What size affiliate are you and do you employ staff?

[RacingJim]

Just wondering out of people on here, what size affiliate would you class yourself and how professional are you in your setup?

e.g. how do you get your web development done? Are you a techy type who does everything yourself, do you employ freelancers from India, freelancers from the country where you live (e.g. UK) or do you have a more professional setup such as having an office and some salaried staff?

Personally I run my business from home, I'm a limited company but I have no 'employees' I'd say I'm probably a medium level affiliate, I use freelance web developers to get a lot of the more difficult stuff done, I design my sites myself in terms of concepts and look, but then put it in the hands of the developer to make it real.

I write my content 50/50 myself and freelance content writers. if it's a 'money' article I'll do it myself and if it's just something to keep a site fresh I'll let a freelancer do it.

Just wondering how others run their business, I'm looking at potentially getting an office and staff or getting more expensive freelancers - as the ones I've been using just take aaaages and their work is often error-strewn so I have to go round the houses a bit to get my sites how I want them. e.g. bouncing sites back and forward between me and Mr Developer while he irons out all the bugs I've found.

I find working with freelancers a hit and miss experience, especially the cheapo ones on the foreign freelancer sites.

[-Shay-]

We do most of our work "in house".

When it is stuff that is "over my head", we outsource to a quality freelancer - think graphics, and logos, as well as design or advanced coding issue). Whilst I can "clean up" code, I do not fare well writing code.

I typically write most of the content as well. When we're in a pinch and need a bunch of content in a short period of time, I typically find someone to help with the content writing. Historically, we've taken on affiliates who were struggling with their own business and in exchange for "reasonable rates" and a strong work ethic, we've provided guidance on how to better monetize their business. Three such struggling affiliates went on to make six figures after working with us. I'm not saying we were the sole reason for their change of fortune but between the short-term income, advice, and experience - we played a role in helping them get through tough times and become successful.

We are set up as a Limited Company and we do have an office - though I do not work from the office. We have explored the idea of hiring full time staff, however - as a medium sized affiliate who strives for modest, yet continuously sustained growth - taking on a full-timer for any period of time would not fit our business model. There are times where we could use 2-3 people and there are months where we cannot use anyone at all - so for the time being, we do not employ anyone on a regular basis.

[Triple7]

I just started and I am a small affiliate. I did work with freelancers, especially the cheapo ones too. My conclusion after working with a few of them is: what I do myself I do better. If i pay peanuts, I usually get monkeys. Their articles f.e. were not the quality I was looking for. Some of them did even make grammatical errors, which is unforgivable for a content writer. Same thing for webkids. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Or you get scammed. Nowadays everybody can call himself webdesigner or contentwriter.... I am not, but I write Dutch without errors, so I am writing better than 99% of the budget content writers. I even got asked by some casino's to write articles for them. My English is crap, so I'm not going to write texts in English.

So now I do most things for myself. For foreign websites (in construction) I do have friends that are writing text. I pay them for that. I know a lot of people from different countries, so that's useful. They can make some money and I got content I want.

I've got an office at home. Well, office is a big word. It's a room with my desk and stuff. I am not looking for an extern office. It's ok like this. I can work here the way I want and I've got everything here I need. Perhaps in the future I will hire freelancers, but ones of a more expensive category. Quality costs money.

For the rest I cannot say here too much about how is setup my company.

[wonderpunter]

I started small Now a medium sized affiliate I have 3 others that write, All tech side, SEO I do myself football season I have plans to move to large affiliate size with around 10 new employees and over 3,000 pieces of content per month. it's been a Journey to start was a real struggle the first year but when everything clicked into place it just kept growing and growing though I can sometimes work 20 hours but I wouldn't change it for the world.

*Also with regards to freelancer.. I have used college students from the states via forums, and found communication has been a lot better in knowing what i need, and there are some talented kids out there that need to pay off student loans.. you should give it a try.

[Moonlight Cat]

what I do myself I do better.

This is the very big mistake. My biggest mistake in the first years in aff.business - i do all, by myself.I wrote articles, coding sites e.t.c. This is very hard. But when i began to use the results of wage labor, my income was grow several times. This law for any kind of buisness. You need to buy cheap labor of others results and assign it.

example: most part of my income (~60%) from spanish speaking market (Spain and LATAM). But i know only two of three words in Spanish.
I have traffic and players from English speaking countries - but you may see, that my English language is very poor.
The one and only reason, why i made money in this markets: i use wage labor.

[Triple7]

This is the very big mistake. My biggest mistake in the first years in aff.business - i do all, by myself.I wrote articles, coding sites e.t.c. This is very hard. But when i began to use the results of wage labor, my income was grow several times. This law for any kind of buisness. You need to buy cheap labor of others results and assign it.

example: most part of my income (~60%) from spanish speaking market (Spain and LATAM). But i know only two of three words in Spanish.
I have traffic and players from English speaking countries - but you may see, that my English language is very poor.
The one and only reason, why i made money in this markets: i use wage labor.

Well, I don't agree completely with this. You also need to do things yourself. I just started and I didn't want to invest a lot of money. I wanted to invest time and see how things would be. I hired some cheap freelancers and all they brought me was just frustration and irritation. I think I lost more time cleaning their ****, calling them to fulfill the agreements, etc than I would have spend when I did the job myself. I really spent alomst more time discussing with this people than with really working.

That's why I decided to do things by myself and in the future, when I've made some money with this, hire better qualified freelancers. Quality cost money. Pay peanuts and usually you will get monkeys...

For things I cannot do my self (like writing English content), for sure I will hire people.

[Aris1985]

We are a limited company based in Scotland/Greece that consists of me and my Dad, i do the SEO/webdesign and hire good content writers to help out with all my affiliates ( i run affiliates in different niches). My Dad is a developer and has built a custom CMS for all our affiliates so he deals with coding issues etc, i tend to spend quite a bit on content writers as i have tried going down the cheap route before and the quality of the content is just terrible... I would say we are a small affiliate in comparison to the kind of cash big affiliates make: http://prntscr.com/6stbqf
Source: http://90digital.com/data-insight/ig...icle-4968.html

[wonderpunter]

We are a limited company based in Scotland/Greece that consists of me and my Dad, i do the SEO/webdesign and hire good content writers to help out with all my affiliates ( i run affiliates in different niches). My Dad is a developer and has built a custom CMS for all our affiliates so he deals with coding issues etc, i tend to spend quite a bit on content writers as i have tried going down the cheap route before and the quality of the content is just terrible... I would say we are a small affiliate in comparison to the kind of cash big affiliates make: http://prntscr.com/6stbqf
Source: http://90digital.com/data-insight/ig...icle-4968.html

Traffic value is interesting, in those numbers my traffic is worth between $180,000 to $600,000 per month depending on low vs high CPC, but not a true worth into what it generates in revenue "For me anyhow" otherwise i would have sold up already I class in profit generated for a medium affiliate 100k+ per year, Large affiliate 1 million per year.. then super affiliate perhaps 1 million monthly?

[Aris1985]

$180,000 to $600,000

That would do me

[vardan]

I started my "journey" 3-4 months ago, althrough I was visiting and reading this forum almost 2 years.
I discovered this business accidentally, when I read about sales of two domain names in 2012: online-casino de and onlinecasinos de. When I visited these pages, I saw that they wern't selling something or there were not operating online casinos, just links to other sites.
I was confused, why they paid almost 200000 $ only for domains..... ?
So I discovered the affiliate marketing

Now I am working alone, sometimes I order articles and ask my friends for translations, and I make questions about SEO or tecnical issues here.

[Christiaan]

I am a self empoloyed affiliate. First I did it next to my full-time job. Now I am full time affiliate.

In the beginning I did everything: design, development, content.. Now I have a freenlancer who does all the writing. Bit I still decide which content has to be written and still publish it myself.
Sometimes the design is also done by a freelancer.

[Sherlock]

I am a big affiliate and I have "employees", if it means fulltimers who get money on regulary basis independent on affiliate income. So yes.

Freelancing is a huge hype, I have never met anyone who can fulfill my needs. Even the last try: costly javascript guy who wanted 30USD/hour let me waiting for him for so long that I "fired him". Sadly whole this freelancing bubble went towards crazy ending. The platforms that deliver "freelancing jobs" - like Odesk - are corporations. What an irony. So there are kids who read something about digital nomads, but who are defacto employees of the corporation with minimal taxes and insurances and hiring a freelancer today means, that you are asking other corporation for insecured labourforce. It is incredible what happened during last years. It is in fact 0 hour contract, nothing else.

There indeed will be some skillfull guys there, but I never had luck and better strategy is to have longterm relationships with people based on trust and security. It maybe looks cool, to be "free@, but those IT guys are never 100% free. If they want to be really free and independent, they would work for themselves. But they are not able to be fully independent, therefore the game for independence makes no sense. 10-15 years ago, yes.

But that does not mean one has to follow classic way. E.g. it does not make sense to have an office, when really what matters in just head and laptop. People who work for/with me are on all continents and work can be done via group chats and emails. The only problem here is to find the people who are able to live such life, because yes, it is a different style of living when you actually can live the life of digital nomad with stable income.

Second thing is that indeed it does not make sense to do all the paperwork in IT/affiliate area. Company is just a shell and the people who are paid get the salary via ewallets or Bitcoins, so there is no paperwork with accounting and stuff like that. Also - if one really cares about the people - it is important they understand that they really live on their own. E.g. they will never get unemployment benefits if they quit, they will not get pension, if they do not invest, no employer is paying their health insurance.

In short - I see a way in "fulltime freelancers" or "independent employees". However this is not (yet) a model for big company with tens, hundreds or thousands of people. But honestly I have not seen many pure IT projects that would need so many people. Most internet projects are incredibly overstaffed, because it is hard to manage those projects. It diminishes the returns then.

Also - having independent worker - is different to freelancer, because those guys must respect your authority and commitment to the project, which is something very productive. Freelancers have often the feeling/approach: "I will do my hours, you pay me and ****off". But coding something is about debug mostly and the debug has to be deep and ongoing. Someone who works only with you can and should spot his mistakes as he develops further projects. Freelancer makes the job and is gone. You can do the debug, then find someone else to repair it etc. It is incredible loss of efectivity. There are so many bugs. Always. Even at simplest websites. Even at biggest corporations. If you did not see any bugs at your website or you trust to your freelancer... well... do not be surprised.

Last note: the good worker is someone extremely rare. Because he is good and because he is good because you invested into him a lot. So it makes sense to try from every one to make a partner for life. It will fail most times and it is a slow process, but in the end it seems - at least for me - that doing it this way was my best investment ever, because now I can write here this article and I know the things that need to be done are in progress.

[sweetbet]

I used to have a decent sized affiliate operation going with web designers, writers, server maintenance guys, script writers, etc.. That was before so many affiliate programs closed down or went rogue. Ranking was easy, the money was great and re-investing a big chunk of it back into the business meant more profits down the track. Now that most of my affiliate business is fairly well established, and with so many of the really good old affiliate programs gone, and seeing that it's getting harder and harder to rank and make money, I only hire people on a casual basis when I need them, as opposed to a guaranteed part time job with a fixed income.

[Sherlock]

Sweetbet, can you list here the rogue affiliates that cost you the most on lost income?

[muffincrumbs]

I do all the coding and design myself. 90% of the art I outsource and I outsource articles for smaller sites to keep them fresh, but you have to go over them again and again, or pay to have them professionally edited. Being a one person show is great in a lot of ways, but without outsourcing you are not using all of the tools available. There are just too many topics and no one is an expert of everything... well my wife thinks she is but...

[sweetbet]

Sweetbet, can you list here the rogue affiliates that cost you the most on lost income?

C Planet
Casino Pays
Pure Commission

888 and 400affiliates were decent players for me, but their income dwindled down to nothing almost overnight. I'm not sure what happened there, but I soon also removed them.

There were others, but I've forgotten their names over the years.

Casino Coins was an awesome program, but sadly, it closed down. That was a huge player for me.

[Voids]

Small affiliate, work full time, hire a writer for most of the writing, make enough for a couple of nice holidays a year.

[RacingJim]

C Planet
Casino Pays
Pure Commission

888 and 400affiliates were decent players for me, but their income dwindled down to nothing almost overnight. I'm not sure what happened there, but I soon also removed them.

There were others, but I've forgotten their names over the years.

Casino Coins was an awesome program, but sadly, it closed down. That was a huge player for me.

I agree 888 are pretty terrible for affiliates.

[eenzoo]

Former big adult webmaster turned into binary options and gambling industry. I´m a classic one man show cooperated in a Malta based limited company - i just focused on my strongest skills. All other doing freelancer (writing) or long term bisuness parters (Server administration)!

[FootyAccums]

http://prntscr.com/6stbqf[/URL]
Source: http://90digital.com/data-insight/ig...icle-4968.html

I'd say this is a little dated or misplaced. top 10 best online (and the affiliated sites) as example... Traffic beasts.