Chapter 1

Sometimes it pays to be lazy...

Let me paint a picture...

You’ve decided to become an online entrepreneur, and make money through affiliate marketing.

You chose affiliate marketing because you heard it’s pretty easy to get started: you don’t need to build your own product (you just promote everyone else’s), the money can be fantastic, and it’s much easier to build a passive income than most other ways of making money online.

Imagine waking up in the morning and logging into your affiliate account to check how much money you’ve made overnight.

“Hmm… only $150 last night… it was a bit of a slow one…”

You lounge around in bed with your laptop, drinking a coffee and reading the news sites, before padding across the hall into your office around 10am to start “work”.

“Work” involves adding some new content to your website, or sending an email to all the people subscribed to your newsletter. Or you might be chatting back and forth with the guy who is creating content for your new project. Or approving a graphic created by your designer in the Philippines.

It’s not hard, but then, you don’t really need to do much. Your site basically sits there, making money on autopilot.

You stop work at around 2pm so you can meet a friend for coffee. He’s complaining about his job — he’s overworked, his colleagues aren’t pulling their weight, and his boss is an egomaniacal jerk who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.

You feel pretty glad that you don’t have to deal with that anymore.

He goes back to work and you spend the rest of the day seeing friends and family.

You check your earnings again just before you go to bed, and see that you’ve made another $300 today. Not too bad for a day’s “work”. In fact, you think you might take tomorrow off…

***

This is what my average day looks like. I’m not one of those high-profile “look at me!” affiliates, flaunting my cars and mansions. (I drive a 10-year-old hatchback and I rent my apartment.)

But I run three reasonably small affiliate sites, and from those I earn more than a full-time income.

The best part about it is that I don’t really need to do anything to my websites.

My only ongoing costs are my monthly hosting charges, and the fees for sending out my newsletter. It’s less than a hundred bucks a month.

I don’t pay for advertising.

I don’t have to keep adding new content to my websites.

They just work.

And I’m going to show you how to make an autopilot affiliate site, just like mine.

How did I get here?

I built my first affiliate site in 2007 after going through a training course for beginner affiliates.

The course focused on building “search engine optimized” websites — Websites full of content that attracts visitors from search engines like Google. Those visitors come to read your articles, and then BOOM! You promote affiliate products to them and earn money.

I liked the idea of building a site that would get traffic from the search engines because search engine traffic is free.

I could have taken a faster approach and just paid for advertising to get visitors — lots of people were doing that. If you’re paying for your visitors you can basically jump straight in the deep end and you have the potential to start earning straight away.

But… I really wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I was $4000 in debt on my credit card, so I wanted to get my feet wet in the free-est way possible.

Also if we’re being honest here, I wasn’t even 100% convinced that affiliate marketing would work for me.

And to tell the truth… it didn’t work for me.

I made one sale in my first year as an affiliate, and barely anything for the next couple of years after that.

Looking back now, I can see why I failed.

I was lazy.

Lazy how? Well here’s a flashback for you: Back in 2007 you could just build links to your own site by submitting things to directories, “spinning” articles, building “web 2.0” properties, and a bunch of other things.

Links are important for getting your website to the top of Google. So if you had the time (or the money to hire someone) you could use these methods of building links to get your website to the top of the Google search rankings reasonably reliably.

And with those top rankings, you could get lots of visitors, and turn them into lots of money.

Traffic = money!

But lazy old me couldn’t be bothered going out there and building links. I just didn’t have the dedication for that.

To add insult to injury, I went rogue with my website content. I was supposed to create my content around words and phrases (keywords) that lots of people were searching for in the search engines.

But to me, those topics were too boring and vague to be useful to anyone, so instead I just created the kind of stuff that I would want to read myself and ignored the keywords.

And the result?

An embarrassment. I’d done everything wrong.

After about a year online, my site was averaging around 150 visitors a week. I kept it online because it wasn’t really costing me anything to run, but I didn’t put any more work into it.

‍My monthly website traffic after being online for a year. If you look closely you’ll see a tumbleweed blowing past.

After FIVE years of just sitting there it was it was getting around 7000 visits a month.

It was growing slowly, but it made so little money that I started calling those earnings my “couch money” — it was like the spare change you find tucked down behind your couch cushions when you vacuum: kinda fun to find, but not exactly enough to live on.

I figured that I simply wasn’t evil enough to be an affiliate marketer. I couldn’t play the game.

But then the game changed...

In 2012 Google released their “Penguin” update, which changed the way Google looked at certain kinds of links (and therefore it changed the way they ranked websites).

Remember all those links I was supposed to have built if I had wanted to get my website ranking well in 2007? Yeah, Google decided it didn’t like those anymore.

Those “easy to build” kinds of links were “devalued”, and sites that had used those kinds of links to boost their search engine rankings found that their rankings plummeted overnight.

Some sites that had built a lot of these links were even penalized. Lots of previously successful affiliates lost their rankings and their incomes.

It was basically the apocalypse for affiliate marketing as we knew it.

But there were also some winners who emerged from the rubble.

And it turns out that my miserable failure of a website was one of them.

‍Weekly traffic during the Penguin rollout in 2012. No impact on my traffic. (That little dip in April is Easter.)

Since I had been too lazy to build all those backlinks like I was supposed to, my website passed through Penguin unscathed.

But it wasn’t just that.

While other affiliates were desperately scrabbling to find new ways to get links that would not get them penalised by Penguin, my site was naturally gaining more and more links. Other sites were voluntarily linking to me left, right, and center.

As a result, my rankings kept going up and up and up. It was actually easy now that all the serious competition had been removed.

(And remember — I am supremely lazy. I still wasn’t lifting a finger to get these results.)

The secret combination of content

So what made my site different to all the other affiliate sites that got busted and couldn’t recover?

It turns out that in my laziness, I’d accidentally stumbled upon a strategy that works in the post-apocalyptic SEO landscape.

It involves using a combined system of content types which (when used together) make a powerful website that ranks easily, makes money, and is extremely easy to promote. (In fact my sites basically promote themselves.)

It also steered me away from the mistakes that most new affiliates make. (And affiliates are still making these exact same mistakes today.)

I accidentally put this strategy together, and now I want to share it with you.

But first, you need to understand why the “old” methods (that you might have tried already) don't work…