Affiliate marketing – can you make money from it? The short answer is yes, anyone can make money from affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which affiliates refer customers to products and services online. Not every would-be affiliate is successful though and something like 95% of newbie affiliates drop out. See affiliate marketing success rate. That means that only 5% of affiliates actually make money and stay in the game. Yes, only 5%!
But affiliate marketing is a very easy thing to get into, and not such an easy thing to become successful at. As businesses go, affiliate marketing is a very cheap business model. Unlike a bricks and mortar business, the barriers to entry are incredibly low. This might explain the high drop out rate. Pretty much anyone can “give it a go”. See also traditional vs e-commerce business.
Yes anyone can give it a go, but not everyone finds affiliate marketing to be as easy and straight forward as they had imagined, or hoped. It would be great if everyone could easily start an affiliate business and have huge success without a lot of hard work. But that isn’t the reality of it! In reality many affiliates will struggle and fail. The ones who use those “failures” as feedback, are the ones who eventually make it work for them.
Affiliate Marketing Can You Make Money?
Making money from affiliate marketing is done by successfully referring customers to products online through your unique affiliate links. The links are tracked back to you and you’re rewarded for the referral. But doing this successfully does take some getting used to. In the early stages of becoming an affiliate there’s a lot to learn. You need to understand how to attract an audience in order to promote products to them. This is where many would-be affiliates get into trouble.
The online space is pretty competitive and there’s millions of other affiliates who are also promoting products and services online. Despite their being many ways to reach your potential customers, this still means there’s huge competition. There’s various ways you can promote affiliate products but you’ll need to find an audience through the various promotion methods:
- Blogging
- Video blogging – v’logging
- Paid marketing (Pay per click)
- Social media
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Email marketing – list building
- Off line marketing methods
- Niche websites
- Etc.
Affiliate Marketing Can You Make Money – List Building
Most affiliates have an email list of subscribers who they promote their affiliate links to. An email list is a list of people who have signed up to a particular service in order to get some information about a certain topic. By giving value to subscribers and building trust through sending regular emails, affiliates earn money by referring affiliate products which are related to their topic of interest.
So for example if you’re selling a Yoga training course, you could offer free Yoga videos through your email list. People sign up to your list, and you promote a Yoga course while offering useful and free information about Yoga through your email messages.
In the beginning, your list will be very small. As such, it’s much more difficult to build a steady income from selling products to your subscribers. But as your list grows to more and more subscribers, you should see some sales coming in. Initially too, affiliates are less aware of the things they need to do in order to become successful. But, over time their marketing efforts are rewarded by better knowledge and more influence. Their list grows and they get better at communicating their value to their audience.
During this interim time of learning about affiliate marketing, many affiliates will get frustrated and quit. But if you can see this time as a learning and growing period, you’re much more likely to succeed. Success isn’t guaranteed in any business and affiliate marketing is no different. But you can make money in it if you commit to staying the course and choose never to quit!
Summary
Yes you can make money with affiliate marketing. But it’s not easy, especially not at first. Expect to work at affiliate marketing for several months/years before you can expect a regular income. Initially you’ll be spending time learning and implementing new skills. Your email list will be small so you won’t have the success of a long term affiliate who has built their list into the tens of thousands of subscribers, for example.
If you’re a content creator, it takes time to create and promote your content. The fastest way to do affiliate marketing is with using paid marketing, building an email list and promoting high value products through a high ticket business model.
Slower and cheaper methods include blogging and video blogging, for example. If you already have a website with traffic, you can quickly monetise by finding appropriate affiliate products and listing them on your website and promoting through your email list. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing to get started building an email list.
For more on affiliate marketing access a free video series here.