As a quick note, I'm sorry for my lack of posting recently, I have been away again for a few days for a break in a country castle around 2 hours from my home. Here’s a sneaky picture if anyone's interested.

Anyway, back to work.

One of the things I hear quite commonly is the phrase 'don't put all of your eggs in one basket'. It's a phrase which is thrown about the forums and the internet quite loosely and I think that when people read it they don't take much notice of it, but in all honesty it's really quite correct.

When I first started making money online through affiliate marketing I used eBay and the eBay affiliate program to generate the majority of my income and, as many of you will know, the mistakes in this are all too evident when you consider the changes which occurred during the changeover to eBay's in house affiliate program. When the changeover happened many people were expired, many people who were making some money online which they had begun from their niche affiliate websites. There was one glaring mistake which they had made and that was their online income was fuelled purely by eBay's affiliate program and so when they were expired they lost all of their online income. Now I have to say that eBay have a very lucrative affiliate program and I make a decent chunk of change each month through it using my affiliate websites as a platform for promoting products for sale. However what would happen if tomorrow eBay turned around and for some reason decided to suspend my account for whatever reason, it's happened before for no reason and it could happen again. Of course my income would halt......or would it?

The honest answer to the above question is no my income would not come to a grinding halt. I have made sure that I spread my interests across enough affiliate programs that I don't have to rely on one solely to generate my revenue. The main other affiliate programs I use are from Amazon, Clickbank, PayDotCom, Commission Junction, LinkShare & the Google affiliate network along with Google Adsense, from all of which I get some kind of income. In most cases the commission generation is through traffic on affiliate websites but in some cases it will be through my mailing list and through my blog, all in all it doesn't really matter as long as you're not relying on one affiliate program to bring in all of your online income.

Many people who promote products through affiliate programs only promote products from one particular affiliate program, for example if they are using a WordPress affiliate websites to generate an affiliate income then they will simply place products on there from eBay and use EPN to generate the income. There is no need to be so rigid, in most cases people like to have choice, they like to know that they are getting the right price for something so in showing them the same products from different merchants you are more likely to generate a sale through one of them.

I will give you an example; I recently built a WordPress affiliate site on which I placed product listings from eBay, Amazon and Overstock.com, and this site now consistently generates me income from all three of the above merchants. I could have placed listings on the site from just eBay but my customers would have had less choice and may not have bought an item through my site as a result.

So I'm going to say it one last time, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Yes you need to affiliate with those merchants who benefit you and if you want to read more on choosing the right affiliate program you can go here.

All in all though, give your customers more choice, more importantly if you build a site around several affiliate programs then the site is more likely to have a longer shelf life and bring you more financial rewards.

Similar Posts Which May Be Of Interest:

• 10 Step’s to Choosing the Right Affiliate Program
• Who Else Has Had Just About Enough of eBay?
• Utilizing The Amazon Affiliate Program