Affilate Marketing Pros and Cons

I"m trying to add more affiliates, but only one affiliate program seems to actually generate money for me so far. The others have quotas you have to meet within a certain time frame, the affiliates add and remove products and then you have to add and remove them, and then there are coupons with expiration dates you have tor remember to announce and remove. If affiliate marketing were all I did, I might be able to handle it, but, unfortunately, it isn't all I do. The hardest part for me is keeping what's on each webpage and blog straight and the dates when coupons expire on them straight.

Our last sentence hits the nail on the head and shows why those who spam every site they join will not be successful. The spammers offer canned messages and links -- not passion, and they are more concerned with the service they do themselves than the service they do for others.

That's one reason I don't open a store and decided to sell online. I do have more flexibility than if I had a store because I can still answer the phone and answer email most of the time when I'm sick. But all those other things you mentioned are things I also face. When I finish this comment I need to go to the county website and find out if I have to report for jury duty tomorrow because I was busy and forgot to send the request to be excused back so it would arrive three days before I was to report. There's barely enough reimbursement to cover my gas, and I can't plan ahead because I won't know until afternoon (if I'm on call) whether I will still have to go in. At least though, when I'm not dependent on affiliate income, I get the full profit to be made on what I sell and my customers are my own -- not someone else's.

You do have to have a lot of internet connections who respect your advice and opinion and believe they can trust you to only promote what you bellieve in. The problem with network marketing is that the first thing they teach you is to try to make a downline of your friends, adn many of us don't want to use our friends that way, even if we really believe in our product.

I'm not good at it yet, either. It's fickle and takes lots of time to keep up with. Deals change every day, and you have to update your promotions and web sites to reflect new coupons and remove old ones. If you join a site like Commission Junction, their affiated companies come and go and you have to delete promotions for them one day and reinstate then the next. I think it's better to stick with one or two affiliates you can keep up with until you know them pretty well. That's the same thing I do with my writing web sites. The first I joined was Squidoo. when I knew my way around there, I built up my presence there and moved on to HubPages, where I am also building a presence. I have a small presence on some newer and small sites, and I switch between them and add work just to keep my foot in the door. I put in an intensive presence on myLot for my first month so I could learn the myLot culture and get up to 500 quickly. Now I am taking it a bit more easy to spend some time back in the writing sites, just hoping to make payout every month here while I relax and interact with my friends. I think that's also the best way to approach affiliate marketing. Get to know one company well and promote it heavily, and then move on to the next when you have a good start in the first one. But don't pay any attention to my advice on this, since I am not really a successful affiliate marketer. My best affiliate is Zazzle, and I don't make payout there more than about every three months. I just don't put the time in.

I feel more comfortable writing than trying to sell affiliate products. I can only do it when I really believe in the products. The gurus of affiliate marketing, the ones selling eBooks telling you how to make thousands of dollars a month in two hours a day don't convince me. One of the online reviews of myLot I read before joining implied it was easy to make three dollars a day here. So far I haven't come anywhere near that. I never emphasize the earnings when I offer my affiliate link and make it clear that expecting to get rich here is quite unrealistic. Of course, if I had 1000 referrals.......Yeah! Sure! And all of them making a dollar a day.