The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

Warren Buffet is one of the most successful investors on the planet. Here are a few things I’ve learned from his videos:

Lesson: Build a virtual “mote” around your affiliate business which makes it harder for competitors to enter your niche. In the online world, a mote can mean thousands of inbound links, tons of content, a huge user-based community (forums/etc), a specific technology that reaches mass market acceptance (auctionAds), high value/visitor margin compared to competitors, brand identity (digg).

Lesson: I got a few things out of this video. When we work on the internet, there’s some degree of anonymity– we often do not meet the people we are working with, we may outsource projects to places where we will never go.. Yet what’s most important? Is it the $ or is it our ethics & standards? Do we care? Is ethics, integrity, honestly as important in the online world as it is in the offlline world? Do we build relationships online for the purpose of profit? Warren was right when he speaks about how integrity is a key point to success.

The second thing I found interesting was the quote “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

Lesson: At the end of the video, Warren says he wants to invest in businesses that he believes will continue to provide “more & more money over time.” Although we can never be entirely sure which affiliate sites will end up generating long term revenue, we should always keep in mind the long-term success of a site/niche, rather than just the ability to make a few quick bucks on a short-term trend. At least, I think so anyway.

Lesson: “If you really know businesses, you probably shouldn’t own more than 6 of them. If you can identify 6 wonderful businesses, that’s all the diversification you’ll need–and you’ll make a lot of money– and I will guarantee you that going into a 7th one rather than putting more money into your 1st one, is got to be a terrible mistake.”

How does this apply to affiliate sites? If you invest your time & energy into building up 6 wonderful affiliate sites, that’s probably a much better strategy than building 40 marginal sites.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 12:45 am and is filed under affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.