Affiliate marketing is not hard once you understand what you’re accomplishing. One of the most acceptable ways to earn money online is because of the low fence to entry and the combination of products and services you can promote to make money.
While it may not be difficult once you get the hang of it, it can be uncomfortable when you get started to figure out what you should promote and get people to click on your links.
Affiliate Marketing is a marketing strategy in which an online retailer delivers commission to individuals or companies who direct customers to their site. It’s also a form of “performance marketing.” The company presents its products and services via the affiliate’s website, with the affiliate gaining paid for each client referred.
People often mistake affiliate marketing with network marketing (or MLM’s), where you have to market something no one enjoys to profit from. That’s not affiliate marketing. When you utilize this advertising strategy, you are just upgrading someone else’s product by linking back to them on a blog or social media account.
How hard is Affiliate Marketing, and does it actually work?
Affiliate marketing is evolving into an increasingly prevalent way to induce traffic and sales for bloggers, small businesses, and online retailers. It’s extending in popularity every year due to the advancement of social media sites like Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
The Internet has earned it, and anyone can become an affiliate marketer with negligible technical or SEO knowledge.
It does work as people head to sites like Google and YouTube to find out information about products before purchasing to make a knowledgeable buying judgment. People are also always looking for tools and services that can make their life and work more accessible, which is another valuable way to generate income from affiliate marketing.
Pros: Affiliate Marketing
- No technical knowledge required: All you need to do is add your affiliate link wherever you’re promoting it. You don’t need to know any complicated programming or business models to make money with affiliate marketing. If someone purchases from your link, you either earn a specific amount or receive a percentage of their investment.
- Completely free: Affiliate marketing is 100% free to start. You don’t need to invest a penny to get started and make money from affiliate marketing. There are no up-front costs where you have to pay for products, tools, or services, and you can often start by talking and writing about things you already own or have used.
- There is no need to create a product: Affiliate marketing doesn’t require any product creation or development. You can promote affiliate products and services that are already available. You’ll find many companies that sell products or an online service have an affiliate or referral program that allows you to make money just by leading potential buyers to their products. With affiliate marketing, you can see which offers are performing the best, and then you could even create an even better product in the future.
- No dealing with customer support or returns: You don’t have to deal with customer support or returns if you promote someone else’s product. That is something that needs to be handled by the seller. You need to create excellent content that gets attention and drives conversions.
- Easily swap out links: If you find a product that converts better (or is better in general) than your original affiliate offer, you can easily change the links to start promoting that offer instead. If you started with Amazon, for example, and then found a better offer with a much higher commission rate, all you need to do is swap out your links.
- Remotely done: You can use affiliate marketing to make money from any location in the world. You could even run it 100% remotely if you wanted to. As long as there’s internet access, you can create content or promote offers online.
Cons: Affiliate Marketing
- It takes time to build: While many companies will allow you to promote their products immediately (like Amazon), others require you to build up an audience before they accept you into their programs.
- Drive traffic to make money: If you don’t already have an audience, you won’t be making any money. You’ll need something (like a website) that gets traffic before you start making money.
- Inability to scale: If you already have a large audience and lots of visitors, this may not be an issue. But if you have a small site and have hit a wall, it can be challenging to take your income to the next level.
- Very competitive: You can find thousands of new affiliate marketers starting and tons of established brands. It has massive bank accounts to bankroll its affiliate efforts, which can make it hard to compete if you’re not very good at doing research.
- No say in the actual product: You don’t get to decide on what new features should be developed, how the product looks, new markets to enter, marketing copy on the companies website, and what type of offers they may use to entice your leads into buying.
Is Affiliate Marketing Hard?
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing is easy once you know what you’re doing, but it can be a challenging learning curve and a frustrating one if you come into it thinking you’re going to get rich overnight. However, if you’re willing to put in the work to drive traffic and build up your website or blog, there are plenty of opportunities out there for you! Many affiliate marketers are out there, but only a few make vast sums of money. You can start affiliate marketing just looking for some side income as a side hustle, but it can also serve as one source of revenue if you’re looking to make a full-time income online. Ensure you have a strategy in place, stay patient, and only promote quality products and services.