Getting back on track ....

I worked with Amazon affiliate (associate) program for few years and in my experience, affiliates are rarely making a killing.

Some of the scams out there have numerous accounts and websites and they tend to make few $$/month per site. However, that is not a long term sustainable income.

About Google adwords, market is becoming more and more competitive so the cost is going high. Lots and lots of websites are coming up with garbage and lot of websites have adsense as their financial model, leading to ongoing training of users for not to click them. This is what happened to banner ads (01% - 0.2%) and is going to happen to adsense....

At the same time, users are getting more creative to search for the items (50% of keywords every year on Google are completely new - never searched before. DISCLAIMER: I don't remember the source). So, a savvy PPC guy can keep using wordtracker, google keyword suggestion tool to come up with more and more unique keywords to drive CPC lower and make money....

Take care,
Rajat