Affiliate marketing is it worth it? If you’re wondering whether it’s worth bothering becoming an affiliate, this one’s for you! Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative career and is for many. However, before you get to the stage where it’s working for you, there’s a lot to do. There’s several ways you can do affiliate marketing too. And depending on the route you take, how hard you work and for what duration, you can expect a variety of different results.

For this reason many bemoan affiliate marketing – saying that’s it’s a waste of time. But tell that to those who have quit their jobs and become financially free and you’ll get a different story.

Affiliate Marketing Is It Worth It?

Affiliate marketing can be tough. It can be very frustrating and just when you think you’ve got somewhere, nothing happens! In the beginning you should expect to struggle, to an extent. It’s easy for the “guru’s” to claim the ease of which they make tens of thousands of dollars. But these people have usually been at it for years, or even decades.

With a large list of subscribers growing into the tens of thousands, it’s far easier to shoot out an email and make sales. But as a beginner, your list will be starting from zero, like everyone else’s.

This is the hardest stage of affiliate marketing, when nothing seems to happen. But trust the journey and there’s a large prize waiting at the other end. The trouble is, most don’t get beyond a few hundred subscribers before they quit. Or they don’t even build an email list and things are even more difficult! The affiliate marketing failure rate is at 95% according to polls.

But many of these people simply quit, before they get anywhere. It’s impossible to count all the affiliates in the world too, so the accuracy of these kinds of polls is difficult to rely on. But it’s a fair assumption than most affiliates don’t give up the day jobs and either have a part time income from it, make nothing, or quit!

Affiliate Marketing Is It Worth It?

But what about those who make a success of it? If the number of affiliates who succeed is only 5% of those who try, you only have to be in that 5%! Affiliate marketing is a business model which rewards you when you make sales. Make no sales and you’ll get no commissions. It’s a performance related pay – unlike working a job. The difference is that with affiliate marketing when you start making progress, your “machine” can keep working even when you’re not! Affiliates can even make a passive income once they have built their online businesses to a certain level.

This is especially true if they use subscription products and build huge email lists. Once you sell a few hundred subscription products, you’ve got a number of subscription payments hitting your bank account each and every month – whether you work or not! This is most definitely a prize worth working hard for. The problem is, some don’t see the bigger picture and within a few months of nothing happening they decide to quit! This is a big mistake. What these people are missing is the freedom and flexibility an online business can give them.

An Analogy

My favourite analogy with affiliate marketing is the bamboo tree! Apologies if you’ve read a similar article but I think this sums up affiliate marketing the best. The Chinese bamboo tree has a 4-5 year gestation period. During that time, it doesn’t break the surface of the soil. It needs water and nutrients from the soil. After that period, it can grow 90 feet in 5-6 weeks time!

Within the affiliate marketing space you’ll see all kinds of reviews such as “I tried this course for 7 weeks and didn’t make a penny” “It’s a scam!”

But what these people are missing is the big picture and the Chinese Bamboo tree analogy. Most quit affiliate marketing because they don’t understand this concept. If they just kept going and made a breakthrough, then used that motivation to keep them going a little further, they would eventually see sales coming through.

Of course you can have a bad strategy and work like a ox for years and still struggle. This is an experience I had with affiliate marketing when I was following a bad strategy.

Affiliate Marketing – Worth It? Strategies

There’s fast strategies and slower strategies with affiliate marketing. Blogging is one of my strategies and it’s a slow one. Blogging can be compared to the Chinese Bamboo tree analogy too. When you first start blogging, nothing much will happen. Google has a sandbox which means it holds your website off the search results for several months. During this time, it’s easy to think you’re not moving forwards and quit, or at least have your motivation hampered.

You stop, look at your results, and wonder whether affiliate marketing is worth it! If you doubt your direction, which many beginners will, you stop and look for another “shiny object”. Shiny object syndrome can keep you in perpetual course buying mode when each email landing in your inbox promises the next best thing. With a continued flow of new emails from affiliates, it’s easy to fall into this trap.

Affiliate marketing can be tough, and you should expect to work at it for some time before you start to see the results. Looking too early can stop you in your tracks because you can lost faith in your strategy and the path you have chosen.

Affiliate Business Models

Of course there’s different business models within affiliate marketing too. Choosing a slow strategy and a low value product can hamper your progress for a long time. There’s no guarantees with affiliate marketing and your success or lack of it is 100% your responsibility. Even with a high ticket product range and using paid marketing, you can still fail! But using a good business model which has more potential for earnings has a huge benefit.

Most affiliates, like myself, start with affiliate sites such as Amazon. Amazon is the most well known affiliate program and offers thousands of products you can promote. So no matter what your interests are, you’ll likely find something from Amazon you can promote. The trouble is Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are pretty low.

You’ll only earn from 1%-11$ commission on any given product from the site. So if you sell a $100 product, the most you’ll earn is $11. There are other benefits on Amazon and you can pick up some extra earnings from your referrals basket, especially if they are on a shopping spree when they use your affiliate link.

However, choosing subscription products and digital products can mean you get much larger commissions for what is often the same amount of work. Digital products typically pay much more than physical ones do; often 40% commissions and even above. With larger commissions, a high ticket sales funnel and subscription products, you can much more easily use paid marketing to drive your affiliate business forwards.

Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It? – Paid Marketing

Some affiliates focus only on blogging and other organic marketing strategies. They make take several months or years even to see a return from their hard work. When it does come in, it can be passive. All the content they have created previously still works for them; bringing in leads and sales to their affiliate business. But most won’t work for long periods like this without evidence that their work is paying off! So unless you’re creatively inclined and like working for months with no obvious reward, you’ll need another strategy.

One such strategy is to use paid marketing. With paid marketing you set up advertising campaigns and send people to a website or sales funnel. When your paid marketing is working (and this takes some testing and measuring usually before it does), you can leave it running. Campaigns which become profitable can be left on, those which don’t turned off. When a paid campaign is profitable it can also be scaled up to a larger audience simply by increasing your budget. This is like turning on a tap and getting more water – only money comes out the other end! This is why so many affiliates put up with the struggle in the early days. Ultimately they can create an abundance of income and free themselves from their jobs, bosses and long commutes and work from anywhere!

Those who don’t see this as the outcome can struggle to maintain consistency and may eventually give up before they get there.

Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It – Outcomes

Depending on your life right now, and if you’re read this far, you might have an opinion on whether it’s worth becoming an affiliate marketer. If you believe in the outcome and believe that it’s possible, nothing can stop you from achieving the goal you set out for. You can work from anywhere, and make money on autopilot, if you succeed. For some that’s an impossible dream. Depending on your financial situation, available time and ability this can take some time.

If you can invest in a high ticket business system, for example, and use paid marketing this journey can be considerably shorter. But it’s not impossible to do without such a system either and only through organic marketing. You can still use subscription affiliate programs to give you an advantage without investment.

But if you’re choosing the longer route of content creation, it’s worth considering what you would enjoy to do. Writing content around something you hate or at best are disinterested in is a bore. And it’s much harder to sustain the necessary input you’ll need to succeed. See how to blog for profit without selling your soul.

Get started online with this free video series. You’ll learn a few strategies you can implement and what can work best for you.