Not joining enough affiliate programs will hurt your chances of succeeding with making money online:

The first thing you want to do is give your home based business a chance with multiple streams of income. Limiting it to just one or even two will not get you by today at all. Think about like this: In the real world, relying on just one job to get you by may be a recipe for disaster. What happens if you lose that job or get hurt or sick? If there is no money coming in from anywhere else you might just be on the verge of bankruptcy.

This idea also applies to affiliate based programs. Limiting your home based business to one stream of income is not a good idea, it leaves your business extremely vulnerable. Even if you build up that one stream to be a ver high residual income, what if that business goes bankrupt out of the blue? So do you.

If you promote only one affiliate program, you will not fulfill the needs of all your potential customers. People will come to your website to get answers to a variety of different questions and needs. If you can't help those people, your home based business will be in a lot of hurt.

Joining too many programs will hurt your home based business in the following ways:

Too many programs means too many things to learn and apply. You will get distracted, lose focus, and get confused on what needs to be done. It will be very difficult to effectively promote each program the way it should with many programs to worry about.

Your customers may not take you seriously if your website is crowded and you are promoting too many programs. They may think your site is a joke of a mess and you are just interested in making money any way possible rather than helping them. Your sincerity level will drop and so will your sales.

What you need to do is find a happy medium. You want to find and promote a number of programs where you will not lose focus of your customers but enough to diversify your income. A good number to promote is somewhere around five or six. This will give your customers a good number of programs to choose from as well as allowing you to fall back on other residual income programs is one just happens to fail. This amount will help the looks of your website, it won't look crowded, and this number will allow you to focus better.