Using the day job killer techniques I’ve run a few direct link type adverts for just under a week and the results are a little disappointing to be frank. It also occurred to me that the approaches could be an instant way to financial disaster..

The key to this is billing cycles

Most of the blog traffic has followed the same mould as my first post about day job killer. A lukewarm review that still gives an affiliate link. And they mostly also say that it’s not for newbies and thats also very true. Andy Beard has a comment in his Blog somewhere about this that sums it up much better than I can here..

Now I’m going to blow the lid off the steam pot.

Billing cycles and payment cycles make this an incredibly easy way to get into a large amount of debt quickly. Any accountant knows this and it goes under the broad topic of Cash Flow. Let me explain.

Google Adwords is usually billed sometime around the 8th of the Month after your clicks. So best you get is 40 days

Tradedoubler - 2 month delay average 62 days £30 minimum

Amazon - 90 day delay before payout Although they say 60 its more like 90. And you need to earn $100+

Commission Junction - not sure but seems to be 60 days.

Clickbank - every 2 weeks if you’re a high earner but you have to set the payout amount first and each cheque costs you money - and they hold a reserve. Say $100 of which you need to have $120 or so in affiliate sales.

The thing to note is that you’re paying out the adwords bill before any cash comes in.

Now given that the authors state that they try and run campaigns at 100% payback then to make a certain amount of money each month you need at least that amount to spend out first.

Granted you could do it on a credit card and so leverage the interest for the profit but that’s a very big gamble.

Following their method you spend $20 or so trying to work out if a product is viable or not for further work.

Let’s be realistic some are going to be dogs and some are going to work really well. So if we want to try and get to 100 items - being nice about it at least 30 are going to be complete dogs. $600 just for testing.

So now we have our 100 items. And each is making us a nice $10 profit. But hold on we have to spend $1000 just to pay for the advertising. Then we get paid - hold on a month later. Interest on $1000 on a credit card can be quite a bit. Especially if we haven’t got a minimum payment and get a further late payment charge.. hmph..

There is a way of doing this but it does require a minimum spend. We have to ensure that we at least generate enough commissions for a particular affiliate system to get paid. So for clickbank we need to have 10-12 successful items going (to get $100) and we will start to be in profit on the second check i.e. after 3 months.

We can infer from this (oo getting a bit Mathematical here!) that whatever affiliate program we invest in we need to stake the minimum payout multiplied by the number of months the payment is delayed.

I cannot see riches very quickly even though the hype tries and pushes this. The higher the stake the bigger the return but the bigger the loss if something goes wrong.

So to summarise. It’s a dangerous and risky way to make money but the day job killer techniques can be made to work. If you want to avoid the risk then you’ll still need about double the minimum payout level for the affiliate management system to seed it. You’ll also be lucky if of the 100 items you try that 50-60 of them actually provide a return so be prepared to shell out another $1000-$1500 on testing before you’re starting to break even. Of course most businesses have cashflow problems but DJK is more of a risk than most businesses because if Google or the affiliate people decide, they can freeze your account and you’ve lost out.

So take care and use the techniques in day job killer wisely.

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