There are many factors that a marketer must decide before they
decide to join and promote a particular affiliate program.
These factors could include items such as the commission rate,
ad materials, customer support and timely payouts to just to
mention a few.

But even when some individuals are selecting the best affiliate
programs to promote, they still are not make any money.

I will tell you the number one reason why majority of affiliates
do not make any money promoting even the *best* affiliate
programs.

The answer is that they do not stick long enough to promoting
the affiliate program to realize its full income potential.

With thousands of affiliate programs to choose from on the
Internet, most marketers switch between programs without giving
a certain program a chance to develop into a lucrative income
stream.

Let me give you a parable to explain my point.

Dave is a young musician who wants to make it big on the music
scene.  He thinks that his best bet is by learning a variety of
different musical instruments and maybe one of them will be his
ticket to making it big.

Dave takes piano lessons and learns to play the piano pretty
good, but not *really* good.  He could develop his piano skills
further, but he doesn't have time because of his guitar, violin
and drum lessons.

Eventually he learns to play a variety of different instruments,
but never becomes really good on any one instrument.  He goes to
various auditions for the musical instruments that he has
learned, but never makes the final cut because he is not good
enough.

What Dave should have done is concentrated on one instrument and
developed his skills until he become an excellent player of that
one instrument.

Only then would have had a better chance of making it big onto
the music scene.

The same thing applies to promoting affiliate programs.  If only
some marketers would stick with a particular program until it
started showing decent results.

The *key* to affiliate success is by promoting only a few
affiliate programs.  By concentrating on only a few affiliate
programs and putting your time into promoting only these
programs, you will find that you will get much better results
than trying to promote 40-50 affiliate programs at the same
time.

You are fooling yourself if you believe that you can effectively
promote 40-50 at the same time.  If you are promoting these
affiliate programs from your web site or in your ezine, is
unlikely that all of them are related to your market or theme.

Statistics indicate that potential customers need to see an
endorsement or advertisement for a product or service at least
seven times before they make a decision to buy.

If you are only mentioning an affiliate program in your
ezine only once, you may be disappointed if do don't see as
many affiliate sales as you expected.

You have to continue plugging endorsements and ads for the
affiliate program over a variety of different ezine issues
before you start seeing satisfactory results.

If you are still struggling to make affiliate sales, but are
convinced that you are promoting a quality product, you may need
to look at other promotional methods.

For example, banner advertising does not generally work as well
as other methods because most people expect an immediate *sales
pitch* when they click on the banner.  People who feel *pitched*
do not generally convert well into customers.

Most importantly, if you are going to promote only two or three
specific affiliate programs, they should be products or services
that you truly believe in.

If you are skeptical about a product or service that you are
promoting, chances are that you will have a hard time convincing
others to buy it.