As a way to make a good living, affiliate marketing online can be a very useful and effective business model. Despite this, many people still fail to succeed with even the best affiliate programs. If you can find out why this is, you will greatly increase your chances of succeeding yourself. 1. You join an affiliate program for a product that requires you to purchase it first. This is not uncommon, and in reality owning the product you are going to sell is a good idea. What happens in many cases is that the affiliate marketer does not make money in the early days, looses confidence, and drifts to the next available "sure thing'. Over a period of time this can add up to a substantial amount of losses. The moral of this story is to always promote your product, until at the very least you recoup the cost that you spent for it. For anyone with a good working knowledge of online marketing it is very attainable. 2. You spend more for advertising then you are getting back in revenue. This is common when it comes to Internet advertising, especially for people who do pay per click advertising campaigns. The best way to avoid this is to start with a small campaign, and get a real number in your mind in terms of how much money you must spend before you are creating a sale. Then you can calculate the cost per click, to determine whether you can bid more or should bid less. 3. Your judgment of the value of your time and effort will improve as you build your experience and knowledge. You will discover that the best marketers online are very aware of the value of their time. The key point here is that you can spend time every day that is not productive as an affiliate marketer. Once you have everything in place to promote your product, you should spend the majority of your time actually working on marketing and advertising. Getting visitors to a website is really the only way you are going to sell anything anyway. Many affiliate marketers do not spend their time wisely, and it ends up costing them in terms of productivity and profits. In summary these are three ways to lose money with affiliate marketing on the Internet. There really is no excuse for this. As a professional you are in business for yourself, and can determine your own profitability by working smartly and controlling your monthly business expenses.