Affiliate marketing is a major way that many people make money online. It’s not a scam, and it’s not a free ride either. Affiliate marketers work hard by writing web content, attending training sessions, discussing SEO and social media marketing techniques, and building e-mail lists. Many affiliate marketers do quite well with affiliate marketing, even quitting their jobs so they can devote themselves full-time to this line of work. Others. while not giving up their day jobs, nevertheless make a good side income.

I should know; I am an affiliate marketer myself. Since March of 2009, I have been setting up web sites and earning a small, yet significant, monthly income from affiliate marketing.

I came onto the scene of affiliate marketing thanks to Michael S. Brown, who offers a "How-To" e-Book on affiliate marketing via his Niche Blitzkrieg program. To find out how affiliate marketing, and especially how niche affiliate marketing works, click on my web page article entitled "Niche Affiliate Marketing". In essence, affiliate marketing involves the referral (and sale) of products through a web site that you build and market. The web site itself is filled with content about the product(s) being sold. If you can have this web site reach a prominent position on the search engine results pages, and have it also attain a decent page rank, you’ll be well on your way to gaining customers and product sales.

Once a product is successfully sold through your web site, you take a cut of the profits (i.e., commission). The commission is paid to you because you use a special referral link when promoting your products. Each time someone clicks on your referral link and then buys your featured products, the merchant is alerted that one of his/her affiliates sold the product by referral. As a result, you get a percentage of the sale price of the item(s).

Commission rates can vary depending on the merchant. For example, Amazon pays 4-6% commission on affiliate sales. Other affiliate sites, such as Commission Junction or ClickBank, work with individual merchants and those merchants post rates starting from 1% and going to even 60% (or above).

However, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of my own affiliate operations now: the money that I have earned since starting my affiliate site "empire". Here is the financial breakdown:

I purchased the Niche Blitzkrieg program for $79.00. I also paid an additional $25.00 for associated keyword tool software and $19.99 for RSS feed submission software. The total for all that instruction material and software came to $123.99.

I then signed up at a hosting site and purchased a domain name. Eventually, I purchased another domain name (I have two affiliate web sites at the moment). The total for hosting and domain names came to $150.00 (for a year’s worth of hosting) and $19.98 (for the domain names).

This resulted in a total investment of $123.99 + $150.00 + $19.98= $293.97

I initially set up my Gelato Maker site in mid-March. After posting the content, doing some article submissions, and setting up an Amazon affiliate store, I did not see very much activity on my site. I even considered giving up altogether and shutting down my hosting account. Then, after a month and a half went by, I noticed my web site creeping up in the search page results. First, it shot up from position #26 or so to position #13. After a little bit more tweaking, the site was sitting at position #6 on Google. And the very next day, the site was at #1 on both Google and Yahoo.

This got my Google AdSense earnings rolling. Also, I finally cleared my first gelato machine sale on Amazon.

Other gelato machine sales followed, but I did not receive my first Amazon payment until several months later. Still, once the sales started, they never really stopped. Here is the sales log from Amazon:

December has not been included in my payment log just yet; however, the cumulative total for December is at $65.52. This includes the earnings from both my Gelato Maker site and my more recent Cappuccino Machine site. So, in total, I have earned $182.04 since starting in the affiliate marketing business. And that does not include any additional money I earn from Google AdSense for ad clicks on those sites.

No, I have not yet come out in the black on my initial investment of $293.97. However, I would not say that even that remaining $111.93 is a loss. I have been able to use the additional software I purchased on other projects, such as promoting my Your Money and Debt site, submitting online press releases for other clients, and optimizing the content that I write. Also, keep in mind that, for the amount of money that was earned here, most of it resulted from only one web site. Also, most of the money resulted from me simply using Amazon affiliate ads. Had I made direct deals with merchants or even with sites like ClickBank, my earnings would’ve been much higher.

So, in summary, I am glad that I got involved in Niche Blitzkrieg affiliate marketing. I fully intend to expand my affiliate "empire" by creating more sites, making more and better commission deals with select merchants, and perhaps even making my own commission deals with other affiliate marketers.