Tags: inspiration, making money online, rosalind gardner, super affiliate handbook

The Lifestyle & Income of a Super Affiliate

 

As promised in my last post, I’m going to show you more of the “big picture” of my life & income as a Super Affiliate.

I’m a full-time Super Affiliate. For me, it’s all about lifestyle. About working from home and raising my two children. Being a great mom, and creating the life I want to live – and one that I absolutely love.

I usually share that with photos. The photo to the right, that’s me hiking the trails by the Rock Island Falls where I live in Tennessee.

Over the years I’ve shared a lot of the highlights from my mobile, work-at-home lifestyle. You’ve seen photos of me traveling the world, goofing off, trying new things. And just hanging out with my kids – whether we’re flying off to Las Vegas or playing in our own back yard…

The most significant point, that you can’t actually see in these photos, is that they were all taken on a weekday – between 9am and 5pm…

During a time when most people are stuck at work, at a job that they hate, making less money than they prefer to live on.

I’ve been there. I had a low-paying job, 6 of us lived in an 800 sq ft rented house, the car was always breaking down.

It was a struggle just to make a paycheck last the week. Those were tough times, to say the least.

Changed seemed impossible. When I did finally decide enough was enough… making that lifestyle change required dramatic measures. I quit my last “real job” cold turkey at the beginning of 1997, and started my first business.

My children were 5 months and 5 years old. This year they will be 14 and 19.

I’ve been home with my two children full time, running a successful home business, for over 13 years now.

But what I want for my life, and what lifestyle design means to me… may not be the same for you.

So today we’re gonna do something a little different. Instead of just giving you a sneak peek into my fun easy-going lifestyle, we’ll take a look at just some of my income as a successful super affiliate. Actual screenshots and real numbers.

That’s what you really want to see, isn’t it?

You want to know if there’s really any money in this whole “work at home” Internet Marketing thing, right?

So let’s talk Proof.

Real proof.

Here’s a screenshot from my PayPal account, taken just a few months ago – in December 2009:

This does not show you my total incoming payments. It doesn’t show you how much money I made online. It also doesn’t show you how much of it I spent through PayPal which was over $2,000 that month alone. It doesn’t include affiliate checks I get in the mail, or payments I received through my other payment processors.

All this shows you is how much I transferred out of PayPal last month, into my bank account. And if you add those numbers up, it comes to $10,300.

That’s one month. December 2009.

Here’s a screenshot of the PayPal payments that I received last year – during the year 2009 – totaling just over $80,000:

And how about this year: a partial month, Jan 2010. Over $31,000 in income:

Again, that’s just PayPal, which only represents a portion of my online income. A lot of my affiliate commissions still come via check, some by direct deposit, and some from different payment processors (like 2checkout, for example).

You’ll rarely ever see me talk dollar figures, or discuss my income. There’s a reason for that. Personally, I feel it’s irrelevant. The amount of money I need to maintain my ideal lifestyle may be completely different than your own goals.

Some people just want to make $1,000/month online for extra money, others want to become multi-millionaires. And there’s plenty of people in between with their own set of lifestyle & financial goals.

The point is that you want to make money online. And my point with this post is that you can make money online. Good money. As much or as little as you personally want. I’m doing it, and so can you.

I know what you’re going to ask me next, so I’ll just go ahead and tell you. You want to know where that income came from, and what those payments were for exactly – right? The partial online income I shared with you above came from a variety of sources. I work in a variety of niches, across dozens of domains. I use pen names on most of my niche affiliate sites, and add email addresses into my one PayPal account to receive affiliate payments there.

The income sources include: payments for short low-cost reports I sell in various niches, affiliate commission payments from a variety of merchants, membership sites I manage, advertising I sell on some of my niche sites, etc. But the majority of the income I earn online comes directly from Affiliate Marketing.

I hope this inspires you. In closing though, I have to share something else with you that I’ve learned along the way. Money is not the end goal. Money alone will not make you happy. While that may sound cliché, I’m telling you that from the heart.

Figure out what you really want out of life. How you want to spend your time day in and day out. It’s all about lifestyle. Then work backwards from that vision, and figure out what it’s going to take to achieve and maintain that ideal lifestyle. That’s where your financial goals come in.

Best,

p.s. I love my Super Affiliate lifestyle. While I’ve been involved with Affiliate Marketing for more than a decade, it was Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook that turned me into the successful Super Affiliate I am today. I continue to study and model Rosalind’s methods, and highly recommend this $47 investment if you’re genuinely ready to make dramatic life change…

Want to know something funny? I waffled over spending that $47 myself for more than 3 weeks when I first discovered her guide. It seemed like a lot of money to spend on an ebook. I look back on that now, and I laugh.

Category: Affiliate Marketing