One Income Stream – Affiliate Marketing

One of the things that I did about 3 years ago was to add another stream of income into my bank account.  My first stream of income was from the leads business I had founded.  The second stream of income was my wife’s income, medical transcription.  So, I worked on adding a 3rd income stream – affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is not network marketing.  Can be similar, but definitely not the same.  You are completely independent (not an associate or distributor), doing the marketing and selling of other people’s products, services, ad space, etc. that spins off a commission.  Some examples of popular affiliate programs and companies are Commission Junction, Clickbank, AzoogleAds, Google Adsense, etc.

Anyway, I began spending about 5 hours a week building up sites, learning, and working on building up this stream.  For the last 2 years, I haven’t hardly done anything with it (maybe 2-3 hours every other month), but it continues to spin off 4 – 6 checks a month that I receive.  Those checks range in amounts from $50 to $400.  Not a bad little stream of income for barely doing any work.  It has certainly helped build our bottom line when business is slow or the doctors are dictating less for my wife’s work.

One of the things I like to do is designate a category of bills a stream of income is going to pay for.  For example, my affiliate marketing stream takes care of all vehicle related expenses – such as insurance, loan payments, and maintenance.  It’s kind of nice knowing that those expenses are taken care of every month.

As I mentioned, I have barely touched my websites and other promotions over the last two years – that is until a few weeks ago I decided to begin building up this stream into a larger stream, or maybe even a small river.  So, I am back at it, but I’m putting in about 2 – 3 hours a day into building this up.  I am launching a series of websites to build on my Google Adsense revenue.  I am beginning to work with Google Assassin to build up my Clickbank revenue.  I am working with some existing relationships to do some special campaigns in relationship to National-Leads.com, etc.

I write all this to say… 3 years ago when I started this, I knew very little.  Most of the early days was spent learning from some key ebooks and beginning to promote some products.  That created a nice stream of income that has equated to about $6,000 a year.  Not huge, but not bad for working about 15 – 20 hours a year.  My thought was… what if I could add a zero to that number???  Or at least triple or quadruple that number.  I know what to do… just do it more and smarter.

It’s certainly not something impossible, and it’s not something that is going to take away from your primary focus.  If there is some interest, I’ll give you some basic things I did to get started and learn what I did.  Let me give you a hint though – It was not Robert Allen’s book. 🙂