> organic marketing etc but then you are just trading time for dollars.
But the alternative, trading dollars for dollars, is essentially just arbitrage, which tends to disappear from competition. Organic marketing is the only sustainable source of alpha I’ve found in affiliate marketing.
The margin on most items is 4% (some lower, some higher e.g. luxury items are 10%).
4% is not terrible in and of itself.
But then you factor in:
- advertising costs
- conversion rates on clicks from the above
- taxes
and you get a real appreciation for how hard it must be to run high volume/low margin businesses.
Sure, you can do organic marketing etc but then you are just trading time for dollars.