Singing Pig

It sounds like the type of offers you are getting in your inbox is spam, pure and simple. I.e. work 2 hours a week get rich and retire to a beach somewhere. To clarify; these ARE NOT affiliate schemes. At least not legitimate affiliate schemes.

Problem is there are already lots of websites doing this already, such as www.greasypalm.com. Also, not all merchants will allow you to promote their affiliate programs in this manner. If you have this type of rewards website then you must declare so when applying to affiliate programs. Most merchants will probably accept you but some won't. It's also a bit of a logistical nightmare paying out cheques to lots of people who buy through your links. Also, how do you track which sales are made by which people? You need some clever software for that. Also, what do you do if affiliate sales don't track and commission isn't paid? Conservative estimates are that around 25% to 30% of affiliate sales aren't tracked due to spyware, cookie blockers etc etc. And what about somebody who returns a product to a store? Do you still pay commission out? And how do you know?

Yes, you can make good money in affiliate marketing. I've been making a full time income from home, staring at my PC screen at rediculous hours of the morning.

BUT, there is one worrying trend people need to be aware of:

The number of people learning how to make money with affiliate programmes is growing massively literally by the minute. Whilst online sales are still growing at an incredible rate, at some point the massive growth in online sales WILL plateau, hence the average earnings for an affiliate marketer WILL start to drop.

Average Affiliate Income = Total affiliate commissions divided by number of affiliate marketers. It's not rocket science!

In my mind, the only way to beat this trend is to earn commission on the efforts of a virtual sales force, not on your own efforts alone. If anyone thinks they can maintain their high levels of sales as more and more affiliate marketers (i.e. competitors in their "business" of affiliate marketing) arrive on the scene, then I would question their long term vision and understanding of basic business sense.

If you want to make a lifetime income, my advice is to make sure you have more than one income stream and always keep one eye on the future. Never get complacent. This online marketing lark is still in it's infancy. I for one never want to go and work for anyone ever again.

Are there any good affiliate schemes that you know of, or could suggest, that would be good to get into?

Hi,

Start by looking at some of the directories that offer affiliate deals, including (but by no means limited to!):

http://www.associateprograms.com/search/index.shtml

http://www.affiliatewindow.com

http://www.shareasale.com

http://refer-it.com/

http://www.cj.com

http://www.maxbounty.com/

Good luck!

Trevor

You can, and people do make a lot of money in affiliate marketing. I have done for a few years, peaking last summer. I was daft enough to not have a back up of my sites, and lost the lot when my server and hard drive went down at the same time. I would certainly not put time into re-building something that was not worthwhile, and my focus the last few months has been to re-develop my web portfolio.  Its low cost, low risk and passive income.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most cost effective and super efficient ways of advertising. As an affiliate you are using other sites and businesses websites to support your own business, earning revenue off related business. It is free to place advertisements and banners on your site, and free to join most networks (some charge a small admin fee). As a merchant it costs the affiliate nothing to advertise your business, so they have nothing to loose really.

Not everyone is going to make big money in affiliate marketing, usually the sites that display when people search for a specific subject, and have got the right kind of affiliate marketing and advertising in place. Your adverts need to be relevant and not "in your face" for most people to be interested.

To protect yourself you need to choose a niche subject, and write lots of genuine and useful copy / information. The more niche you are (on subjects that people do actually search) the better you are likely to do.

You need to get a lot of traffic – focused traffic for your affiliate programs to work, and you need to be offering them what they are looking for basically.

Hope this helps

Lea

just to add some comments from my (small) experience . . . I am a member of the Click-flipping group . . . which gives instructions which supposedly tell you how to make money from affiliate schemes. Some people are indeed making money, but many more are losing money. Out of a thousand members of this group, only a handful are posting that they they are making a profit. Which is not good enough odds for me personally to put all the time into trying it, yet.

So it's like most businesses . . . most people lose money, a few win, and no-one can actually give you precise enough information on the difference between winning and losing. Most of the information which pretends to do so, simply does not work in practice. If the was such a thing as knowledge on how to succeed in a business . . . then ANYONE would be able to do so by following such instructions. . . the statistics show that this is very far from the truth.

Chris

I think affiliate schemes do work but you need traffic, I would'nt pay for traffic unless I was taking details from people or offering something to make them come back to my site.