Internet Income… Affiliate Marketer or a Business Opportunity Seeker?

There are a lot of people who, when they become interested in making money online, turn to Affiliate Marketing. This is not surprising as it can be a fairly easy entry into Internet income; at least it seems so at first. In going the Affiliate Marketer route, there is no need to have your own product and, in some cases, you can even get by without a web site. There are some affiliate programs that actually provide each of their affiliates with their own replicated web site to sell the products or services. Others running affiliate programs have sales pages that the marketer can send potential customers to. The mechanism, like email, for sending the prospect is encoded with the affiliate marketer’s unique affiliate ID number so that the proper marketer gets credit for the sale and receives the resultant commission.

A high percentage of people who begin affiliate marketing don’t make enough money to continue in it very long. Often, they end up spending more of their own money advertising and promoting affiliate products and/or services then they actually make. This is truly unfortunate because a lot of these people are already in a precarious financial position and that is the reason they are looking to make some money online. They get so excited about promoting and hopefully selling someone’s product or service that they don’t do adequate investigation before getting involved.

Selling anything on the Internet is normally a very difficult proposition. Anyone considering affiliate marketing should take a serious look at that term "Affiliate Marketing." Sometimes they are referred to a "Affiliate Programs" or something like that. Trust me on this, the most important word in Affiliate Marketing is Marketing. Even if it does not appear in the phrase, it is the key word. If people don’t know immediately that they are in the marketing business, not the affiliate business, they are destined to fail. It is all about marketing. If you are not into marketing you should not be in Affiliate Programs.

People considering any type of Internet business must be very, very careful. We live in an age where there are a lot of charlatans and unscrupulous people on the internet who are preying on the "newbies" (those new to Internet Marketing). Once one starts looking for an appropriate online business the liars and scam artists seem to come out of the woodwork and have but one goal… to separate you from your money. You have probably seen some of the hype: Make $40,000 by noon tomorrow; Do nothing and make $500 an hour; How I made $1,000,000 in three months. There is no end to these claims, but I can tell you, except in very rare instances they are lies. Think about it for a minute… If I really had a way to make $150,000 per month, would I share it with anyone for $47.00? Not unless it is all of those $47.00 payments that makes me the $150,000. But then, after you pay the $47.00 how will you make that kind of money? You won’t.

Please understand, there ARE legitimate opportunities out there. But it seems to me the crooks outnumber the honest businesses about 10 to 1. So be careful.

If you want to go the business opportunity route instead of (or along with) the Affiliate Marketing I suggest you start small. Keep your required up front investment small enough that if you lose it all it won’t hurt much. Make sure you are comfortable with the program and you can see yourself promoting it. Once you are in, remember it’s all MARKETING!