Affiliate Marketing Secrets

I have been a member of a niche group website for much of the eight years it has been around. At one time, this website was thriving with new members, an active forum and constant interaction from the developer. However, along the way the developer has put less and less time into the site and the traffic has decreased by over 90% in the last year and held steady at 300-400 unique visitors per month.
The core group that is still around the site has complained about the lack of leadership and how the site is dying. I was not sure how bad of shape the site was in until I did some research, but I e-mailed the developer/owner and asked if he would be willing to sell.
He said, “of course” and I asked him what it would take to take the site off his hands since he no longer has the time to invest in it. He said I would have to make him and offer and went on to say that the site maintenance was “very cheap” and that with his ad contracts was taking in about $200-$250 per month in revenue.
Since I had no idea how to value a website, I begin to search on Google. I found several website value calculators that would provide values based on a number of factors. Most of the website value calculators I used (I used 7-8) gave me a value between ($290-600). There was one that valued it at $13 and one at $2400 but the majority were in the $300-600 range.
So, I responded to him saying that I had no idea what a website was worth and that based off of these site calculators and their guesstimates that the site was actually bringing in only $6-60 per month in advertising, I offered him $350.
I have not heard back from him in two days after getting almost immediate response the first couple of days. I know this has been him M.O. around the site at times, but I figured he would at least offer up some dialogue, especially since I found out his e-mails go directly to his iPhone (not like he has to log in to check them).
I wondered if maybe I insulted him with my offer? I know that if I were to hire a firm to build a website similar to the one he has, it would likely cost me about $2,000-3,000. On the other hand, he is putting very little effort into the site and many within the site’s community feel the site is dead or soon will be.
So, my question is this…how should I proceed from here?
Part of me wants to keep the website going just because it has meant so much to me and the other members of the community for the past eight years. There is another part of me that thinks with some effort, maybe it could be resurrected and possibly reach a level where it is bringing in $300-400 per month in revenue. Then there is the ambitious part that wants to build off of the site and grow it into something that could generate thousands per month in revenue.
So how should I proceed? Given his lack of time and commitment to the project, should I continue to press him to give it up? Was my offer too low and should I submit a revision? Can I do that without creating an atmosphere where I’m competing against myself? Should I notify some of the other community members of my intention and try to get them to lobby on my behalf or could I possibly create competition for myself where there is none if someone else were to try and take it over?
This is all new to me. The site has the basic structure that I need and that I can expand from and seems like it would be a much better deal than building a custom site. On the other hand, I cannot force him to sell and he may be content to leave it be and tinker when he can and just ignore the pleas of his community.
Any advice?
Thanks in advance!

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Affiliate marketing is the process of paying someone to do the advertising for you, then you pay them per sale or action. This is affiliate marketing from the advertisers’ (the product seller) point of view. Affiliates don’t see it that way though.

As an affiliate here is my definition of affiliate marketing: it’s the process of match-making a buyer with a seller. This definition was first introduced to affiliates’ training by Travis Sago, the author of “Bum Marketing”.

Starting to make money on the Internet as an affiliate is one of the easiest business models. The low start up costs made it easy for everyone, whether qualified or not, to start an affiliate marketing business. 2010 witnessed the release of tens of affiliate marketing training courses that claim to be the best ever in the field. That made it even easier for new affiliates to start their businesses.

In the process of match-making a seller with a buyer, the affiliates spend money and/or effort gathering information about the product and what it can do to which group of people. Then they spend more money and/or effort on advertising.

In this process the affiliates are taking all the risk on themselves, and only get paid for their successful promotional efforts. All of the experimenting, tweaking, researching, and optimizing expenses are on them. This situation resulted in two kinds of affiliates:

1. Those who would do anything to get the most out of their promotional efforts, including unethical and sometimes illegal practices, and

2. The affiliates who try hard to make their living honestly but fail to break even several times and finally they drop the ball and look for something else to do.

The super affiliates are not necessarily unethical or using the so called “black hat” techniques, but for most of them success didn’t come over night. They learned from their mistakes and had their “light-bulb moments”. Each on of them has specialized in one form or another to drive the “hungry crowds” down their promotional funnels and only started experimenting with other methods after they mastered what they are doing.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The alternative is buying all of the affiliate marketing training courses and learning from them, or doing your own research and gathering the information that you need in order to start.
The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training sereis posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it. But without the right vision and business mindset all of the training of the world will be worthless. So learn first, plan, then execute.

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Niche research is important in affiliate marketing as this will help you determine which product is best to promote and which business is lucrative. Your success in this venture largely depends on how you choose a profitable niche, and how much effort you put into it.
Affiliate marketing can be an exciting venture. However, with the many products or services to offer online, getting started with this business and choosing the right products or services to promote can be very confusing. If you choose the wrong product, you may never earn a single dime.
Choosing a lucrative niche is essential as this would help you get great marketing results. Here are the things to consider and do to be able to find the right niche:
Choosing a smaller niche is more profitable in most cases as this allows you to target prospects. The advantage of choosing a small niche is that you don’t have to exert a lot of effort on it as opposed to choosing a huge niche that include a wide range of products and services. With tight niche, you will have to work less and make more money.
Make sure that the niche you choose is lucrative. This means there’s low competition in it so you could have higher marketing results. To determine whether the niche is profitable, the quality of the services and products suited for that niche should be of high quality.
One thing you should also consider is to be able to find people who are interested in the products you will choose to promote. No matter how good your product is or how best you think your niche is, it is useless if your market find your product useless as well.
Consider your interest and passion. They say that you can only be successful in your endeavor if you have passion and interest in it. The most successful entrepreneurs in affiliate marketing have the most passion and interest in their ventures. Finding a niche that interests you will definitely help you build that success.
Aside from considering your interest, also consider selecting products that you are expert or have a vast knowledge about. To succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to know how to convince people to visit your site and make a purchase. Also, do keyword research. There are many online keyword generator sites that will help you have an idea on searches are done on a specific niche. If you find that the keywords related to the niche you chose are searched by over 30,000 times per month, it is worth pursuing.