[jordansmith]

Honestly, I slowly moved away from being a developer. Anyone with an idea can hire a developer to make their SaaS project, or whatever the idea is. The money is in the marketing of the project.

I switched to affiliate marketing and making ecommerce stores. Less time developing and more time just selling. Facebook Ads & Instagram are a godsend.

This is both active and passive income. Once things are rolling you can hire a VA for super cheap to make sure things keep running smoothly. This lets you take time off while keeping keeping the machine running. If you want to be active you can push out new products, niches, and just scale what is already working.

[_jdams]

Hey man, I have a quick question. You may know the answer, you may not, it's a shot in the dark but I'll try anyway.

I've been wanting to get into the affiliate marketing space for a while now. I was curious if one way to approach is to setup a shopify-type store which contains actual products I'm looking to sell, but the links to the products actually go outbound to amazon affiliate link or something else, or is your approach more blog-related, where you type text about something and then include affiliate links within the body of the blog post? Have you tried both, which is more effective?

The other thing I've researched and read a lot about is how to validate an idea to see if there's interest. The way to do this is to setup a simple 2-page landing/splash page on Strikingly, Unbounce, Instapage, or any other similar site, explaining what your product or website is about, with a direct button to complete the purchase, but then you redirect the user to a "Sorry, we are not yet ready", and see how many "convert" - that is, users who are immediately ready to pay for said product. Do you do any of this validation for your affiliate marketing sites, or do you just open them and start selling through your web store or blog posts (depending on answer from first paragraph)?

Thanks so much for taking a moment to help me get started.

[jordansmith]

I don't do any amazon affiliate type stuff as the money isn't great so I can't really help you there. There are things out there that can pull a feed from amazon and display the stuff on your site.

I have done that type of validation before. Often I'll do that if I am testing between multiple offers to see which works best. But usually with affiliate marketing you don't need to do that since they aren't purchasing anything from you, it just redirects to the advertisers site.

[cylinder]

I used to be in ecommerce long ago, but I don't even consider it anymore because of Amazon's dominance and the overall saturation, unless one is creating a novel product / trend.

Did you create new products or simply better at marketing products that are readily available on Amzn etc?

[jordansmith]

Pretty much everything i promote is not unique. Either affiliate marketing or items just bought off ali express. Not all of it is even available on amazon, lots of little random items.

What I sell isn't any better than anywhere else, it is just the marketing that gets people in.