How does one define success in affiliate marketing? Everyone would have a different take.

For some, $100 a day income woukld signify success. For some others, it’ll be about earning a million bucks through AM.

I treat affiliate marketing as a business and a successful business is one that produces a profit and is sustainable. I prefer businesses that are scalable as well but to be successful they don’t need to.

Of course, the profit produced by the business must be sufficient to completely support my lifestyle or at least a significant portion of it.

In the short time I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing, I have made small investments of my time and money and got back a whole lot more in terms of profit. And although the profit earned hasn’t been a big amount, the ROI has been huge. In one case, I spent about $10 and 3-4 hours of my time and have so far got back close to $700 after about three months. And with no further input, should bank about $3000 this year on autopilot from that one campaign.

I haven’t worked hard at this so the returns haven’t been big. But I have worked and that’s the key to success.

I read and read and read about how to do research, how to pick a niche, how to do keyword research, how to build landing pages and so one – which is all very good. But all this knowledge was of no use till I just decided one day to start taking action, to start putting all my internet marketing knowledge to work.

I didn’t spend time planning stuff in great detail. I was desperate to start making money – some money – on a regular basis and just wanted to get off the blocks as soon as possible. So that’s what I did. Quickly slapped together a site using WordPress, signed up for a campaign, built a few links, set up tracking and within a month, I started earning between $10 to $20 per day just from that one small site.

That small success has taught me one important lesson about making money on the internet. Small actions can lead to big results on the web. The operative word is action. Every small step goes a long way, remember that.

I have been dabbling in affiliate marketing for some months now but it’s only very recently that I became serious about it. I’ve decided to treat it like a business now and not as a hobby and money has started trickling in on a regular basis.

The profit stream is still a very tiny stream but I plan to scale it over the next few months so that it becomes a raging torrent by the end of this year.

As a first, I’m posting the first screenshot of my affiliate marketing earnings  (they are not my first earnings – just last month’s over at Neverblue). These should have been much higher than what’s being reported but that’s a topic for another day.

I can imagine myself looking at this post at the end of 2009 and feeling proud of my affiliate marketing success.

Earnings' Screenshot