Making money from being an affiliate was once a major source of income for many people via the Internet, but as this media has grown, so has the amount of people also trying to do the same.
Although nowhere near as easy as it used to be, we take a look at whether you can still make a fair income from being an affiliate or whether it's just become too hard to really see a viable money making opportunity with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing has been around for the majority of the time that the Internet has been here, with many of the big early companies catching onto the fact that affiliate marketing can really work well for them.
In the early days it was more centred on paying for impressions and for leads, rather than sales, which has only really been the standard payment type since online tracking technology has evolved to allow people to track where sales have come from.
It is only in the past seven years that affiliate marketing has really gone crazy, with big players like Affiliate Window, Commission Junction (CJ) and Trade Doubler reporting increased merchants and affiliates using their system.
Offline affiliate marketing has been around long before the Internet was ever thought of, with many schemes around the world offering the chance for people to earn money from selling products on behalf of a producer or manufacturer.
Because there are so many people now taking part in affiliate marketing, it is undoubtedly a lot harder to make good money from this type of opportunity now days.
Before Google really got strict on duplicate content it was possible for affiliates to make more money than the main selling site, because they could simply reproduce the information, buy a few thousand links and head to the top of the search engines rapidly.
As the engines have got much stricter this practice, thankfully, has now come to an end, with Google really focusing rewards on people who work hard and write their own content and really have a good go at optimisation.
Although this has made making large amounts of money from affiliate marketing much harder, it is still possible to make a good income, if you are willing to put the effort in.
For example, if you were selling watches for a couple of watch sellers, for you to make good money you would need to have a content rich website, with articles about watches and press releases etc, rewrite all of the product descriptions so that they are unique to you and then make sure you do the usual link building, social bookmarking, social media and content driven optimisation to make it really work and start bringing home the money.
Making money from being an affiliate is still possible, you just need to work harder and have a good product to sell.
It is better to aim for the lower value products and sell more of them rather than go for high value objects that you might not be able to sell many of.
It is also a good idea to go for things that are popular, things like jewellery, children's toys and media, because trying to sell things like insurance, mortgages and credit cards on a commission basis is a massively competitive market and some would say almost impossible.