Let’s us take a practical look into just how much money you will need to invest to get anywhere with affiliate marketing. Let’s assume you already own a PC or notebook and an internet connection. Let’s also assume you have 0 skill in coding or Photoshop. You are essentially, a very noobly noob.

What every affiliate needs is tracking. Tracking comes in many shapes, sizes and forms. Some people don’t use tracking and instead just direct link from the affiliate network. That’s what I like to call an idiot. Don’t be an idiot. Now the top two most influential tracking sources out there are Prosper202 which has a free version and a newer paid version. Then, we have CPVLab, which is my tracker of choice. I’ll throw out another one from Bevo Media, as well.  Prosper202 starts out free, while CPVLab is $297 for the first year, $147 after that. Bevo Media costs $20 per month to get a verified account, then you can pay more for additional addons and feature plugins. Lets say you go my route with CPVLab. There goes $300. So much for that $23 in your pocket, right?

Then, you need a server to put CPVLab on. Most people make the mistake of using shared hosting. Again, don’t be an idiot. Get a proper VPS or server. A good VPS from Wiredtree will cost you about $50 – 60 per month. There is also BeyondHosting which costs a similar amount, but they can assist you in installing CPVLab if you can’t do that yourself. Otherwise, you can go out and hire someone to install it for you for $20 or so. Don’t forget you will need $10 – 20 for an SSL certificate to get your pixel firing on secure web pages. Total so far is up to around $350 – 400 just for the first month.

Then you decide you want some tools to help you out. You sign up for some forums, like AffPlaybook for example (big shout out to David for keeping these great forums alive and kicking for so long!). AffPlaybook costs $67 per month (but I think its well worth it for some great information). You also want to do some competitive analysis and research. WhatRunsWhere is the top of the top for this. It’s a big hit at $229.00 per month, but an excellent tool when you just don’t know what kind of ads are pulling weight where. You can get some excellent ideas for Facebook and PPV here, not just search and display ads (what kind of interests on the sites are the ads appearing on for Facebook, and what sites/targets are specific ad offers showing on for PPV).

Maybe you’ll want to start your first campaign with a landing page. Too bad you can’t do this yourself as you don’t know how to code. LP designs start around $50 each (or you could grab a free one from my list or a $5 LP from AdsandLPs.com – I swear I’ll add more LPs soon!). You also want to split test designs, so you order 2. Another $100 invested. You will be running these on Facebook, so you order 100 images for about $30, too.

Now that you’ve got everything put together, we can get an idea of what an initial investment, before you even start advertising, in your business will be:

300 (Tracking)
75  (Hosting Setup)
300 (Additional Tools)
150 (LPs, Banners, etc)

This equals out to $825. I’ve already added a little to these numbers for some grace, but lets round up to $900. $900 is what you will probably spend to get a good footing before you even start advertising. Now if you can spend $900 on an intial investment into getting setup properly, you can afford just as much to test (or you should be able to atleast…)

So that means the absolute bare minimum I would have ready to spend before even setting up hosting is $1800. This is a really, really low number. Consider that when my father opened up his restaurant that we had to get about $100,000 in loans just to afford all the equipment, rent, franchise costs, and what not – this number is nothing in my eyes. Even $5000 ready to spend would be a low number in my eyes, but you’d be well better off than anyone with less than $2k to spend. No where else can you find an industry with so much to make with such little investment.

If you don’t yet have $2000 or so ready to spend, here are my suggestions. Get a temporary second job. Working 40 – 60+ hours a week for a month and saving as much as you can will probably get you that 2k. It’ll be a tough month, but after that you’ll be on your way to financial freedom from the  comfort of your office. Sell your game systems, TVs, and electronics you don’t use. They’re time wasters anyways. Sell your car and get a bike or pay a friend to drive you around town when you need it. Your first couple months you’ll probably want to lock yourself indoors and dedicate as much time as you can to getting affiliate marketing to work for you. Rent out your spare bedroom, or learn a skill you can freelance for. Setup websites for local businesses for a couple hundred dollars a pop. Use a simple WordPress theme and you’ll be making $100+ an hour from guys that are clueless about how easy it would be to do it themselves.

So, will a couple hundred dollars get you far in affiliate marketing? It won’t even get you through the door. My suggestion is to save up until you are ready, and really only go at it when you have a proper amount ready to put on the line – at least a couple thousand dollars.

The main thing I think about is what happens when and if all of these tools become overused and abused. They basically allow you to see other peoples campaign data (for tools like PPC Bully) and inform you whats doing well and whats not.

For those in the Acai niche, I can’t imagine how hard those terms are getting researched on PPC Bully. But that could create spawns and spawns of advertisers competing with the same landing pages, ad copy, bids and competition that I guess could be seen as a bit unfair.

Honestly, had I created these tools I would have just left them up to me and my business. It’s great to help other people, but in this case the creaters have opened it up to the public domain for a very, very, very small service use fee. I’d be charging people a few thousand dollars a month to keep those out that just shouldn’t be trusted with the kind of data literally being handed away for pennies.

Am I saying I won’t be using these services? Nope, I’m a fucking hippocryte. This is valuable data, and 50 dollars a month that can make me 100k+ a month is a unfair trade for the developers. For me its all happiness and money until someone starts seriously abusing the systems put in place… like Uber or someone.

Still looking at systems, but I’m thinking either PPC Bully or Hexatrack is what I will buy into. When I start banking off some of that data, though, I’ll pay for my own system, use it until it breaks, then sell it to all you noobs. I bet thats what the PPC Bully guys did…

So any help from my readers? K thx.

If you’ve got any questions to ask me, feel free. My email is now working without a hitch thanks to my new connection, so if it’s to private, email me.