Why become an affiliate?

I recently had a stomach virus and split the day between bed & bathroom. The next day, I saw I had earned $XXX on my sick day. It felt soooooo good to be earning money even when I was "out of commission."

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Renée
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. — Porky Pig

I thought I answered this once before.

I read a blog posting after Katrina about a guy who was into affiliate marketing. The summary of it was - he lost most of his possessions, his house, etc. But his income did not even blink because he was an aff marketer and his income was online and on auto pilot. All he had to do was move to a different city, find a place to live, and get a computer and an internet connection.

I am barely making any money. But the concept of my income being independent of my physical location, my presence, and the time of day is extremely appealing.

Viva la information age !

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From the fingers of BatteryFuelPatrick
Affiliate Manager for SAS BatteryFuel.com | BatteryFuel Aff Info
Does your affiliates program give you : Free PHP template, free hosted database, huge FREE datafeed.
Chat me: MSN [patrick@allaboutfocus.com] GTalk [patrick.allmond@gmail.com]
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An affiliate is the same as any other self employed person. I have always thought of being self employed as having a more secure financial future. When you work for someone, you essentially have 1 customer (your employer). When you work for yourself you have lots of customers. It does not hurt as bad to lose one customer when you have lots of them.

It is a lot of work when starting out. But with the proper training and apply what you learn, there is a lot of freedom to set your own schedule. You can be creative in what you do and you can expand or not expand and you can build your business the way you want to and do what works for you...Change things around if you need to...It is a challenge but it is worth every penny...
d&k

WOW
What an inspiration this thread is.
I was recently laid off from my "normal" job and decided to try out working for myself. I have always admired the folks who have managed to do this online and my goal is to persue Affiliate Marketing as a career.
I am in a fortunate position in that any income from me is not immediately a priority, however I have little if any funds to invest. I count this as a blessing because I will not get suckered into the myriad of "get rich quick" schemes which proliferate the internet. I will however continue to read and learn and will reach my goal of financial independence.

I would like to express my gratitude for all the help and advice which is available on this and other forums.

Here's to the future
AF

the great thing about being an affiliate for me is that it's alot of fun! I guess i am a geek but i enjoy the research and the creative side to putting together campaigns.
it is a JOB though and if you want to be successful you have to put in the time and the work. Alot of people fail because they think internet marketing is some kind of get rich quick thing - that there is some magic formula and you plug it into your pc and every night thousands of dollars are deposited into your bank account with out doing anything else...
so the challenging part is keeping at it - for me it was learning a new skill set (very frustrating at first). and the learning doesn't stop if you want success.
it is a great lifestyle though... i'm glad i stuck to it through the first lean months.

If you succeed in earning money with time by utilizing affiliate internet marketing, you will quit from job and have allot of money while you are sleeping with your nice wife.

The main reason depends on you.

The fact is you cannot earn millions just by placing link and advertising.

You at least need to work hard. You once become an affiliate decide whether you are an affiliate to earn extra income or to get the only income from affiliation business.

If you want to take it as a business you will have to put efforts. Trust me you can earn millions in affiliation but only if you work.

Here you don't have to work as an labor but as an intelligent entrepreneur. You have to get as much as traffic on your site. Then your content and website should be good enough to make visitors to stay on your site for good amount of time. Bounce back rate should be minimum. Then strategically prepared content should be followed with good advertisement.

An then if visitors get redirect to merchant and buy something, you will earn.

Reading all this would find very difficult, but believe me its not that tough. You and any one can do it the only thing is some amount of dedication and right choice of products with right content to promote. That's it. Always looking for more commission value does not add you any thing. Many will claim to give you 50 % & 80 % commission but you need to look upon their products. If they are giving you 80% what would they be earning. And they are ultimately for business. So they will have their profit margin. So think what would have been wrong.

Thus review the merchant, their products and then join their affiliate program.

I hope you get all the success in affiliation business.

Paul Henry
Affiliate Manager

There are REAL GOOD things about being an affiliate marketer ... and REAL BAD and some MAJOR UGLY. But if you do your homework and set up your website or blog or just post the right links for the right merchants, you can make a nice income that is not constrained by time and place. Those extra checks or online deposits to your bank account ADD UP over time.

Once you start, keep on trucking ... do one page, then another and in a month you have 30 pages of information or products and services people WILL pay for provided you DID YOUR HOMEWORK ... if you earn $1 per day per page on average, in your second month, if you did the 30 page trick your first month, you have an income of $900/month.

You will not get rich over night and it takes time and effort to start to see the money come in, but it's a real nice way to build a solid second income to start and then you can go from there.

Well put Net4Biz!

Personally I like how you can build websites around things you really have a passion for and make money around what you love. In the real world I was stuck in a dirty warehouse working 16 hour days like a slave hauling around filthy stinking mattresses *shudder*

although I haven't made any money yet (in the process of monetizing site) I think its the same as anything in life; you can have anything you dream of just depends how bad you want it.

mBenz-7

I am a newbie on the website and represent a merchant company. And I am here to find any possible opportunity to work with affiliates. And ABW is the right place to meet all of you here.

Yeah, you can make money and I bet that is why so many people get involved in this business. You need to learn skills and take great effort to make money in this business.

Plus, you can make friends and meet some really awesome people here.

Do one before the other first. Learn internet marketing first. It will set the tone for affiliate marketing. It's like a foundation and helps you understand all the things that you can do to leverage different angles on your affiliate marketing efforts.

Lots of people get right into affiliate marketing and don't even understand what the heck they are doing and lose tons of money and get no where trying to do affiliate marketing without learning the internet marketing which teaches you about search engines and how to use them to work for you, how to set up pay per click campaigns so that you don't over pay for clicks while setting them up to also work best for you using SEO towards search engines, how and where to find profitable niches and learning how to choose the correct target audiences for your products that you sell, how to do proper niche research, proper keyword research and tons of other things that you should know otherwise you'll be guessing at a lot of things and just not knowing about others.

Cheers
Salamei

Why become an affiliate? Well, I've certain medical issues which mean my sleeping schedule is continuously out of the whack. I do want to be able to work to obtain an income, so here we are.

And things in my country are getting worse by the day.

First, the gap between the middle and upper classes is widening. Second, it is possible we will be heading onto the path of Russia in terms of economy issues.

Third, many are now working for minimum wages after the government decided to boost the population count too quickly and too much, causing the country's infrastructure(jobs, schools, medical system, housing, etc.) to be extremely destabilised, leading to resentment against those who're taking away their jobs when it should be against the government. Yes, you can now work for as low as US$100++ to US$200++ per month, slaving away for many hours a day and be on a temporary contract that could be totally unfair. There's little to no labour protection and even then, any and all worker's unions are controlled by the government directly or indirectly. And it's a first world country, btw.

So yes, these are my reasons.

To be an affiliate, the first thing is you have to do LOVE RECEIVING PAIN and be able to resist the impulse to go decapitate merchants.

After that, it's all down hill. Pick a niche, post some classified ads with links to products you personally like direct to the merchant. If they make sales keep doing it.

Get a website. Post some content, post some links, get listed in the SERPS and pray.

It's not an easy road ... but you can make very nice money in good times and survive in bad times. As Kermit says: " It's not easy being GREEN. "

well you really think you need reason just google it and you will find tons of reasons
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

What is so good about becoming an affiliate? I love not having to worry about being laid off. I thrive on challenges, so I never get bored. I've never felt as liberated as I do as an affiliate.

What is the hardest part about becoming an affiliate? Definitely getting started. Learning the ropes, and more importantly, learning to manage my time were the hardest things for me. I guess another hurdle I had was lack of confidence. There was too much to learn and I had no idea where to start. I had my toes in the affiliate pool far too long before deciding to jump in and give it my all.

What are the challenges I come across the most? Well, the market changes so often, I sometimes struggle to keep up with the front runners. It's hard to be at the cutting edge. This kind of work definitely requires a creative mindset.

You control your own time. Yourself is your boss.

I think affiliate marketing allows you to have

1. freedom
2. good income
3. departure from traditional business models
4. independence from regulatory authorities to some extent.

These are enough reasons for me to join it however I do not have required success yet.

thanks,

Domain7