The Pros and Cons of Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become a very common way to make money online. Every day, a lot of people are using affiliate marketing to make some extra bucks from home and some of the lucky ones are even able to earn money to cover all their the monthly expenses.

But before you jump on the affiliate marketing bandwagon, you are advised to spend some time to examine the pros and cons of affiliate marketing.

The Pros
The first advantage of affiliate marketing is that it doesn't cost much to get started. Anyone can start an affiliate marketing business. All that you need for setting up an affiliate marketing business are a computer, a high speed Internet access and few hundred dollars.

You don't have to worry about how to run and profit from affiliate marketing. Internet is a good tool to help you find all the affiliate training, tips and information you need to turn your affiliate marketing business into a success.

When you are running an affiliate marketing business, you are marketing other people products or services to make money online. You job is only to send targeted visitors to the company's e-commerce website that you are affiliated with. Whenever a visitor referred by you made a purchase, you'll earn an amount of affiliate commission.

And since you are marketing other people products on the net, there is no stock you need to keep and your merchant or affiliated company will handle all the customer support and product shipping works.

Many affiliate programs will provide a lot of free promotion tools and attractive banner ads and text links to their affiliates. If you join one of these programs, you can use the quality banner ads or text links to match your website content. These ads will make your site look good and possibly generate instant affiliate commission for you.

The Cons
No matter what is being discussed, if there is an advantage, there is always a drawback as well. In the case of affiliate marketing, there are several downsides you have to keep in mind.

You have to do some researches and investigations on the affiliated company or merchant to find out whether it is a reliable company before really joining it. There are unscrupulous and dishonest companies sometimes just close down their affiliate programs without giving prior notice to affiliates. They leave without paying commissions which is even worse.

Affiliate marketing isn't a get rich fast program. You have to take the time to optimize your website and squeeze page so that they will generate good click-through rate consistently. And you need to put hard effort on testing which online marketing techniques are working well with your affiliate programs.

In some niches, you need to build an email list before you can earn affiliate commission. The process of affiliate marketing is you promote your website to get targeted visitors, from your website, you'll encourage your targeted visitors to click on your affiliate ads and links to your merchants sites so that they will make a purchase. But if you are marketing affiliate products related to Internet marketing, home business or online business niches, the visitors you refer to your merchants sites will not make a purchase on their first visit. You must collect their email address to send follow-up email to them to encourage them buy your affiliate products.

Conclusion
Affiliate marketing has pretty high profit potential. But, it is an online business that requires patient, hard work and the right knowledge to achieve success. You may be very interested to start earning money with affiliate marketing because of the advantages it offers but keep in mind that there are drawbacks and challenges you have to deal with.

With the right mindset, knowledge and marketing plan, you can make good profits online through promoting affiliate products or services.