Originally Posted by Sausage

Is it harder, yes it's harder. I do a LOT of traffic and my ratio this month is creeping towards 1:3500, some programs that gave a few sales a day have simply not converted for weeks on end with ratios of 1:10k even some over 1:20k from SE traffic since thats most of my traffic.

Though I also partner in 2 paysite programs and have access to the reports. One of the main reasons I am sure is the huge CC declines, some guys even trying 3-4 legit cards before finally getting their join through. I can no longer signup to ccbill using any 5 of my cards, and have trouble with other processors too! Declines are up 300-400% from where I am sitting across the 4 processors we use, and thats not even mentioning the rebill declines from longstanding members!

Can you still make money as an affiliate? Fuck yeah! Sales are still being made, and traffic is still growing, and while we are in a bit of a rutt at the moment it will not always be like this. Quality porn sites are still making sales, people are still buying porn in droves and with so many big players getting out of the industry there is opportunity! Hell you can still make the magic $100k a year within 1-2 years with some hard work and dedication, and by hard work I mean not posting on the boards all day, and chatting on icq, I mean getting your hands dirty, pumping out 2-3 good sites a day, trading, tweaking, submitting, pushing and networking hard.

I joined with 3 other still very successful webmasters to start a free newbie training project, mostly because we all had family and friends keen to get into the biz. We have around 50 participants now, many how started from absolute scratch with almost no knowledge and in the space of a couple of months many of them are starting to make sales! Some do a site every few days, some maybe a blog a day, some are charging ahead really using the methods that we teach, the methods that work for us and are starting to see a weekly rise in traffic and sales. On top of that they work together, doing projects and trading links and helping eachother. The future of the affiliate model isn't in an isolated affiliate fighting against everyone else, its in cooperation and working together! There IS room in this industry for the affiliate, especially the affiliate who simply doesn't insert him or herself infront of an easy traffic source and traffic destination and hold out their hand for payment!

Regardless of the complaining about the shitty state of ratios and signups, this is still a pretty easy industry to get into in comparison to many others! It's still very easy to make $100k a year within 1-3 years, all it takes is some work, something which adult webmasters until recently haven't had to do.