I often hear this question asked on various affiliate forums. “If you were just starting out and only had $100 to spend, how would you spend it?”

It is interesting to read the responses. But in my opinion, if you are just starting out and only have $100 to spend, you are what I like to call “fuct”. I’m sure that’s not what most new affiliates want to hear, but it is true. Not that you can’t turn $100 into hundreds of thousands, but even asking the question about what you should do with the $100 is the wrong approach.

If you start with next to nothing and somehow build an affiliate empire, it is going to have absolutely nothing to do with that initial hundred bucks. You will have that empire because you busted your ass and put in hours, months, and maybe even years building it.

If you only have $100 to spend, forget about the money at this point. Your time and effort holds way more value. Even though I have done very well over the years in affiliate marketing, I once started out with nothing in this business. Everyone starts out their first day as an affiliate with $0 coming in. The biggest piece of advice I can give to someone with only $100 to put into their new affiliate business is to research and learn. I remember when I first started promoting PartyPoker. The first month I made $200-$300 I went out and bought 250,000 hits to my WSOP website from some traffic seller. Hell, even if I converted 1% of the traffic I was going to be balling. That dream lasted for about 2 nights.

It wasn’t until about 4-6 months into this business that I realized the only way I was going to “live the affiliate dream” was by hard work and lots of hours. Once I dedicated every waking minute to that shitty Compaq Presario desktop in my “put together” office I started seeing results. Many of these results came from research and emulating what other successful affiliates had done. Sure I had to spend money to make money, but the growth was coming from trying new things and learning from my failures along the way.

With that said $100 doesn’t make a bit of difference in the beginning. Mind you it is WAY harder to start up now days then it was back then. But here are a few things I would do if I was starting out that are 100% free.

1. I would get a free page at squidoo

2. I would study and learn SEO for months. Then I would optimize this page to rank well for a high paying CPA poker bonus code.

3. Next I would become a super active member at one of the big internet “general forums” such as EbaumsWorld. <—-Just an example.

4. Once I developed the rapport in this community I would offer to host a freeroll tournament at a poker site and throw in $100 to the winner, or make it a fun prop bet. Regardless just something fun that doesn’t make you look like a spammer or affiliate marketer. Remember you have to be a trusted and liked member in a forum for this to fly.

5. Build another squidoo page just for this tournament. Make it fun and sell why all the members should be playing on this. Even better contact the forum owner and offer 1/2 the CPA revenue for them to help pimp it to the members. Webmasters love money and this will keep you in good standings.

6. After the tourney if you made even a decent amount of money from the CPA’s now you have (2) revenue sources with both squidoo pages.

7. Use this money to hire a designer from a freelance forum to build you a sexy poker site with a nice CMS (content management system)

8. Repeat the SEO techniques you learned from the squidoo pages, but now you have a custom CMS where you can add multiple pages every day.

9. Never stop researching, learning, and keeping up on the trends in our industry. Once you reach the top, stay on top.

10. After all this, go buy a new house, a Lexus, and a Rolex. And by all means, swear never to go back to being a monkey in Corporate America.

The bottom line is that if you want to be a full-time affiliate, it takes a ton of hard work and lots of hours. Working in a cubicle for a 3% annual raise for the rest of my life sounds miserable and God willing I will never have to go there again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Affiliate Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.