I have been using commission junction and link synergy for over a year to advertise products in addition to adsense, but not one sale have I experienced.<p>Am I an odditity, or is this pretty normal?
When I was in college, I paid all of my expenses- food, rent, and out of state tuition doing affiliate marketing on the side.
This was not throwing up banners on a site, but rather running PPC campaigns to affiliate offers (arbitrage). I also learned incredibly valuable marketing/PPC/getting traffic skills I am applying to my startup.<p>Go to affbuzz.com and read all of the blogs there, you'll learn a lot about how to actually make money with affiliate marketing. (Step 1: Stop using CJ).
I ran a modestly successful affiliate site from 2002-2006. I did very little work, and could have done much more to succeed (in retrospect), but it did provide 20% of my income during that time. I recently attempted to relaunch the site after a few years away, but found that the market is much tighter than before (I made only a handful of sales during a two month test run; I also believe that consumers are now more skeptical of affiliate marketing sites.<p>I think that given the right market and some hard work, it's possible to make enough to live from affiliate marketing, but I've found that I prefer to work with friends on more ambitious projects.
Depends what you're selling, and how you sell it. I make maybe $10 a month posting affiliate links to Twitter, but it's because I'm trying to share things with people, not trying to make cash.<p>You'd better believe that somebody is making money on all of those "flat tummy" ads you see all over the web. A few years ago, black hat SEO got a lot more competitive -- you've really got to do criminal things (like hack people's Wordpress installations) to rank of highly competitive terms.<p>A lot of the people who were doing black hat SEO switched over to pay-per-click promotion of landing pages that push affiliate offers... Some people make pretty good money that way, but you can easily blow $500-$5000 on advertising before you've got figured out a campaign that actually makes money...<p>I know of a guy who spent about $3k a day on ads and made $5k in revenue. You've got to watch it like a hawk because if something goes wrong, you can burn cash pretty quick
Affiliate ads are more suited to sites loaded with product reviews, discussions, comparisons, etc. The sort of tips that shoppers look for, combined with an affiliate product link, creates the difference between a stray ad, and a valuable sales proposition.<p>AdSense effectively determines/auctions PPC placements. Affiliates attempt to recreate the AdSense magic in large part by building content around links to products--in other words, marketing.
It's a numbers game. I'll take a guess and say that you are running a blog. In that case, contact some companies and sell some ads directly. It's a long shot in all directions. At most, you should be able to sustain a hobby. If I'm wrong about the blog, sorry -- I have a blog that has a similar problem, but it's a hobby.
Yes, you can make tons of money from affiliate marketing.<p>Doing it "ethically" is another question however. If you want to make money fast and big, its pretty necessary to learn blackhat techniques.
there are guys pushing a few hundred thousand dollars worth of offers a day. It's a huge huge industry, but you can't just toss up some banners and expect to profit.