OK, I don't really mean that you should forget affiliate marketing forever and always. That would be bad.
I do however think you should consider yet another way to make money online that doesn't require creating your own product – reselling.
Reselling consists of buying the resale rights to a product, then selling – or reselling – that product as a merchant. One of the biggest advantages to reselling is that as a reseller, you earn 100% of each sale you make.
For example, if you have a site about health, and were dealing with the topic of rheumatoid arthritis, you might want to promote the very popular book by Margie Garrison called “I Cured My Arthritis You Can Too!“. It sells through Clickbank for $29.97 and pays a 50% commission which means you'll earn $13.33 after Clickbank takes its share.
On the other hand, you might want to recommend the book, “Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis” by Peter Batty, which is available through eBookWholesaler (see my review) and has a recommended retail price of $17.00. As an eBookWholesaler member, you can sell that one for $17.00 (or more) through your PayPal account and keep the whole amount of the purchase, minus the PayPal fees.
Moreover, you'll also have access to a plethora of other titles in the health niche including for example, Dealing with Prostate Cancer, Your Guide To Deep Vein Thrombosis and DEPRESSION A Misunderstood DISEASE. There are exclusive titles in almost every niche topic (that you can comfortably discuss with your mother).
Another source of products with resale rights is Jeremy Burns' Source Code Goldmine series, Version 6 of which was released today. His packages usually include a mix of ebooks, software and multi-media products. And… unlike some sellers of resale rights packages, Jeremy limits the number of licences sold to 500, all of which are usually snapped up within a few days of the release.
Now, before you rush off to buy a bunch of products with resale rights, there are a number of aspects about reselling that you should also consider, which I've detailed in an article entitled “Resale Rights: How to Make Money Online Reselling Other People's Products“.
The article also details how I made nearly $12,000.00 in one month with a product for which I had resale rights.
Read it and decide whether reselling is a good fit for you.