I get asked a lot about my tips for success and my approach to business, usually specifically related to affiliate marketing. As if I’m qualified to give tips for success, but let’s put that aside for now.
There are lots of ways to make money on he Internet, and Affiliate 
Marketing (or Performance Marketing as some prefer) is of course one of them. Even within Affiliate Marketing, there are lots of ways to make money. That’s why I have such a hard time with the term “Affiliate Marketing” when describing what it is that I do every day. Is “affiliate marketing” itself a business? Or is simply way to monetize your business? I think both.
Bottom Up Affiliate Marketing
Many people look at a performance based offer and ask themselves, how can I make money with this? There are people who want this thing, or this service. If I can find those people and get them together with the company who will pay me to do that, I can make money.
I can build a website, I can buy traffic, I can send out emails to a list, I can hold up a sign on the side of the road.
Those approaches are all “marketing”. There’s nothing wrong with getting paid to get the word out.
Many, many people make a very nice living doing this. I think this is what most people think of when they say they do “Affiliate Marketing”.
Top Down Affiliate Marketing
Then there’s the top-down approach, which is to find something that people are interested in (and hopefully you are too), and build something that they will not only willingly visit, but stick around, even sign up and come back.
Then, once that goal is achieved, you monetize it.
Now of course not all websites that people use and love lend themselves toward monetizing with affiliate relationships. But, this can be done in a way that has affiliate marketing or performance marketing in mind from the start, and in that sense, this is also “Affiliate Marketing”.
My Approach
I prefer to swim with the tide rather than against it.
The problem with the bottom-up, marketing-first approach is that people simply don’t like to be marketed to. The primary sources of inexpensive traffic, the search engines, don’t like what people don’t like.
If you’re a marketer, the world is working against you.
That’s a tough road and often unrewarding as efforts only work well for a short period of time if at all, because the consumer space (consumers and the services they use) pushes you away. And if there’s money to be made, it can be easy for competitors to move in and it is only a matter of time before they do.
Then it’s back to the drawing board or on to the next thing. And many times, the easy way to the consumer is to be deceptive, giving the group a black mark, making the consumer space dislike the activity even more. A vicious cycle.
On the other hand, the consumer space loves the top-down, build-something-useful approach. You are creating something they want. Search engines in turn want that stuff in their index. Then they don’t mind if you mix in some advertising or marketing to pay the bills.
So while bottom up is generally smaller in scope and faster to implement and see returns, top down has longevity. Top down is much harder to get started on and gain traction. It takes a big idea and executing on it well with typically a larger investment. It isn’t easy, but when it works, it works for a long time.
