Money Blog

Just about everything you read online would make you think that it’s easy to make money with affiliate program opportunities. After all, you don’t need your own product, you don’t have to ship anything, you aren’t dealing directly with customers, and you don’t need an office building or even a website if you don’t want one. All you really need to make money from affiliate program opportunities is a computer, an internet connection and some basic internet marketing knowledge that you can get for free from countless websites online.

So, if affiliate marketing is so easy then why isn’t it working for you and so many other people who are hoping to get rich with this money making method?

The answer is to that question is actually very clear when you apply some basic math to it. Affiliate programs are usually marketed as a free way to make money online, but there’s almost always a cost, open or disguised, direct or indirect. And most people end up paying more than they earn in the first several months. They get disappointed and either quit or switch to another affiliate program system where they have to go through the whole learning curve all over again.

For example, article marketing is often promoted as a free way to make money with affiliate opportunities, and it is true that you can use it to get sales with absolutely no costs. You can sign up as an affiliate at Clickbank or another affiliate vendor, pick out some top selling products and start writing articles to promote them.

However, when you start to submit the articles you will find that at most of the top article directories, such as ezinearticles.com, you are not allowed to put affiliate links in your article or resource box.

You could set up a free Squidoo lens or Blogger blog and send traffic to it, but it’s not unusual for people to lose their Squidoo or Blogger accounts and their affiliate income disappears overnight. You definitely don’t want that to happen to you so you need to get your own domain name and hosting account. Now, you have expenses and your efforts are no longer free.

By this time you are almost certainly having ebooks and other products thrown at you from all angles that you are told you must have if you want to maximize your article marketing income. You buy a few of these and discover that you should be building a list and doing all sorts of other stuff. So now you need an autoresponder, which is another monthly cost.

Now, you start spending time at internet marketing forums where you meet a lot of helpful people and they tell you that you could be making more sales and money much faster if you used pay per click (PPC) advertising. That’s another thing that can cost you a lot of money.

Meanwhile, you haven’t been writing so many articles because you just don’t seem to have the time any more. You don’t want to waste time promoting your site until you have that autoresponder series written, have figured out how to run your hosting account and learned how to properly do PPC advertising because you are paying money for them all every month.

You are spending way too much but it all seems necessary for your online business. You have made a few sales but not nearly enough to cover your expenses and you don’t even want to think about your credit card bill. Wasn’t all of this affiliate marketing supposed to be free?

Sound familiar? It is a very common scenario and no internet marketer is going to blame you if you have fallen into it. We have all been there.

The good news is that there are three simple ways out. Which one you take depends on whether you have more money or more time.

1. You can stop spending money on anything at all and utilize only free resources. It will take longer to make serious money this way but it is possible.

2. You can limit your expenses each month to the amount that you made in sales last month. If you apply this method every month and if your sales steadily increase, you will be making a small profit, which will continue to grow, and you will only be spending money that you have already made from your online business.

3. If you have a day job where you make enough money to live on plus a little extra, you can put some of that disposable income into your business. This means that you can plan for your affiliate spending to be more than your business income for a limited time, say 6 months.

The third option is the best for getting established fast, but you must understand that you are investing in your business and you will not see that money again for a while, if at all. You have to be prepared to go without that money for an extended period of time.

If you can control your expenses you are half way to succeeding at affiliate marketing. This is often overlooked by people, but it is one of the most important parts of making money with affiliate program opportunities.