There will be a million and one affiliates out there who will tell you that the affiliate program they promote is going to be the best one for you.

But have you considered who is really making the money and who gains the most out of affiliate programs.

Let's take a step back and look at the AFFILIATE.

What exactly is the role of the affilate?

* The sole purpose of the affiliate is to PROMOTE the product and/or service

What are the benefits of being an affiliate?

* Get paid a minimal commission that is regulated by the owner of the product/service

In short, As an affiliate it is your responsibility to make someone else rich whilst doing all the hard work. You take on the expenses of advertising, you are the one who usually misses out on subscribers if you haven't first made them your client before they buy the product/service you are promoting.
You also need to remember that when you are an affiliate, YOU are not the only person promoting that very same product/service.


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That is not exactly true. There are many people out there who actually do become millionaires through affiliate marketing.

I think the key is to leverege your marketing ability to the point where eveyone else is working their tail off and you are making the money.

I currently make money on everysale on the affiliates that I signed up make. The harder my affiliates work, the more money I make.

Actually I guess that is kind of what you are saying.

I suppose the key then, is to find an affiliate program that allows you to make recurring commissions on the affiliates that you sign up.

Everyone is welcome to check out my signiture for this type of program. It may not be for everyone, but it's put me well on my way to financial freedom.

Enjoy

:D

markdesmond01, I understand your feelings as sometimes seems that as affiliate you are jst helping another guy and get some money for it.

But having different experience in this field I must say that this picture is not true.

With good programs (often they are some kind of breakthrough idea), you don't only earn, but also learn, and get extra help.

Let me give you an example, you affiliate an IM tool, and this tool helps you to get affiliate links on all pages created with this tool. Pages get targeted traffic. You don't need to create that pages yourself (you users do that to succeed better with the tool and rankings of their site). You are safely sitting with doing almost nothing, and see with every day more and more pages on real web sites with real site visitors created.

This is your lazy extra publicity. With nice motivation in the promo you can very soon get leveraged sources of traffic.

Of course, you have to do the first effort of sharing this info with your contacts. But they are quite easy for motivation as who would lose the chance to rank better in search engines?!

And then you can use this tool, and if you don't like the tech staff - no problems, your users will be using this tool on their sites, and you enjoy 2nd tier effect from it. Plus the number of pages grows with time.

So, it is not only about paying you money in commissions. With smart programs where the owners think how their affiliates and JVers will benefit, you can get much more.

while i agree as an affiliate you are helping someone else get rich to but why not. Yes the idle would be the merchant with a hot product... but some of us just wont come up with that product or whatever... so in turn we promote somone else great idea and get paid for it. and yes there are many!!! millionaires that are affiliates... while we are helping other people turn a profit, if they are goign to turn a profit why not try to cut in on it by being an affiliate.

I don't believe it's possible to make millions as an affiliate - well may be if I have a very popular site like Digg or YouTube.

But it's gonna cost millions to set up a website like that, and that requires VC funding.

The idea can either suceed or fail but highly risky.

With CPAs, Data Feeds it's the people who run these programs that are the richest.

Everything else is a rip-off.

Merchants don't care they have thousands and millions of affiliates promoting their products, they don't care if you and I don't make money after *genuine* hard work.

All they need is genuine traffic like the kind you get on CNN or MSNBC not zombie traffic.

When you market yourself thru venues like Ebay, Digg, Youtube, etc, you're fighting for a share of their traffic. Realistically, you will make money, but only a profit that is in-line with the value of that share. Meaning, 1% of their traffic is only worth close to 1% of the source site's profit.

You can be successful thru these methods, but I think it's going to be a $5 here, $2 there, $10 there kind of result. If you get enough sites and domains going you can make combine all those small amounts into a sizeable amount come end-of-month.

To anyone who is stepping freshly into affiliate marketing, I recommend you pick 5 or 6 subject matters that have absolutely nothing in common, then you create sites around these subjects. One of your sites will likely do better than the others, and you can create your new projects / marketing ideas now that you have a focus. It's also a nice way of not putting all your "eggs in one basket."

It's very difficult if not impossilble to monetize on Digg traffic, and it's also a waste of bandwidth. I haven't tried YouTube I need to buy a video recorder first ;-)
but, YouTube definitely has a much larger and diverse user base compared to Digg.

I didn't know I could advertise on eBay.

It's a good idea to diversify but can be very expensive though. Imagine if the hosting cost is 6 bucks/month for 1 website plus domain fees 45 bucks/ 5 years.

That's about $117 for just one website.

Right now I have 2 sites, and just depending on organic traffic is taking over 6 months for anything to become visible.

The only people who are making money right now are my hosting company and the domain registrar

Which drives down my motivation to promote anything.

I agree with xboxundone. There is a lot of money to be made out there but not everyone can come up with the great ideas or have all that start up money. And people sometimes do flip flop between affiliate and merchant, also some people do both.
If you want to maximize the profit for doing a minimal amount of work, find a two-tier affiliate network so you can make a profit from the others you recruit, as was mentioned before.
Lastly, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Use different networks, run different campaigns, and never stop learning what's out there and what's hot. You'll find what works for you, which may change over time, but that's what you stick with. And it does work :)

This is why so many businesses fail, and not just affiliate marketers.

They have the wrong focus.

Stop thinking about making money and start focusing on solving people's problems. You are too obsessed with the hype of millions of dollars and residual income, blah, blah, blah.

Once you have a site or product that solves a specific problem, the rest is easy and the income will flow.

You've got it backwards.

This topic is going off the wrong track too quickly.

What makes you *assume* that I'm not obsessed with making millions or even residual.

And what makes you assume I'm not solving peoples problems?

And you have the nerve to tell me I have it all backwards.

You are full of assumptions and generalizations.