funny, I was just posting about this very thing on a similar post. You just never know what is going to pay or not because everyone is different, so are their tools, resources and marketing venues. Frankly I think that the direct sales/home business programs where you have to pay over $5 to join is a waste. The alternative? Affiliate networks. Little do people know that through this one that I've been using for almost a decade you can become an Avon and Mark affiliate for free and you don't have to pay $7 a month for a website that doesn't pay (that was what pissed me off about Avon - so I pay $7 for a website and don't get any checks for what my site, that I pay this monthly fee for if I make sales? WHAT A RIP OFF!!). So its easier to join affiliate networks where you have a choice of MANY companies for free and you can build your business up around that for free. Such a better alternative. I do join direct sales companies, but if their fee is over $5 - forget it, even the free programs are too much of a risk sometimes if you don't make money on them..... This is the basics of what I have learned in my 10 years experience. Then, I get paid weekly on Friday through MyLikes - I've been paid there several times. I was shocked and blown away a few months ago with a direct sales site I joined for $5 and hardly promoted to find out I had made a $116 sale and made about a $23 commission. You just never know....
That's what my spouse and I do. We join free affiliate programs, because you can still sell a great product, without having a monthly quota to buy, and some of them you can buy at a discount if you are an affiliate.
We also make use of Amazon Associates, Google Adsense, use WordPress blogs, Blogspot, Squidoo, and popular alternative health sites and forums. The other forums allow us to post our links in our sigs, because most of them are generic.
We get sales from people, we've never heard of too. Between the two of us, we have one of the largest health food and products store online with all of it combined.
And linking up and synching up all your social networking sites together via various .rss feeds, get you alot of hits too. You can rss synch wordpress blogs into blogspot, into MyBlogLog which will .rss that feed back into your Yahoo Pulse, and you can do the same with Windows Live profile. You can feed your Flickr into most stuff, and synch your various public social networks into Gravatar (comes free with WordPress hosted blogs). It's amazing the technology you can do and get more hits.
I'm teaching a friend and one of my nieces how to do all of this too.
We call it planting seeds and letting them grow.