One of my friends over at the poker affiliate listings forum who is a newer affiliate asked me if I could do a blog post about how I decide which of my income I re-invest into my affiliate business and what I keep for myself.  Great idea for a blog post!

When I first started as a poker affiliate I was living in a dorm room at my University.  A couple hundred dollars a month started rolling in around Christmas I believe it was from link sales and then the affiliate revenue followed slowly – I actually remember the first link sale I made was a big one on a couple different pages for $800 and I was so amazed at how much money I had made from putting a few links up haha.

Anyways during the first few months when I was bringing in revenue I pretty much kept it all for personal stuff as I didn’t have a job in University and needed the extra beer money.  I can’t remember completely but I think I only forked out $50 for my first template and then maybe another $150 for a second and didn’t really purchase much more at the beginning.

When summer came around I told my parents I could live off my poker affiliate  income (they didn’t really “get it” and asked a few times if I was getting a “real job”).  At this time my income was around $1500 per month, which was half writing content for others, part affiliate income and part advertising sales.  At this point I was comfortable enough to start spending a little bit of that income on purchasing things that would take me to the next level as an affiliate.

I guess I had it lucky because I was around 19 and living at my dads house still so I didn’t need to pay rent, car payments, etc that  a lot of start up affiliates might have to pay.  I was comfortable living off around $1000 per month and started putting back $500ish back into my affiliate business.

Re-investing into my sites really helped and I slowly started to grow, earning more and more affiliate revenue monthly instead of having to rely on writing and selling advertising.

As I have continued to grow over the past two years I find on average I have always re-invested about 1/3 to 1/2 of my monthly income back into my business.  It takes discipline because I could always take that $500, $1000, $2000 or $5000 and go buy myself something nice, but for some reason it has always come naturally to me to re-invest in my business. I guess its probably because I love this job, and love seeing myself grow in the business and I know it takes some re-investing to get myself to the next level.

So if you are asking how much you should re-invest back into your poker, gambling or whatever affiliate business you will have to ask yourself:

What is the minimum amount you can live off comfortably and stay somewhat happy?  As a new affiliate trying to make it you might have to sacrifice some things in order to re-invest into your business.  I know there is a lot of things I pay for now that if I was a new affiliate I would cut back on in order to help grow my business – try and find a couple things you don’t really need to spend money on and cut back.  There is no set amount you will need to put back into your business, but the more the better and the faster you will grow.

Hopefully that post will help some of the newer affiliates – It’s late and I am not re-reading it tonight so I hope it ran together and made sense … anyways little plug here for my UB Referral Code portal which I have been putting a little “re-investing” into over the past few weeks.  My next post will most likely not be until the start of August for a goal recap post, but hey never know I’ve been really motivated lately maybe I will get another one in.