Open Post: How Do You Make Money From Affiliate Schemes?

I agree - it's difficult.

For instance;

I planned to market ipods - lets say with a budget of £100 per day (yes i'm English).

My affiliate pays me 3.5% and has a conversion at 2.14%.  the price of his agressively marketed product is £100.  His approval rate is 90%.

I set my maximum marketing budget at 2.5%, so my £100 would need to achieve £4000 worth of sales.  In order to acheive this I would need to attract £186916 worth of custom to his site based on his conversion rate.  at £100 a shot this equates to 40 1869 clickthroughs and 40 sales.  With me so far?

My £100 budget gives me a bid budget of just over 5p per click.  The main issue would be attracting that many clickthroughs with such a low bid amount.  I tried up to 20p an still only got circa 100 clickthroughs.  I would therefore estimate that only approx 10% of my allocated budget would have been consumed - £10.

This would give me 2.60 per day, or after 30 days £78 profit based on an outlay of £300.  Oh and just to add further misery the payment would be paid 2 months in arrears.

So £78 isn't enough to live on and to achieve an income of £5000 per month, I would have to nearly £20k and finance it for 2 months.

Please tell me there is another way!!!

Dont go after qucik money, try stocks in growth market.

I've gotten my profits to about $100 per day affiliate marketing ClickBank products though PPC.
The trick is finding the right product. From my personal experience current ClickBank gravity of any product can be bloated and may not represent the real picture. However by looking at historic trends you can get a much better idea.
So I started downloading ClickBank marketplace feed daily to get some historical perspective.
Recently I've put up a site http://www.cb-analytics.com to make this data publicly available so anyone can freely use it.

I've just started promoting some affiliate programs, and so far I earned only $75 with Text Link Ads (over three months), but I'm only learning. I hope some day I'll do much better.

Well I have ready about affiliate sites or adsense sites subscribing to Adwords to advertise their sites for very niche key phrases. Its the same concept, spend a little and earn a little more

Everton,

Your site is a gold mine for affiliate marketing. Like John said,"try adding affiliate links to any tech products you review. Also consider signing up for AuctionAds, an Ebay based affiliate program.

Also Go to CJ, and sign up as an Apple affiliate.

In order to generate your own unique ideas, peak into your Google Analytics stats and see what keywords your visitors search for. If they are product specific, then review those products and add some links!

Final words: success won't come overnight; Keep testing, tweaking, and most importantly reading!

I have a couple of sites which generate regular money through CJ affiliate programs. They're very much laser focused on a niche and so you know that when the visitors come that they're looking for something very specific and, as John says, you do a bit of pre-selling on the landing page before selling the product.

Slapping CJ banners into your site simply doesn't work. Text links do but only if it adds value to the reader.

I have never made a penny out of these affiliate marketting program. I wonder they are indeed helpful to make money.

I have as yet to make very much money with affiliate products. I think I have made about $50 promoting some Clickbank Products. I have made more money with sponsored posts.

The best i have made is $300 in one day, that was promoting some clickbank offers

Nothing to brag about, but you did ask ;)