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Affiliate marketing is a rapidly growing segment of the online marketing industry.  Often described as a “win-win” arrangement for both the publisher and the client, it is quite popular as a low-risk and generally profitable venture.

The Pros of affiliate marketing:
•    For the marketer, the most obvious advantage is the low capital cost. Unlike the client, who has to buy, store and manage inventory, the affiliate marketer simply has to focus on product promotion. Affiliate marketers of online retail giant Amazon, for instance, already have their own websites, and the cost involved in directing traffic to Amazon is significantly low compared to other businesses. Sites like Clickbank offer a lot of convenience for managing affiliate commission based staff.
•    One of the most lucrative aspects of the affiliate marketing industry for the affiliate marketer, is the minimal risk involved. In another business, critically low sales are the entrepreneur’s nightmare: changing or scrapping a product is a tiresome and risky business that can seriously harm the company.  The affiliate marketer, however, has the luxury of knowing that in case the product does not attract a large enough number of buyers, it is relatively easy to switch strategies, and, in the worst case, products. The maximum possible loss, therefore, is the cost of marketing the product.
The Cons of affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is often overrated as an easy way to make money. For an astute marketer this may be the case, but in general it brings its own risks and disadvantages.
•    The main disadvantage is that affiliate marketing entails serious hard work. To direct enough traffic to the client’s sales page is a challenge under the currently predominant affiliate arrangement – the revenue sharing system. Since this arrangement requires that the potential customer actually buys the product, the marketer battles on two fronts: to make the advertisement appropriate to attract the target audience (the people most likely to buy the product), and to make it enticing enough that they actually make the purchase.
•    Furthermore, affiliate marketing can sometimes be a unreliable choice of career. The work may be intermittent and the pay often sporadic, it is also not a very secure means of earning: there have been instances of hackers receiving the pay instead of the actual marketer. Of course, this problem is dealt with by reputable companies, but restricting your clients to only those few companies will not give you a career boost!
Essentially, affiliate marketing can be viewed as a suitable choice of side-business, without making it your chief source of income, and the experience you gain as a publisher will be invaluable if you ever start your own business. A success story for affiliate marketing has been Nicci And Lee, and Sean Rasmussen, so there are many stories to be found if you ask around.