There’s a lot of talk out there about developing a successful affiliate business, but in my experience most individuals do not think about their affiliate websites in terms of a business, but rather as a personal site.
In this post I’ll clarify the difference between the two approaches, but before you read ask yourself the question: Do you run an affiliate site or an affiliate business?
The Fundamental Distinction between Job and Business
In my mind, the primary difference between individuals that run an affiliate site as a personal blog versus those that run the site as a business originates from the individual’s approach to the site. It is the same distinction that distinguishes individuals who think about having a job or career from those that think about developing a business.
The distinction between a personal, hobby, or part-time site and a site that runs as a business is philosophical.
It has nothing to do with the number of hours you put into the site or whether or not you do all the work yourself or hire outsourcers to complete some of the tasks.
A personal site is a project, part-time or full-time, that you invest your time into with a hope of earning money.
But wait…isn’t that a business?
No, not at all. A business is a site that you approach in terms of setting clear goals and generating a return on your investment, with the idea that the process, once clarified, is scalable across multiple units.
It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on the site, or even if you just own the domain and get someone else to do the work. The fundamental difference is that you think about your site as an asset, a vehicle for you to generate a positive return over time.
Most people don’t think about getting a positive ROI on their time. In general, we tend to have misconstrued perceptions about what our time is worth, and why. I encourage you to try a thought experiment to set a value to your time and then decide if your site is producing returns.
In the next post, I’ll outline two examples to identify and clarify this distinction further. Read on to see how your approach measures up.