The Highs and Lows of Day-Trading and Affiliate Marketing

My wife always criticizes me for making analogies about everything that I do in life. Unfortunately for you poor readers of my blog, this is not an exception!

Back in the late 90s, I (like many) started to get swept into the whole “day-trading” phenomenon. At this time, making a few bucks in a day was not too difficult. (Simply because everything seemed to go up.) Now I was in no way a day-trading expert and most of my transactions were less than $1000. It was fun, though: Researching a stock, picking its buy price, then picking its sell price and watch it go! I would literally be watching the stock-market on a minute-by-minute basis. The highs and rush of a big gain, the sadness and frustration of a big fall. Of course, at the beginning there were plenty of highs, but when the stock market finally crashed, the lows set in hard…I have not done day trading since 2001.

Just recently, I picked up a Wall Street Journal and checked out some of my old stocks that worked well for me. Mind you, if I stuck with that, I would be very poor now. It did bring back the excitement a bit. The funny thing is that the feeling I was having was a familiar one. When it really gets down to it, affiliate marketing and online money making is very much the same thing. The highs of a big day of sales or high traffic to your website. The lows of getting no sales or having your Adwords position drop out of the first page.

But this is better! The risks are much lower now! On my high days, I earn over $200. On my low days, I spend $10 in advertising. And just like the stock-market, there is an instant gratification to your traffic and sales due to instantaneous internet reporting. Now I may not watch my statistics on a minute-by-minute basis, but I do check it out throughout the day. And just like stocks, once I have exhausted one concept, I move on to the next (while the first one keeps bringing in the dough!). As you develop more campaigns and more knowledge about the industry, you find that your high days become plentiful while your low days fall to virtually nothing.