You’ve heard about them.  People that make their money entirely online.  A world of sleeping in until noon everyday, working in your underwear, and taking champagne baths bought with all of the money you are making in Affiliate Marketing.  But hold on just a sec cowboy…  While it’s true that many new affiliates jumping into the game right now will someday reach that level, it is not something that happens overnight.

Affiliate Marketing can be stressful.  You can spend hours, weeks, and months testing out offer after offer, trying to break through and find that first big campaign.  Then once you have found it, the network can take it right out from under you, or Google & Facebook can take away your traffic on a whim.  So now you are back at square one.

This all sounds very discouraging.  I’m not trying to talk anybody out of pursuing a career online, but I am trying to get you to take a realistic look at what you are getting yourself into.  You are starting a business.  Starting a business is hard.  You certainly don’t want to jump into the deep end of the pool before you have even learned the dog paddle.

The best advice I can keep you is this: don’t quit your day job! If you have the ability to absorb a few losses and keep yourself afloat while you are learning the ropes, you are going to have a much easier go of it than someone who needs a campaign to work in order to put food on the table for dinner.

Ask any successful affiliate how they got their start, and I would be willing to bet that most of them got into this as a hobby or a part-time thing while they were still working somewhere else.  When you are ready to go full-time, make sure that you have a bankroll saved up to float yourself for at least 3 months or so, in case things don’t quite go the way you wanted.

If you put in the extra work to set yourself up for success in your new business, that champagne will taste even sweeter when it comes.