Money through blogging

Why I should make money from affiliate marketing? What are the advantages of affiliate marketing? And is there any disadvantage of affiliate marketing I need to pay special attention? All the questions can be turned into one question instead: What are the pros and cons of affiliate marketing?

As any other thing in the world, affiliate marketing has its own pros and cons. Here is a list of both pros and cons I summarized for your information:

The Pros of Affiliate Marketing

1. You don't have to source or create your own product. Sourcing or creating your own product needs a lot of time and hard working. However, affiliate marketing allows you to sell other merchants' products and/or services and get commission from your promoting performance.

2. You don't need to invest a lot of money to start your affiliate business. No Inventory. No staff salary. You can start your affiliate marketing by building your affiliate website or blog in your spare time at home. It just take you no more than $100 to buy a domain name and a shared web hosting. Then you can use one of the popular Open Source CMSs to build your website for free. The CMS is easy to learn and easy to use. if you don't want to spend time on site building, you can go to GetAFreelancer or ScriptLance to find a professional at an affordable cost.

3. Free yourself from daily routine. If you run an online or offline business, and unfortunately you don't have any stuff working for you, then you need to work all days to deal with the whole process: purchasing, marketing, shipping, payments, and both before and after sales services. This can really be frustrated. But as an affiliate marketer, you don't need to make a living like that. Your only job is to market the merchants' products whenever and wherever you want. Once you establish you marketing channel and start to make money from it, you can leave it running automatically. Then you can start another affiliate project if you want. Finally the growing income will make you a flexible life.

4. You can promote any many products as you want. There are thousands of merchants ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses that wait for you to promote their products and/or services for them. That means you can run different affiliate businesses at the same time and make money from all of them. Some top affiliate marketers have more than 100 websites that promote different products and services and pump more than 30,000 US dollars into their bank accounts.

5. The Earning Potential is unlimited. How much money you can earn from affiliate marketing is up to you. As an affiliate marketer, you are your own boss and no one can control your income but yourself. The more you work on it, the more you will earn. It is safe to say that many top affiliate marketers make a decent amount of money and they don't need to worry their financial situation any more.

Now let turn to the cons of affiliate marketing.

1. You can not control the product quality and service provided by the merchants. Of course, it is the cost for not running the business by yourself. So if the product or service you promote is not as good as advertised, customers will require a refund and you will then lose your commission.

2. Some merchants may scam you. They may claim high commission rates and attract you to join their affiliate programs, but then lower the rates so that you are paid less. And the worst thing may happen that they close their affiliate program without informing you in advance. You need to be very carefully to choose which affiliate program you will join.

3. Affiliate marketing is not easy and quick. To be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to learn hard and work hard, especially when you are just start. Building your website is quick and easy, but it need hard work to create good content, also will take a long time for your to get a lot of visitors to you affiliate websites.