Affiliate marketing is nothing new.  It is been around for years.  The general consensus used to be that one trying to figure out what to do with one's website that PPC (Pay Per Click - like Google Adsense) had the lowest return at between $1 and $5 per thousand page views.  Affiliate marketing was in the middle ground with an average of $10 to $20 per thousand page views.  And selling your own item was at the top with anywhere from $10 to $100 per thousand page views.  But this is no longer the case as there is so much money to be made off of affiliate programs like those through CB (Clickbank).

Through Clickbank there are thousands of programs that affiliates can look through and many of them have payouts of more than 50%.  That means for instance if an item sells for $100 the affiliate marketer will get more than $50 for referring the sale.  Some products even have returned as high as 75%.  With returns this high a sexy brings affiliate marketing on par or even above selling your own items. 

 
Another great thing about being an affiliate marketer especially with quick purchase electronic items like those through clickbank is that everything is professionally done already.  Have established and professionally done landing pages that are made to convert at very high rates and to draw in and retain customers.  So unlike when you're selling your own product all you need to do is post a little snippet of code on your website and you're up and running.

Now with the advent and great popularity of social websites like Facebook and especially Twitter, it has become even easier because you don't even have to have your own website or even create your own content.  You can just create an account post whatever one small and use any of a number of twitter apps to schedule posts with your clickbank adds throughout the day.  Some apps will even change up the wording for you so it doesn't look like you're spamming.  Spamming is one thing you do need to be careful of on sites like twitter - they will block your account if you overdo it.

If you were to have a website or a blog, rather than using typical sources like Google adsense for revenue you may want to switch to being an affiliate.  Many affiliate programs tend to pay an awful lot more than Google adsense does nowadays. Especially ever since early 2008 when Google secretly messed with the payouts for many search terms and keywords - all of this was of course in favor of Google and not the content publishers (I wonder if the DOJ will look into this along with all of the other possible antitrust violations and monopolistic behavior by Google in their current investigations of Google as a monopoly). 

Most bloggers and website owners that have been around will tell you that they no longer depend on or even used in some cases Google adsense as their earnings and revenues have dropped across the board upwards of 80 or 90% in many cases.  Affiliate marketing if you use an affiliate service like clickbank is definitely the way to go.  Less hassle, more money, no games (like Google loves to play - you never know what the exact percentage of payout is on Google - ever wonder why?), and basically with some software that's currently available it is easy to set it and forget it and just watch the money roll in.

There are affiliate marketers out there that are bringing in $10,000, $20,000 and even $50,000 or more per month consistently through the clickbank affiliate programs.  All it takes for you to sign up, get an account and start posting on your websites, blogs or her social websites like twitter.  It is a cumulative process and it doesn't take long before the sales start rolling in and with the high payouts available to you through clickbank it won't take long before you start making some serious money.