Pros & Cons of Earning Cash Online Via Affiliate Marketing 
Posted by Udegbunam Chukwudi on March - 26 - 2010
You can download a free copy of Jonathan Volk’s Affiliate Marketing 101 Guide @ the end of this post
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Affiliate Marketing as a way of earning an income online has grown popular in recent times with more and more people joining everyday but do you actually know the great pros and most ignored cons to it that could leave you making little or no money online after just a few sales?
Affiliate Marketing has been around ever since the make money online boom started. In simple words, it’s all about getting paid a commission by merchants for sending them customers. In another light, it can be seen as selling other people’s product for a percentage of each successful sale.
Affiliate marketing can be done via many avenues including personal blogging, paid blogging and PPC (Google Adwords).
Most work from home folks choose to go the blogging way and this entails writing paid or free blog posts around the product you’re selling, leaving causal links to your affiliate product in some blog posts and of course using banner ads to promote these products.
For the make money online newbie, here are the pros and cons to consider before jumping unto the affiliate marketing bandwagon.
PROS ASSOCIATED WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING:
- Absolutely no income is needed in getting started. A free blogger or wordpress blog and say three great affiliate products from ClickBank or Commission Junction (CJ) are all you need to get started.
- You don’t have to worry about creating a product, managing sales support, keeping inventories and a whole lot more of work that comes with running a business.
- You can practically setup blogs promoting your affiliate products and leave them to run on auto-pilot and create money for you all year through without lifting a finger.
NOTE: A great deal of search engine optimization and backlink generation needs to be done to achieve auto-pilot affiliate marketing.
CONS ASSOCIATED WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING:
- The competition can be FIERCE especially with products that have a high conversion rate. These products are practically been pitched by every Tom, Dick & Harry and few of the ones that make sales are actually pitching the product to the thousands of subscribers on their email-list which you as a newbie to internet marketing or making money online (as the general population calls it) may not have. Nowadays to beat the competition or sustain it, most affiliates attract prospective customers by offering free bonuses to each and everyone who orders via their affiliate link and by also using “Black hat SEO methods” like Blog Farming.
- This is the con that 90% puts me off affiliate marketing. Most of the time, affiliates are promoting products they have NEVER used in their lives. They go as a far as writing glowing product reviews that serve as bait to the unsuspecting customer. In my opinion, there’s nothing as evil as recommending or hyping a product you’ve NEVER ever used before. If you’re doing affiliate marketing through blogging, you’re highly advised to desist from pitching unfamiliar products or if you do, you MUST alert your readers to the fact that it’s a paid opinion/review. The very minute one of your loyal readers puts his/her trust in you and buys the product only to find out, down the line, that it’s whack, you’re finished. One disgruntled reader/customer expresses his/her dissatisfaction at your recommendation of such a product and other readers stop paying attention to you & your blog entirely. In this case scenario, you’ve might have lost out on hundreds or thousands of dollars for a few quick sales.
So there you have it. A few pros and cons to consider when trying to earn an income online as an affiliate marketer.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing and want to promote Digital products such as PDFs, mp3 files, web hosting etc, check out the largest seller of digital products on the internet: ClickBank.com
Amazon.com & CJ.com will serve those of you looking at selling physical products.
Download Jonathan Volk’s Free Affiliate Marketing Report
Also for a limited time only (I think) Jonathan Volk is offering his Affiliate Marketing Report free of charge to all those who want it . The Affiliate Marketing 101 Guide includes the following sections:
Section 1. Introduction
Section 2. What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Section 3. What Is An Affiliate Network?
Section 4. Recommended Affiliate Networks
Section 5. How Does All This Come Together?
Section 6. The “Pregame”
Section 7. The “Pregame” Pt. 2 – Know Your Demographics
Section 8. The “Pregame” Pt. 3 – Setting Up Hosting / Domain Name
Section 9. Setting Up A Simple PHP Redirect
Section 10. The Landing Page
Section 11. Affiliate Marketing Methods (Basic Overview)
Section 12. Social Media Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 13. Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 14. Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 15. Media Buying Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 16. After Your Campaigns Are Ready To Launch
Section 17. Conclusion
You can download your personal copy @ Affiliate Marketing 101 Guide!
What other pros and cons of affiliate marketing can you think of?
Feel free to comment below.
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- Make Money Online With No Brain Cash Vol.1 FREE!
- Your Blog Is Filled With Short Posts & Affiliate Links
Pls, enlighten me more on how to go about it (making money online.) Hoping to hear from you soon. Thanks.
Check out Nigerians Teach Yourself How To Make Money Online
I am very sorry you think reactivating Akismet is a smart thing.
I cannot participate on this site because Akismet will delete my comments if I use my url.
That you rescue me in spam makes the the decision to reactivate even worse, since then I know you know that you allowed your “business” to trash me in the first place.
In other words, you are evidently a person who opts for personal convenience over brotherly love every time.
If keeping Akismet is the smart thing to do, I do hope you become less smart in the future.
Until then, at least this one potential client and fan won’t be back here.
Leone.
Why don’t you just comment without your url, or are you (also) only commenting to get the backlink? I wonder what your definition of “business” is, since it has to do with blog commenting…
I’m suddenly suspecting that comment marketers are launching a war against Akismet and blogs that have it installed.
Seriously, I am more incling to comment on blogs with GASP, than on blog that do not have it installed, like you have done on your blog…spamming or no spamming, backlinking is still important!
I think that in the drive to destroy Akismet (and let’s not forget that Akismet is very tied into WordPress – the same person developed both!) that some people are forgetting the cardinal rule of commenting on blogs: blog, rules!
If a blogger wishes to use Akismet or any other plugin, then that is their right. No one should come to their blog and say “you are doing it all wrong”. It’s like going to someone’s house and criticizing the furniture – you don’t get invited back!!
Stay strong…
You’ve just said it all
. Thanks for dropping in
You guys have turned a nice post on affiliate marketing to discussing another wonderful plugin, commenting on a blog is a choice but you won’t to mess up something house just because he organized a get-together or what the whiteys call family reunion, would you?
Thank you for laying it out so simple, the pro and cons, if you are new, it does mean you can’t become a guru tomorrow, just keep at it, and you’ll also be proficient in this most competitive market very soon!
I was able to talk with jonathan volk before (through his blog), and I can truly say that he’s a good man. He was then offering a free webinar to help those who are in need of more knowledge in affiliate marketing. I can vouch for this program of his, even I have not yet seen the program, but just by basing who he is and with what he have achieved so far.
Hi there, this your article on affiliate marketing is quite interesting and i’m it will really help the newbies around, keep it coming buddy.
Download my Product Launch Code course Free now, product launch code is a step by step guide course that I designed for affiliates to follow and stay ahead of other affiliates and win the comptetition on every product launches.
It’s a good course and you really need it if you want to really get massive affiliate commisions on product launches. Download it for free here
Precious
P.S: Comment has been delinked for failure to follow commenting policy ;-(
I’ve been making a full-time income as an internet marketer for almost 2 years now. The one thing I learned was that you need to build a list. After you have your squeeze page set up, write lots of articles with backlinks to it. It’s very important to build relationships and contacts to be successful in internet marketing.
It’s really great when you make instant affiliate commissions. It’s like having your very own ATM machine! I just downloaded a great free guide that teaches you exactly how to make instant affiliate payments.
Thanks for the comment but I don’t appreciate folks pitching their products blatantly on my site.
Affiliate marketing is another easy way to make money from your website or blog. I hope the free affiliate marketing guide will real help lots of newbie in the country to get start with good affiliate marketing product.
Affiliate marketing is easy? far from it, I think it simple but it is certainly not easy, especially if you want to build a business around it…
Well, not sure if ‘absolutely no income’ required is always true. Unless you are ranking extremely well with respect to search engine results, you have to spend a great deal of money on PPC advertising and/or email marketing software.
In the cons, I agree the competition is very stiff
You have a point there Ajith. In the beginning it all looks like you need no income to keep it going but as soon as you realize the limited chances you have due to the competitive nature of the market, you reconsider and spend some cash on PPC advertising
am really enjoying reading your writings