What is the affiliate marketing success rate? Between 2017-2018, the search volume for the term “affiliate marketing” rose by 44%, according to Google Trends. But despite this massive uptick in awareness of affiliate marketing, only around 5% of affiliates go on to make it their full time living.
As of 2016, 84 percent of publishers and 81 percent of brands have adopted affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is incredibly effective for product owners since it is performance based. Advertisers (affiliates) only get paid if they actually make the sale! This means affiliates take all the risk, with both their time and money!
Affiliates themselves are flocking to the arena hoping to make a living on the internet without any products or services of their own to sell. It’s easy to see why. If you can earn a full time living from affiliate marketing, you can live on your own terms, working from anywhere on your laptop!
Affiliate Marketing Success Rate
The Affstat 2016 report shows that most affiliates will earn under $30k a year, and even less. Many preferred not to answer the questions in the report about earnings. All beginner affiliates start out making nothing, and some never make any sales at all!
The image below represents the countries represented for the report. Of course affiliate marketing is a massive industry so it would be impossible to compile data across the globe for every affiliate.
The generally held view is that there is a massive affiliate marketing failure rate of 95% which leaves only 5% of affiliates who stick it out.
But why the massive drop out rate? Affiliate marketing is a massively over subscribed industry and this means there’s huge competition. According to Investopedia, just about 9% of affiliate marketers make more than $50,000 a year. See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make.
Affiliate Marketing Success Rate – Why So Many Fail
Affiliate marketing is often thought of as a get rich quick scheme and the barriers to entry are very low. With a traditional business, you have much larger costs. With an online affiliate business you only need a laptop and internet connection which most people already have. As such, many people can “have a go” at it with little or no investment and low risk. If you had to invest hundreds of thousands into a business, buy a building and employ staff, far fewer people would be eligible or make the effort!
This “easy” option, low barrier to entry and “get rich quick” view makes affiliate marketing appear to be a quick fix and easy access business. Unfortunately affiliate marketing is not easy and so many beginners will find out the hard way that selling affiliate products takes time and dedication. It is the long term affiliates who earn the most.
Most new affiliates won’t earn anything before at least putting in a few months, if not years of work beforehand. The short term view of this, particularly if you’re used to being in paid employment is that “affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work“!
The 5% who succeed with affiliate marketing have a longer term view and stick with it despite the problems.
What Most Don’t Know
Most newbie affiliate marketers will also fall into a number of traps which they don’t know about. Building a business is hard and takes time and effort. If you imagine affiliate marketing to be easy, you’ve fallen into the first trap!
This assumption will hamper your business because you won’t take it seriously enough or hold yourself accountable. It’s also not easy to be your own boss and you need to prioritise your time so that you are being productive.
As an employee shifting into entrepreneurialism, it can be an easy mistake to assume that time in front of the computer is always time well spent; since time at work is paid time! But affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means you only get paid for making sales. Therefore you need to become the master of your time; prioritise your time according to the most important activities for your business.
Not all affiliate products are the same either. Some pay incredibly low commissions. Physical products pay way less than digital products. By choosing subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products, the same amount of work can be far more lucrative to an affiliate.
To Be Successful
To be successful as an affiliate, you only need to come into it with a better attitude than most! Knowing that most will fail should prepare you better already! Don’t expect it to be easy, get help and support, use the right products and build an email list of subscribers.
An email list is a massive benefit for an affiliate. Expect to work hard building up your list to at least 1000 subscribers in order to give an affiliate business a chance. Long term affiliates have had the same struggles as those who quit. they just look at those problems as lessons and not failings!
Learn how to “fail forwards” and learn from your struggles. With the right attitude, anyone can make a success of affiliate marketing. Just make the decision never to quit and you’ll eventually make it! Access a free video series to learn more here.
