Golden Goose Marketing

All too often, I hear people saying that affiliate marketing isn’t a good career.  “It’s unstable,” they say.  They complain that you can make a ton one day and nothing the next.  And for some affiliate marketers, that’s true.  It doesn’t have to be, though.

Affiliate marketing can actually give you a remarkably stable career if you do things right.  Below, I’ve laid out some guidelines to making a steady income from affiliate marketing.

• When you’re getting started, keep your focus narrow so you can find success more quickly.  Once you’ve started making money, though, begin to diversify your earnings.  If you earn a lot on diet products, try diversifying with something else like auto loans or holiday gifts.  If you have steady earnings in multiple categories (even if it’s not a ton), your income will be more stable.
• Work with companies you can trust, and never let a company owe you more money than you can afford to lose.  Even established companies have been known to skip out on the bill if their advertiser doesn’t pay them.  You can’t fully avoid that possibility, but you can make sure  no one ever owes you too much.
• Build quality sites.  Quick landing pages are great, but every affiliate should have at least one or two quality sites up their sleeve.  Try to build at least one good site with real content.  Guidelines are getting tighter all over the place, so it never hurts to have one extremely high quality site waiting in the wings if your others should get banned.

As you can see, affiliate marketing is not an inherently unstable career.  Just like anything, there are choices you can make to put yourself in a more secure place - you just have to have the discipline to do it.