Affiliate marketing is all about selling products or services of somebody else in return for a percentage of the sales earnings as a commission. And you do not need to have a website to this.

There are so many advantages to affiliate marketing for you do not need to have your own product, carry inventory or worry about delivery. You don't need to have a merchant account to accept payments or even worry about customer service issues. You don't need to worry about shipping start up costs or overhead. All you have to do is find products and promote them successfully, and cash your paychecks when you receive them.

One thing is evident though, most affiliate marketers prefer to sell digital products such as eBooks, software programs, online training courses, special reports, etc. While selling digital items can be a very profitable way to make money with affiliate marketing, there are, however, several other important and mostly ignored disadvantages to selling digital items like the lower perceived value of the digital items, and the ease of competition.

In order to understand more about the advantages and disadvantages of digital items, let's take a look into the real world of products that are non digital.

While it's true that more and more people are coming to the internet for work and play, not all of them are interested in digital items. They might be interested in online shopping for other types of products or services, but might not be inclined to purchase information from the internet.

That means that by promoting and selling only digital items, significant markets of people are being ignored, people that might be interested in purchasing real products and services.

Therefore, you must keep in mind that as an affiliate marketer, there are certain things to address before you consider selling nothing but digital items, competition is intense. I personally don't have the exact figures, but I would assume that over 90% of new and perhaps even current affiliate marketers put all of their efforts into offering digital items.

And what this means is that more and more new as well as current affiliate marketers are all focused on one segment of internet marketing, and ignoring the other underserved and better profit markets.

Each and every one of these digital only affiliates is in high competition with each other for business. Please, understand that a customer will only ever purchase this item once, that means there can only be one successful affiliate who will make the sale of a particular digital item to each of these customers.

While selling digital products as an affiliate marketer is an excellent idea, it should be a part of a well curved business model which includes the selling of actual products or services as well, products and services that are consumed often; ones that are in constant demand and ever-increasing marketplace.

To focus all of your efforts on only digital items is a big mistake and is the main reason why in excess of 95% of new affiliate marketers will fail because they are all fighting for a share of the already saturated market place where only one affiliate can ever succeed and even then, they will only be successful once.

You should create a balance of hot, in demand digital items for some fast cash and good, reliable real products for long term in-coming income. There are many courses online that will teach you how to succeed as an internet marketer. You can promote affiliate products with or without a website.