by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: March 01, 2010

The pros and cons of affiliate marketing are in their respective ways so extreme that anyone who is so much as contemplating becoming involved in affiliate marketing should take great care to determine them and take account of them in the first instance. Affiliate marketing is a very uncertain business at the best of times - even for those who are extremely experienced and skilled in the process - and the reality is that nothing in the concept that is affiliate marketing can ever be taken for granted.

Affiliate marketing in theory is very straightforward. A blogger or webmaster will sign up as an affiliate with an affiliate marketing company and essentially sell products on that company’s behalf on their blog or website. When a visitor to the blog or website clicks upon one of the product links and subsequently makes a purchase, the affiliate marketing company will identify the affiliate who has provided them with the lead via a unique code in the link and pay them what is most often a percentage of the sale price.

The first pro of affiliate marketing is therefore that the affiliate marketer is paid for what is essentially very little extra work. They will in the first instance clearly have to create and optimise their blog or website but that is something they would be required to do anyway for it to know success. Even the handling and dispatching of the goods is handled by the affiliate marketing company and the affiliate marketer has no involvement in the procedure.

The second pro of affiliate marketing is that there is no limit to the amount of money an affiliate marketer can earn in this way. Where the affiliate marketer has created a very popular website or blog and chosen wisely in the closely related products they subsequently offer for sale upon it, the income generated can be very healthy indeed and far outstrip other forms of income such as that provided from Google Adsense.

Considering the above makes affiliate marketing a very attractive proposition indeed for any blogger or webmaster. The first and by far the biggest con, however, of affiliate marketing is that the vast majority of affiliate marketers will generate very much money at all from their pursuit, if indeed they are successful in generating any. This is chiefly because the competition is so vast and so fierce that to succeed as an affiliate marketer, one has to know a great deal of luck in finding an extremely specific and virtually untapped niche market.

Another con of affiliate marketing is in the length of time which it can take for the affiliate marketer to be paid the revenue which they help to generate. Two months or more is not an unreasonable timescale in this respect, especially where sales occur at the beginning of a calendar month. This is but an incidental reason for any prospective affiliate marketer not to quit their day job.

The final principal con of affiliate marketing is that the sales process is so unpredictable. It is entirely possible for an affiliate marketer to generate high levels of sales one day, think they have the affiliate marketing process cracked, then proceed to generate no revenue whatsoever for the next two weeks. This is because affiliate marketing depends upon very targeted web traffic landing upon the page, perhaps seasonal considerations where the products relate to a particular time of year and the fluctuating rating of the blog or website in the Google rankings.

The pros and cons of affiliate marketing make the process therefore one which is more than worth attempting, more than worth tweaking again and again in order to hopefully achieve success - but very much one upon which one should never be wholly depend for generating income.

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