I'm starting to feel like a Warrior!!!

You don't have to "plateau" at all - I only did because I had to stop work, more or less, and was relieved to "plateau" rather than to "collapse".

It took me a lot more than a month to get started seriously, though.

At least - I always had a bit of writing work and made something from that, right from the day I started, more or less, but my own affiliate marketing business took months. Without knowing it, I was doing most things right and two or three things wrong (you never know at the time), and I got lucky and picked the right two or three things to change, and then it suddenly all fell into place, and I went from earning about $300 in a month to earning about $3,000 in a month (from Clickbank), actually in the space of not very much more than 1 month!

With affiliate marketing, I think, it's terribly difficult to identify what you're doing wrong when it really doesn't work at all for you, and other people's opinions about it are not usually very helpful, because however well-meaning they are, they can't really know without inspecting everything you do; I really was lucky that it turned out to be the first couple of things I guessed it was.

Good luck and good wishes,

I started out in about June last year after making the newbie mistake of buying up alsorts of ebooks and bogging myself down with too much info in too many different methods. So I picked one method and expanded with my first wordpress blog reviewing one Clickbank product. It was pretty gash, poor keyword research, poor execution, a few videos on YouTube, no articles, 10 profile backlinks and that's it. Within a month it was #5 for my main keyword. Sadly it was a pretty low spending niche, most people ended up on the site looking for free info.

It converted about 1 in 100 Uniques and made around $30 a
Month. Not bad, but it's never improved. It still makes the same now and I've added zero to it since I created it, but I've learnt a lot of valuable things from it and hav spent the last few months tweaking and repeating.

Still nothing incredible, but they are niches I have interest in, and I feel I provided valuable info to my visitors.

I'll keep working and tweaking but most of all enjoying

i started working as a freelancer without really having an idea if i'd get hired or not..at that time, i was doubting myself if i have anything to offer, if my skills are good enough to impress someone that could make use of them; i put a lot of thought into it, and i decided that article writing was the best way to go, even though i haven't had written an article in my life; right after i decided which way to go, i submitted a sample to a potential employer; he never got back to me; took the sample, submitted again..bingo! i was elected out of dozens of writers, some which were in the business for years; got my articles posted on a blog belonging to a designer, and made my first $100 in a month..wasn't much, yet was a start; now i'm combining writing with other means of making money online, and it starting to pay off...it is such a huuuge relief and satisfaction to see your work posted somewhere...the only regret that i have is that i haven't started this a while back

My first breakthrough came when I got my first sale, it was a cheque for £25 (about $37) in the mail after I placed a classified advert in a magazine many years ago.

I think a lot of big breakthroughs come when you do deals though as you say, on The Apprentice Donald Trump once said...

"The money is made at the point of the deal"

A lot of people (me included) work hard learning a lot of stuff, become successful at what we do, but often don't leverage our efforts to make life easier for ourselves.

I've worked hard to get to six figures a year, but a lot of times I have found myself "burnt out" and only recently I've started outsourcing stuff.

And I've been doing more deals, there are people under the radar with fantastic products/services out there who need help, and are waiting for marketers like us to contact them and make things happen.

You start to realise how valuable and needed your marketing skills are, when you step outside the "internet marketing" bubble.