humblebeginnings - 8:54 am on Sep 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

The same and other questions about affiliate marketing are bugging me for a year now.

I know some of you claim to make extremely good money with affiliation. And most forum members who make that claim are certainly very credible.

The problem with that thesis is that I must be a complete idiot.
Because I have been trying to make money with ClickBank, Shareasale and CJ, but for a year now I only manage to break even.
Adsense has always generously outperformed affiliation for me.

Mind you, I never use banners, I only implement textlinks in articles or reviews i write about the affiliate products I aim to sell. The articles are honest, If I dislike the product I will tell it too.

I think I have very rarely made a sale through natural traffic.
Most sales I make are through Adwords or YSM traffic.
And that kind of traffic is getting more expensive every day.

Apart from my pathetic affiliation track record, I think some of the networks, like CB, sometimes rip you off. At least, they accept merchants who I suspect to rip off their affiliates.
It has happened to me 3 times that if I start off with selling stuff for a CB merchant, I have one or two sales in the first 3 days.
Gets you very excited and motivated to bring tons of traffic to that merchants landing page. And as soon as you done that, no more sales, ever. Now since some of the CB merchants promise you to make $10.000 a day without any work or degree (and if you are interested they will get you a college degree in 3 days anyway) I do not have much faith in their business ethics.

However, I always wonder, the forum members who make so much money with affiliation, are they affiliates, or are they merchants?
And what are they doing what I am not doing? What is making the difference between a good affiliate marketer and a bad affiliate marketer? Are people really buying get-rich-instantly stuff from these silly one page yellow marker abused sales pages? Are people really prepared to buy information products meaning they have to pay for a pdf-download that they are likely to regret in a few hours?

OK, I am in the grumpy seat again...