I've been trying half heartedly to make some money from affiliate marketing for the last year or so without much success. Over the last few weeks I've started to make some sales, perserverance pays off it would seem. The sales were made in the weight loss niche with what I've found to be a very professional and supportive affiliate program [MoreNiche]. It's time to have a look back over the year and how I've done.

The biggest problem I've had is in getting traffic if I could solve that I believe I could make a full-time income just from the products available with MoreNiche. In twelve months with Adsense I've made a sum total of $25 which doesn't even cover the time of setting the ads up, again if I could get more traffic I'm sure that would improve. I've spent a lot of time promoting Clickbank products without any success which is almost certainly because it's very unlikely I'd ever buy something from Clickbank myself. There's just something about the 'stock' landing pages that are generally used that I don't like. I wasted too much money being a paid up member of SFI who seem more about building downlines then actually selling their products.

I started with Plug-in Profit Site(PIPS) but have used it more for the resources and community. PIPS is like SFI in that it seems more about building a downline then promoting any products outside of the internet marketing niche. I think PIPS is the right idea with the wrong affiliate programs.

My attempts at article marketing have been pathetic, I still haven't even published the requiste ten articles with EzineArticles. Not that the articles I did spread far and wide did me a lot of good for traffic or my rankings in the search engines. But then the standard advice is to keep pumping them out which I found to be too time consuming however looking back at when I gave up I took the wrong approach. I never thought of my time spent writing articles etc as work it was an interuption to other things I wanted to be doing so my mind was always on something else.

I still haven't and do not intend on creating a 'list'. Even after more than a year I'm still going to ignore the advice that says 'build a list'. I still believe anything I can offer in an e-mail can be done better through a membership site. Although my attempt at making this site a free cooperative failed miserably I still believe in the concept . I'll re-enable the co-op if the traffic here ever gets to a decent level.

The good thing about the sales starting is it is very motivating already I'm planning new sites and over-hauling old ones. I will not be giving in anytime soon and plan on another go at article marketing in the next few weeks. I have an offline business that I'm concentrating on establishing before christmas and once that is running i can turn my attention back to internet marketing.