you are making decent money to support yourself, you could learn to code as an additional skillset. At least, that is what I would do.

Display ads vs affiliate marketing?

AM any day. The returns are incomparable. Besides, you can always throw ads on an affiliate site to increase revenue by 30-40%. AM does not have to be capital intensive. There are a lot of ways to work around not having capital. Maybe you will find some ideas here on BuSo (:

There is very little chance that you will be banned from Amazon. But sure, if you are not comfortable working with them, you can choose other companies. In fact, I would highly recommend it.

I know that you are looking for some validation for your goal of $2000 a month with your website. Yes, you can make that much money with your website.

How much time will that take?

Typically, that takes more than a year. But I can bet you can achieve it sooner if you work smart and have the right mindset.

Good luck!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Do no backlink, information sites rank and get traffic these days?

Not much traffic. If they do start getting traffic it's because they start picking up backlinks. There's a huge wave of people in the past year talking about "no backlinks" and I know who to blame. It's extremely bad advice. "If you build it, they will come" just doesn't work. You have to do some marketing, and when you do that online it tends to result in backlinks.

The idea that you can ignore 50% of the Google algorithm and succeed in any meaningful way in SEO is obviously goofy.

seems harder to rank for review keywords than to create informative content and profit from display ads, right?

For sure. The "review" and "best" keywords keep getting harder (meaning a lower ROI) and freshness is at play now too. It's a giant pain in the butt, but if you can get the rankings and hold on to them it's good money. You can do the info content + ads route. You can do both! There's even more "templates" like that you can create:

Content Type:	Conversion:
Review Posts	Buying Product or Service
Information Posts	Clicking or Viewing Ads
Linkbait Posts	Gaining Links & Shares

There's many more of these "content types" all with their own goals that in some way contribute to the main goal, which is to make gobs of money.

In a way it would be less stressful to get a steady hourly wage

For sure. People don't tend to see that. This is a tough racket. Most people fail. Not only do they not make any money, but they lose it, they lose time, they lose opportunities, they lose friends, etc. It's not for everyone. The grass is always greener on the other side.

Everyone I know that has watched me work from home as my own boss thinks its the easy life. Now that they're working from home due to covid for even 6 weeks, they're losing their minds. They thought "being your own boss" was easy. They can't even boss themselves to get out of their pajamas or not work from the bed, etc. They hate it, they hate not having a social life, they hate not having work and just watching Netflix all day. All the things they thought I was doing and wanted, they hate. This level of discipline and sacrifice is for the few, not the many.

It is waaay less stressful to have cash flow of any kind. If it's from a day job it's likely more dependable at the start too, and you can use some of that money to fund your projects. You're right. Having capital helps big time in growing your projects. And having dependable cash flow reduces stress, the kind of stress that makes it hard to be productive for most. Some people see their back against the wall and get fired up to achieve what they didn't realize they had in them. Some crumble and become a nervous wreck and get nothing done.

We can't really tell you which is the better path: dev work or internet marketing. It depends on your dispositions. I can say there's nothing wrong with having a day job, especially when you haven't succeeded with internet marketing in a way that can fund your lifestyle. If you go straight for that, one thing will always be in the back of your mind: "the clock is ticking". The pressure starts to build. How many times and how long can someone fail before they run out of money, you know.

 

[secretagentdad]

Learn to code.


Affiliates that can code think 2k a month is chump change.

 

[BlackMoney]

If you really want to learn front-end development then pay some money for great courses like frontendmasters.com. Sure, you can learn from free material online, but if you want to learn fast, you need to have a good learning material.
I know what I'm talking because I've been in web development field professionally for more than 10 years. Self taught. Learned from reading documentations and experimenting because at that time I didn't have money and was stupid enough to think that spending money on stuff which I can learn for free is stupid.
Now I just pay the money for a good course which gives me strong basics in the topic of interest, shows me where to search for more information and introduces me to advanced topics. If I would have to figure out it all myself, it would take me months, but by spending some money, I acquire this information in a week or two.

 

[BusyBee]

What about making plugins for Shopify, Wordpress etc as a business instead of being beholden to Google's latest SEO algo? I really hate writing.

 

[city17]

Something that might help is trying to build simple tools while you're learning web development. You need to build your own projects to become a better dev anyway, as you can't just learn by following tutorials.

You could use those projects to see if you can actually make something you can make money with. Those tools can be really simple. My most visited site is a one page tool that I made when I barely knew any javascript. It's a shitty site, but it solved a problem and now people still use it.

 

[BusyBee]

How did you monetize it? I do have a few ideas for some sites that are custom-coded (content based sites, but not blogs with articles). I guess I could circle back around to the idea of affiliate marketing in 6-12 months...