Now that claim may sound all too familiar, and for the jaded among you who have been burned by more than one ?get rich quick? scheme or another, but affiliate marketing has been a huge money maker for a lot of people.

But don't misunderstand; while there are plenty of ideas on how to make a decent living with affiliate marketing, there is a fair amount of work that goes into being successful. Yes, while affiliate marketing isn't rocket science, as they say, it still takes a firm commitment to being as productive and as efficient as possible.

Becoming an affiliate marketer for various products or services means more than simply signing up for an affiliate program, building a website and placing your affiliate links and ads on your site. It actually requires researching new offers from different companies, writing product endorsements, creating landing pages for those products and placing advertisements, whether in the form of pay-per-click ads or some other forms of advertising. Sounds simple enough, right? However, if you multiply that scenario with the number of products or services that you are promoting, things can become quite expensive, not to mention, time consuming.

If you are striving to make some serious money with affiliate marketing, your ad campaigns could easily run to the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And each of those will require product ads that you continually have to monitor and revise, which means countless hours of work every single day. As you can see, the potential to make money is there, but you will have to work a lot harder and longer.

There is a better way however. By adopting a few simple content publisher strategies, you can drastically reduce the time you spend on your campaigns and still rake in the big bucks, possibly even more.

Don't get me wrong, you will still have to research offers, create landing pages and all that other good stuff, but by focusing your efforts on building relationships with potential customers through informative and entertaining content, you can experience a much better return on your efforts in far less time. Think of it as the ?narrow and deep? approach versus the ?wide and shallow?.

Content publishing allows you to deliver content in a far more effective and entertaining manner than publishing plain old ads. You have at your disposal much more efficient and cutting edge avenues for your marketing such as podcasts and videos, all delivered easily, and at a much lower cost via things like email, RSS feeds and blogs.

Managing campaigns that run these types of dynamic ads are far more rewarding and less time-consuming than placing thousands of ads that require constant monitoring.

Additionally, using the tools that put your business on autopilot is one of the great advantages of working online. The email autoresponder is one such tool. Creating messages using an autoresponder puts your email campaigns on autopilot. You can deliver effective informational tidbits to viewers simply by having them fill out a form on your website enabling them to receive a series of emails, all of them sent automatically from your autoresponder.

Here's a common scenario demonstrating the value of autoresponders. Begin by reworking a few product review articles or informational items and load them as a series of emails into your autoresponder. Then set up an email capture form on your blog or website, a good autoresponder will come equipped with instructions on how to do that, then queue your emails up for delivery at the rate that you specify and ?Ouila!?, you've now got a way to continuously keep your subscribers updated on your products while periodically bringing them back to your site. The best part is it's done automatically, freeing you to spend time on the other business tasks at hand.

Finally, if you find yourself struggling to provide fresh and original content, you can always enlist the services of a ghostwriter. The cost of having good, quality articles written for you on a continual basis is extremely low compared to the amount of traffic and additional sales you will receive.

Affiliate marketing offers outstanding earnings potential but as with any business it could be at the expense of your time and hard work. Make the best use of tools and strategies that help you maximize gain and minimize effort.