What do you mean by "affiliate marketing", in this context? The term
is usually applied to mechanisms by which you offer, or link to, some
other supplier's products on your site and then you get a commission
on every sale. The canonical example of this is Amazon's affiliate
scheme, which probably has more members than any other. But you don't
get paid per click on these, you get paid for actual sales.
As a general rule of thumb, affiliate marketing in the sense that I've
described it only works if you already have an established website
with lots of users and you are offering links to products that your
users want. There are three exceptions to this, which I'll mention
below, but on the whole affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick
solution. If anything, it's probably the least productive form of paid
advertising for the majority of sites. I've been involved with several
websites that use affiliate links, and the only supplier which
actually gave anything like an acceptable return on the effort is
Amazon.
Pay-per-click advertising, such as Google Adsense, is usually a better
choice for most websites. But even that isn't going to make you
upwards of $10 a day per site, and the claims made by the "Adsense
Ready" content-mongers are always hugely inflated. Adsense revenue
will vary according to the popularity of your site and the eCPM of the
adverts that get shown, of course, but you will typically need a daily
average of over 5,000 tracked impressions - that is, page views by
humans (not bots) using browsers with Javascript enabled - to be
earning $10 a day. And that is a *lot* of page views - it's a lot more
than you think, especially if you're used to measuring your pageviews
by means of log analysers like Webalizer or Webtrends, which
invariably inflate the figure considerably.
Going back to the affiliate method, there are three ways of doing it
which can earn reasonably good incomes. Ihe first is to set up a site
which deliberately acts as an affiliate portal to various different
suppliers, with the intent of marketing it to shoppers as a one-stop
site for various different products.
http://www.cantbarsed.com is a
good example of that - I dont know how much money the operator makes,
but the concept is strong enough to make the site a destination in
itself and thus get traffic from people who are strongly motivated to
click on the links and then make purchases. That's fine, and entirely
legitimate, if you're prepared to put the work into it. The other two
ways of making money from affiliate schemes are somewhat less ethical.
The first of these is to buy Adsense advertising on various obscure
keywords (thus keeping costs down) and pass any traffic from them
through to your eBay affiliate ID. You've probably seen these on
Google - do a search for anything rather unusual, and you'll see an
advert suggesting that you can get it on eBay. The other is to set up
a site which merely repackages Amazon's catalogue via their affiliate
scheme, and then submit it to Froogle so that your site comes up in
product searches. Any sales made will earn you commission. I'm not
recommending either of these, I'm merely mentioning them because this
is probably what your friend will be told to do if he buys any course
or book on affiliate marketing!