With lots of bad news about the health of our economy and the skyrocketing unemployment figures, many people, especially younger people that just finished college, flock to the Internet in the hopes to find a good living online. Some rush to get a web publishing company like: Hostmonster and start building their website with high hopes and naive dreams.
Here Comes The Reality
The reality is that making money on the Internet is not longer easy. Although never has been easy to earn money on the Internet, in the past, it was easy to just start earning a decent living as a writer even using Adsense because competition was not stiff. Some say that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to start a business on the Internet, but let me tell you the reality of this. Some years ago, I starting promoting the Hostmonster service as an affiliate marketer and noted a lot of competition for this keyword. I chose the Hostmonster keyword because product names tend to be more valuable than general keywords because they come with purchasing intent.
I published my site, created many videos to promote them and recently, a lot of articles but Google takes several months to put them in the place they deserve, thanks to spammers that create millions of pages in the hopes to get them indexed fast and this is no different to promote a product like Hostmonster which pays $90 bucks every time sale is made. Long story short, I will have to wait several months to even start to see any traffic to that website from those articles.
I have been on the Internet for a very long time now and I see that is becoming increasingly difficult to earn money as an affiliate, not only because of competition, but there are several attacks on every front.
Youtube Videos
I created hundreds of videos related to Hostmonster in the hopes that each video ranked well in the search engines for low volume keyphrases (the long tail keywords) and it worked, but they are referring very little traffic from each, in the range of 10 visitors per year, per video. If you think that it is easy to make hundreds of videos, you have to be nuts. Only 1 in 10 people that visit my videos visit my website, so I will have only 200 visitors to my website for these Hostmonster videos. More of less 1 in 100 buys through my affiliate link, so that effort is worth 2 sales or $180 in total per year. It is a whole lot of work for just $180 a year and maybe refining the system could make this profitable, but it is very troublesome.
Here are some of the problems outside competition:
Google attacks
Google hates affiliates. Although they don't say exactly this, the reality is that they think that affiliate marketing is unnecessary and put a lot of pressure on affiliate marketers, so they tend to go away Adwords. It is true that for many products, promoting them as an affiliate in Adwords is totally dead right now.
FTC
The federal trade commission is putting a lot of pressure (a legal one!) on top of affiliates. You should disclose clearly your relationships with the merchants you are promoting or you will face high fines and your website could be closed.
Taxes
Some states are taxing affiliate programs. In response to this, Amazon closed their affiliate operation in those states, leaving their affiliates dry from that source of income. Although taxes are not that bad, it is bad when the product owner shuts down the affiliate program due to them.
Scams
If all the above was not enough, you should have to avoid scams in your way to make money online. You will find a lot of different kind of scams online: people taking your money without giving you anything, people that don't deliver, people that give you an excellent service and develop you an excellent product, only to find that the product doesn't work later... (that happened to me in a software development project). There are hosting scams as well, servers that get a lot of downtime, people that charge your credit card many times without notice, etc. That is the reason you should go with a reputable company like Hostmonster and that is why I recommend Hostmonster.
Well, if you forget about all the bad things about being an affiliate marketer, you could still be doing it, but don't think for a second that is an easy route to riches, because it is NOT. If you like Hostmonster as your hosting provider, I could give you some of the best bonuses you would ever see on the Internet that will help you overcome most of the problems you could face as a merchant on the net and if you are still attracted to being an affiliate marketer, you will have an easier time doing it.
