Is anyone doing any affiliate ecommerce? How's business?

[Harold Mansfield]

I was going through my domains and came across a couple of stores that I set up a long time ago, but haven't paid much attention to in the past 2 years or so.

I make a little on the side from my music blog as an Ebay affiliate, but never marketed the other ebay store sites since I kinda gave up on affiliate sales in 2008 after what looked like growth and possibilities, turned to crap in a matter of months and just kept getting worse.

Just wondering if anyone is doing anything decent from affiliate sales in the last year or so.
Is it worth getting back into?

[billbenson]

From what I have seen on webmaster forums I frequent, profits are shrinking and people are dropping out except for the real big players that have been doing it for a long time. There may be some niches that are still good, but personally I'd lean toward cart sites, ideally with drop shipping.

[Harold Mansfield]

That's what I've seen too and I haven't seen any change for a while. There also isn't much chatter like it used to be. I guess it's run it's course for the small amateur sites.

[billbenson]

But perhaps if you had multiple revenue streams. Say affiliate products, adsense, arbitrage, downloads - or whatever. It would take some thought, but you might be able to come up with something that would work?

[Bishop]

Where I work we have an affiliate program that has been doing pretty well for being very new. The company I work for sells outdoor sports products and has a history in firearms and hunting equipment. Many places like Google Ad-words ban advertising if the site being advertised sells firearms so I think that might be why it's been working better.

I eventually plan to add an affiliate program for my new site (the one in my signature) after I get a few other tasks done. My target audience is managers and HR professionals so I've haven't found much advertising opportunities targeted directly to them.

[Patrysha]

Several people I know are doing well with their affiliate sites, but they all work really, really hard at it and spend quite a bit of money in developing the tools and resources to make it a consistent and reliable income...I see the people who do it part time improving at it, but at a much slower pace than those who throw themselves at it completely. Different purposes and goals mostly, it's not things that are hard to do that go into success with affiliate sales...but there is a consistency that needs to be applied...and an authenticity. There are always newcomers coming along and of them many crash and burn, others putter away until they really get it and others lose interest.