Advertising is serious business—but it can also be an exciting and fun part of business, too!  And keeping advertising fun and exciting can be a key towards long-term success and avoiding burnout.  Affiliate marketing is a great way to advertise effectively, and the best part is that you’ll be advertising online during 2010: a great year to start!

In order to make your work at home Internet business prosper, you need to advertise.  All the time.  Unlike building a website, professional networking, and all the other things you have to do to get your business going, advertising has to be done again and again and again.

If you’re not careful, it can consume a lot of your time—and money!  From purchasing keywords to designing ads to working with contractors to incorporate Flash and professional graphics in your ads—it never ends.  That’s why it’s so important to take advantage of the affiliate business opportunity.  Advertising through an affiliate program can be a really cost-effective and low-maintenance way to get your word out there.  That is, if you take the easy way out and outsource your affiliate marketing rather than trying to run it all yourself.

If you’re starting now, you’ve picked an auspicious year.

I remember the first time I saw a banner ad online.  It has to have been sometime in the mid-1990s, and I thought, “they’ve gotta be kidding!”  There was no way I was going to give my credit card number to some company I’d never heard of.  It didn’t help that the location of the company wasn’t immediately obvious.  Even if this company did deliver, what would the quality of the product be like?  Nope: I would stick to the malls.

The ad itself was a fright.  Bright greens and blues against an electric-orange background—I couldn’t wait to navigate away from the web page displaying it!  Things soon got worse.  Before I knew it, ads could flash and make annoying sounds.  Eventually, they could pop-up and fill the monitor, effectively obscuring the sites I wanted to visit.

Since then, things have gotten a whole lot better.  Online ads have really come into their own.  Most of them are attractive and alluring, and the growth of reputable online businesses has made shopping online a matter of routine.  Even for me.

Why bring this up now?  Because this is a banner year!  In 2010, online ad sales will surpass print sales.  It is predicted that advertisers will spend 32.5% of their budgets on digital advertising this year, while spending 30.3% on print advertising.  Not a big difference, but it is a tipping point, and the gap will only widen as time passes.

You could look at this in a negative way, worrying that your online advertising is doomed to be lost among the ever-growing flood of banners, sidebars, and pop-ups.  I’d rather look at it a different way, though.  I prefer to look at it as an exciting chance to join a thriving marketplace.

After all, none of the major advertisers—and none of the small or medium business owners surveyed, neither—are pulling back on their online advertising, why should you?

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