Am I an odditity, or is this pretty normal?
Go to affbuzz.com and read all of the blogs there, you'll learn a lot about how to actually make money with affiliate marketing. (Step 1: Stop using CJ).
Doing it "ethically" is another question however. If you want to make money fast and big, its pretty necessary to learn blackhat techniques.
What I have been doing is use affiliate links no different than adsense, that is find 250 by 250 image links and put them on some location on my website.
I gather that I have been doing it all wrong and affiliate advertising is fundamentally different from say adsense.
I think that given the right market and some hard work, it's possible to make enough to live from affiliate marketing, but I've found that I prefer to work with friends on more ambitious projects.
You'd better believe that somebody is making money on all of those "flat tummy" ads you see all over the web. A few years ago, black hat SEO got a lot more competitive -- you've really got to do criminal things (like hack people's Wordpress installations) to rank of highly competitive terms.
A lot of the people who were doing black hat SEO switched over to pay-per-click promotion of landing pages that push affiliate offers... Some people make pretty good money that way, but you can easily blow $500-$5000 on advertising before you've got figured out a campaign that actually makes money...
I know of a guy who spent about $3k a day on ads and made $5k in revenue. You've got to watch it like a hawk because if something goes wrong, you can burn cash pretty quick
AdSense effectively determines/auctions PPC placements. Affiliates attempt to recreate the AdSense magic in large part by building content around links to products--in other words, marketing.
