AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money?

Is affiliate marketing a good way to make money? While it can take some time initially to set up an affiliate income, ultimately you can earn passively from your affiliate links once you have established a traffic source and learn how to generate sales. It is this initial setup time where many affiliates drop out. This is a shame because affiliate marketing can be used to replace an income from a job and free up your time. But expect to work at it for some time before this can happen.

Is affiliate marketing a good way to make money? Most people make money by trading their time for it in a job. But this means if you stop working you stop getting paid. With affiliate marketing instead of trading time for money, you are setting up systems which sell products online instead. Once you have learned how to automate and scale these systems, you can generate money almost completely automatically!

But this requires some setup first and belief in what you’re doing too! If you’re unsure whether your going to make any money from affiliate marketing, it can be difficult to continue when you don’t see the results yet!

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money – Business Vs. Employment

Making money in affiliate marketing is done through the referral of products and services, mostly online. Affiliates are third party referrers who only get paid when a product is sold through their affiliate link. So initially there’s some time which affiliates should spend learning their craft. You can’t skip this phase and become a successful affiliate.

95% of affiliates will quit during this phase because they don’t see immediate results from their efforts. But if they would only continue and use their “failures” as stepping stones, they would eventually see the bigger picture. Once you have made a sale online as an affiliate marketer, you have essentially figured out how to automate your income! Initially though it might cost you $100 to make just $1 in commission. But once you figure out how to make $100 from only spending $50, you can move on to generate any income you want from affiliate marketing.

This is by no means easy and this is why so many people struggle with affiliate marketing.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money – Blogging

You don’t have to spend money to make money with affiliate marketing. However, the less you spend, the more time you’ll likely be spending on content creation. Blogging is a form of content creation in which the affiliates creates content for their potential customers on a website.

As people visit their content, they can offer up affiliate products to their visitors. Over time with enough content and visitors, you can start to see sales coming in, even when you’re not working. This is very nice when it happens but it can be a long time after you have started.

Bloggers can spend months creating content to attract an audience. In a competitive topic, it can even take years to attract the volume of visitors required to make a consistent income from selling affiliate products.

Still, blogging can work wonders and it’s a cheap way of generate sales online if you’re an affiliate. You can work on your own schedule and around existing work, as with other forms of affiliate marketing. Ultimately affiliates create systems which sell products online around the clock, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Once this is working, bringing in money, it’s hard to compete with it through trading time for money in a job. But before that can happen there’s a lot of work which needs to be done.

Summary

So, if affiliate marketing a good way to make money? If you’re prepared to roll your sleeves up and build an affiliate business then yes, affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money. Once you have built online systems and strategies for attracting traffic and making sales, they can happen automatically.

You can make sales in your sleep. But before this can happen there’s a lot to be done. Whether you’re running paid ads or building content, it takes time to learn the ropes of affiliate marketing. There’s a large drop out rate of around 95% so don’t go into affiliate marketing thinking it’s plain sailing! There’s definitely work involved upfront.

But ultimately you can generate a passive income from affiliate marketing from your previous efforts. This doesn’t happen in a job and although in a job you get paid immediately, you still need to keep turning up for work or you don’t get paid. With affiliate marketing your systems can continue working for you, even after you stop. So you can make sales automatically and without having to turn up to work!

If you’re interested in getting started with affiliate marketing you can access an online program here.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn?

If you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate you may be wondering “is affiliate marketing easy to learn?” Affiliate marketing is definitely not easy and you should expect to take some time to learn the ropes. At first you will need to learn some kind of marketing strategy. Depending on the strategy you choose, it can take weeks or months to get traction.

For example, one of the fastest ways to get traction as an affiliate marketer is through the use of paid advertising. With a large advertising budget and some high ticket products to sell, your affiliate journey can be shorter. But there’s still a huge learning curve and this will take some serious effort.

Most people come into affiliate marketing because they’re looking for more money, so they don’t necessarily have a large budget for advertising. If that’s the case for you, you may want to look at other, less expensive advertising options, such as blogging. Blogging is very much slower than paid marketing and although you can see some great results through blogging, you should expect this to take some time and effort too.

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means your new blog probably won’t get a huge amount of visitors easily. You’ll need to learn how to promote your blog and how to write blog posts with the search engines in mind so they get found.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn? PPC Vs Organic Marketing

PPC (or Pay Per Click) advertising is the easiest method if you want your affiliate journey to be faster. With paid marketing you can set up an advert and get traffic to a website within hours. With content creation (e.g. blogging), it can take months before results of your efforts can be seen. This can be disheartening for beginners and many will quit. There’s only a small success rate in affiliate marketing of around 5%. This further suggests that affiliate marketing is not easy.

Even with paid advertising campaigns, you’ll need to test and measure different ads to find a winner. Once you do, paid marketing can easily be scaled up. Simply turn up your budget. With blogging this isn’t possible and it’s much less scalable. So ideally choose a marketing method which suits your personality. If you’re not incredibly patient, blogging probably isn’t the route for you!

However, paid advertising incurs more costs and you’ll need a good product to make a profit while running paid ads. Expect to run ads which don’t work while you find your feet. Again, this can be tough and you likely won’t hit a winner on your first outing.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn?

The up side is that if you are a patient person and determined to succeed with affiliate marketing, there can be great rewards. With content marketing, you can earn money passively from content you created previously. Paid advertising can give you a globally scalable business quite quickly once you’ve put in the groundwork.

But you should expect to put in this work if you’re going to be anywhere near successful as an affiliate. With a 95% drop out rate, you can see that it’s not or everyone and it’c certainly not as easy as some make out.

The people making it out to be easy are usually those who are also promoting a program! So it’s buyer beware! Programs only offer education (and often products to sell too). They don’t guarantee you anything in terms of earnings. Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model which means you only get paid when you make those sales. In the early months as an affiliate this can be hard, because you can put in a lot of work for what seems like nothing in return. But think of this as your foundations and you will have more chance of success.

Summary

Affiliate marketing definitely isn’t easy and you should expect to put in several months of work before you have a chance of earning from it, as a minimum. You may of course get lucky and make an easy sale, or even more! But perpetuating this trend is much harder than landing a “one off” sale, for which you did little work.

Affiliate marketing is a globally scalable business model which can produce some great rewards. If you treat it seriously as a real business, you can earn some serious money from it. Treat it like a part time hobby and you’ll earn a hobby income from it!

Access a training resource to get started here.

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Is it possible to make money with affiliate marketing? It’s entirely possible yes. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties promote other people’s products for a share of the profit, mostly online. Once you join an affiliate program, you get a unique link which identifies you as an affiliate for the program. Your job is to promote that link in any way you known how to send customers through. Once someone buys through your link, you make money.

The most difficult aspect of affiliate marketing is to find a method of selling through your affiliate link in large quantity. Once you figure out how to sell an item once, you can repeat the sale many times with different customers. Since there’s a global audience at your fingertips online, you can promote to pretty much anyone who is online.

Affiliates get to know who to place their links in front of – what is known as their target audience. This is the thin slice of the online marketplace who are most likely to want your product. Once you learn how to place your affiliate links in front of your target audience en-mass, you can sell thousands of products and make money from each sale.

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? How Affiliates Make Sales

Affiliate marketers make sales in a number of ways by placing their affiliate links in front of potential customers. They attract an audience online through using various strategies such as:

Blogging – writing content on a website or blog platform
Video blogging – uploading content to YouTube or TikTok
Email marketing – affiliates build huge email lists of subscribers and promote their products out to their list
Paid ads – There’s a variety of ad platforms online such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube.
Social media platforms – there’s also various other methods of advertising including paid and unpaid social media marketing.

You can choose to promote almost any product you can find online too, as an affiliate. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can promote that product for a share of revenue.

One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon’s. Amazon is a trusted website and has thousands of products to choose from. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and make money from product promotion if they can generate sales.

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

So yes, it’s entirely possible to make money with affiliate marketing. However, it’s not easy and many affiliates will quit. In fact there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing with only around 5% of affiliates sticking with it to make a regular income. But it’s also a very available business model which can be found by anyone with a laptop and internet connection. The low barriers to entry means that anyone can “give it a go”. This, in part can explain why there’s such a high failure rate in affiliate marketing.

You can join an affiliate program for free, and start promoting your link. No other business model is so cheap and easily available for the masses. But the catch is that this also means there’s a huge amount of people attempting to sell online too. Other affiliates can flood the market and this means there’s a lot of market noise of other promoting the same products as you!

As the business model gets more popular, this also means more competition online from other affiliates. But many will drop out when they don’t see immediate success. So if you stick at it your chances of success are far greater than the rest!

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Stick At It And Get Help

I started out learning affiliate marketing over 10 years ago and had a heap of problems. The main difficulty is in marketing. There’s two main ways you can market a product online; using either paid marketing methods or content generation.

Since there’s so much content online (over 600 million blogs for a start) this means there’s huge competition for content marketing. But there’s many platforms to choose from such as YouTube, Google, Linkedin, Facebook and all the rest. Plus, there’s many different products to choose from too. So if you’re able to find a niche which is relatively uncompetitive, your chances of success are greater.

Your job as an affiliate is to figure out how to sell other people’s products through your affiliate link. Once you do it once, you can do it many times. Ultimately affiliate marketing can give you a passive income, particularly if you choose to sell subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commissions.

Training – The Best Investment You’ll Make As An Affiliate

Getting some help, support and training is the best investment you can make as an affiliate. Consider it an investment in the foundations of your “sky scraper” affiliate business. Without strong foundations, your business will likely crumble.

If you want to make a few sales here and there as an affiliate, you might make some extra cash on the side. But affiliate marketing can be used as a vehicle to build huge six, seven and even eight figure businesses on. If you go about it in the right way, affiliate marketing can replace your existing income and set you up for life!

Access a training resource and get help and support in building a from scratch affiliate business here.

Is Affiliate Marketing Free?

Is affiliate marketing free? Yes you can do affiliate marketing completely for free and most affiliate programs allow you to join at zero cost. This makes affiliate marketing one of the most popular online business models available. Anyone can join a program, grab their affiliate link and start promoting it online. When they make a sale, through their affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to them and they earn a commission based on the sale.

However, affiliate marketing isn’t easy and you only generate commissions when you make a sale. As a performance based business model, many new affiliates will quit when they fail to make sales. Even if you are able to make some easy success, this is difficult to sustain over the longer term. To help you succeed with affiliate marketing it is worth purchasing some tools such as:

A website hosting and domain name – which gives you your own “digital property” – free blog platforms can also be used but tend to have less authority and can they be more difficult to obtain traffic from.
An email autoresponder – allows you to collect email subscribers and promote your products to greater numbers of people
Help and support – training is definitely worth the investment if you can afford it. Going it alone isn’t recommended considering the 95% failure rate in affiliate marketing.

There’s also numerous other tools and software which can help you generate more traffic. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some free ones.

Is Affiliate Marketing Free – Marketing Strategy

Despite the fact you can do affiliate marketing completely free, it’s much more difficult to make a success of affiliate marketing if you don’t invest anything. Having your own website, for example will give you more authority with your visitors (and with Google) than a free blog platform such as Hubpages.com. A domain name only costs around $10 to purchase and a hosting can be obtained for a few dollars a month.

An email autoresponder is well worth a small investment too (around $10 a month). Affiliates use autoresponders to collect subscribers email addresses and send out automated messages with their affiliate links in them. It allows you to grow your audience quite quickly, depending on your marketing method.

While we are talking about marketing, this is pretty important issue if you don’t want to spend anything. There’s two main methods of marketing which affiliates use: paid and unpaid. Unpaid marketing methods (such as blogging) will take much longer to gain traction with and of course paid marketing costs you something, although you can start with a very low budget while you’re learning.

The best things to invest in if you’re doing everything on a shoestring budget are an autoresponder and a website of your own. The next best thing is to get help support and training.

Traffic Generation

Without a healthy amount of website traffic, you’re going to struggle to sell any affiliate product, no matter how good it is! To get traffic takes some time and/or marketing budget. With a good marketing budget you can turn on traffic like a tap! But if you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford this, you’ll need to find another marketing strategy which is free. Free traffic strategies include unpaid social media marketing tactics and content creation such as blogging or video blogging.

A completely free traffic method is to use blog platforms such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com or Hubpages.com. Write a number of pieces of content and promote them as much as possible throughout your social media platforms. This can take some time and serious effort though so it’s worth considering your marketing strategy carefully.

You’ll also need to choose an affiliate product which is aligned with your blog content. See also customer avatar worksheet and target audience for affiliate marketing.

Summary

Although you can do affiliate marketing completely for free, it’s much more difficult if you don’t have a few useful tools:

Your own domain name and hosting provider
Help, support and training
An email autoresponder – this one gives you free access and up to 500 subscribers without having to pay!

To do affiliate marketing completely for free can be done, but it will likely be much more difficult and involve generating traffic through content marketing rather than through paying for it. This is very slow and there’s a huge amount of competition online for content.

To learn more about affiliate marketing and to get help and support click here.

Is Clickbank Good For Beginners?

If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may be wondering is Clickbank good for beginners? Clickbank has a very user friendly platform and it’s easy to access products and get started with your affiliate link. There’s a wide range of products you can choose from and with digital products you’ll typically earn more than with physical ones. Some products on Clickbank pay upwards of 50% commissions too! See also what are the most profitable digital products to sell online.

However, it’s not all great with Clickbank. If your account becomes dormant you may accrue charges. ClickBank sales accounts with a positive balance, but no earnings for an extended period of time, are considered dormant. If your account has a zero balance however this doesn’t apply. So you won’t get charged until you accrue some earnings. See Clickbank’s dormant charges account policy here.

Clickbank’s customer service can be a little slow too. It may require up to 7 days to hear back from their customer service department. The other downside of promoting products from Clickbank is the fierce competition. Some of the top programs especially will be well promoted by top affiliates. So choosing a sellable item comes with a lot of online noise so it can be hard to make sales.

Is Clickbank Good For Beginners – Making Sales

As a beginner in affiliate marketing it can be tough making your first sale online. So I definitely recommend joining a program which will help you with your marketing. You can find one on this website – just sign up to my email list for details. Your success as an affiliate isn’t only down to the products you choose to promote but also in how you promote them. As someone who struggled for years trying to make it as an affiliate, I would definitely testify to the problems which exist in marketing.

Clickbank has a tonne of products to choose from which means you can usually find a product in every conceivable niche. But the best sellers are always well subscribed and you’ll find a lot of competition. The lesser known products often haven’t been picked up by top affiliates and are therefore more risky to promote. You can easily pick a bad product which doesn’t sell, no matter how hard you try. So your product choice is key. Ideally choose a product you align with and in which you can build a profitable niche.

Is Clickbank Good For Beginners – Subscriptions

If you’re going to use Clickbank it’s definitely worth looking for products which carry recurring commissions. These are worth a lot more to affiliates because a single sale can mean ongoing monthly commissions! You can find these products using this website. CBEngine.com can help you find the top paying products and those which pay recurring commissions too. Just beware that the top paying products are often over subscribed and there will be a lot of competition.

Clickbank Gravity

Clickbank “gravity” is a score denoted by Clickbank to its products which serves as an indicator of the best selling products. Over a 12-week rolling period, the ClickBank Gravity Score calculates how many unique affiliates are making commissions on a particular offer, with a higher emphasis on more recent product sales. More on Gravity score here.

The score is used to find quality products which are already selling, which is a good idea if you’re new. However, too high a Gravity score might also suggest that a particular product is already oversubscribed. This might mean there’s a tonne of competition for it. Ideally find a product in a topic you like which is already proven to sell but isn’t too competitive. Too low a score and you may struggle to sell your item.

Summary

So is Clickbank good for beginners? Clickbank has a huge array of digital products to sell as an affiliate. Digital products pay more than physical products too, quite a lot more. But you’ll need to actually sell those products if you’re going to earn anything as an affiliate. That’s why it’s always a good idea to get some training if you’re serious about doing affiliate marketing.

Access a training resource here to learn more and get help and support.

What Is Affiliate Marketing All About?

What is affiliate marketing all about? If you’re asking this, you probably already know something about what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties earn commissions by selling other people’s products, mostly online.

Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program. Once they have joined an affiliate program they learn how to promote their affiliate links somehow. This can be done in a number of ways and is mostly done online through marketing methods such as blogging, paid advertising, social media, email marketing and through the use of video.

When someone buys a product through an affiliate link, the affiliate who referred that customer gets paid a commission based on the sale. Because affiliate marketing can be done from anywhere globally, it’s gaining popularity as a method of earning money online. You don’t need any of your own products and it’s relatively cheap to learn affiliate marketing. It’s one of the most popular methods of earning income online.

What Is Affiliate Marketing All About – Amazon

Amazon, for example, has one of the most popular affiliate programs and many new affiliates will join Amazon’s partner program (affiliate program) and earn money by promoting products from the site. Since Amazon is well trusted, a large percentage of consumers are likely to buy from them. A recent study showed that 89% of consumers would rather buy from Amazon than from other e-commerce sites.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/03/20/study-89-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-buy-products-from-amazon-than-other-e-commerce-sites/

But while Amazon is good for consumers, it’s not so great for affiliates who typically earn only between 1% and 10% commissions for products they have sold. Other affiliate products pay much more, such as digital products which typically pay between 30% and 40% commission on sales.

What Is Affiliate Marketing All About – Clickbank

Clickbank.com is a “digital product marketplace” where many affiliates will find products to promote. Unlike Amazon, Clickbank promotes digital products which generally are better payers for affiliates. You can find thousands of products on the Clickbank marketplace which makes it a simple choice if you have an existing website for a means of making money through product promotion.

To promote any affiliate product you must first join a program associated with that particular product. Not all online products and services have an affiliate program, but many do. So you can find things to sell in almost any given topic.

Digital products are good for affiliates for a couple of reasons. You can earn larger commissions typically with digital products and they can be downloaded from anywhere digitally, so there’s no need for postage. The most profitable digital products are those which carry a high value or have recurring commissions attached to them. These are things like software products which have subscription charges or memberships.

High Ticket & Subscription Affiliate Products

With a high ticket product you can earn considerably more than with most other products you can find online. High ticket affiliate products are worth much more than your standard products. As such you can earn larger amounts from their sale. A good high ticket item can give affiliates commissions of $500 and above per sale.

The highest paying digital products are either super expensive physical products or digital education products which give huge value. The most profitable products include items which pay both high ticket and recurring commissions.

With such a business model, affiliates can quickly replace an existing income if they use paid advertising and sell to a scalable audience.

Learn more an access a training course here.

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Popular?

Affiliate marketing is a popular online business model because pretty much anyone can do it and there’s a very low bar to entry. You can learn affiliate marketing on a shoestring and although it isn’t easy to be consistently profitable with affiliate marketing, those who stick at it can see large financial rewards and a passive income over time.

The drop out rate in affiliate marketing is pretty high and only around 5% of those who start will continue to make it their full time income. But this is partly because it’s so accessible. Anyone can become an affiliate from anywhere globally. All you need is a laptop and internet connection. But being successful is another matter entirely because affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means if you don’t make any sales, you don’t get paid! So even though there is the potential for uncapped earnings, getting your affiliate business off the ground can be tough.

If you’re serious about earning an income through affiliate marketing it can be done alongside a job and in your spare time too. The versatility of affiliate marketing makes it a very appealing business model. Access an online training resource here.

How Is Affiliate Marketing Done?

How is affiliate marketing done? Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties sell other people’s products online. When an affiliate makes a sale through their unique affiliate code (affiliate link), they earn a commission based on the sale.

Initially to become an affiliate you will need to join an affiliate program. Once you’ve joined, you’ll usually get access to a back office where you can collect your affiliate link. Once you have it, you can start promoting your affiliate product. There’s many ways to promote affiliate links and some of the most popular methods are:

Blogging or video blogging (V’logging).
Email marketing – collect emails and promote link through email messages
Paid advertising (Pay per click ad platforms such as Adwords, Bing, YouTube and Facebook for example).
Social media marketing – you can use the many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc to post your links and find potential customers.

How Is Affiliate Marketing Done – Blogging/V’logging

With blogging or video blogging, affiliates create content and post on a website or video platform. They optimise their content as much as possible so that they can get found by the various search engines. The most popular search engine is of course Google, so most bloggers will aim to get their content ranking on Google to get free website traffic.

This is definitely not an easy task as there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet. In a very competitive niche, affiliates will be competing against other bloggers for the top spot on Google. But they can also promote their blog posts elsewhere too such as through using social media platforms.

With blogging it can take some time to start selling affiliate products consistently. But over time and with enough content, you can even sell affiliate products passively from the work you’ve done previously. The same can be said for other content generation strategies such as through using YouTube.

How Is Affiliate Marketing Done – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular tools for affiliate marketers. It lets the affiliate collect email addresses of people and send them information on autopilot through email messages. With a large enough email list and an engaged audience, affiliates can sell thousands of affiliate products through sending out email messages and building a relationship with their list. This is usually done by offering a service of some kind through a newsletter subscription.

To collect email addresses affiliates place a form on a website or landing page. They then drive traffic to that page according to their target audience. This can be done through organic content creation or paid advertising.

Using PPC – Pay Per Click (paid advertising)

Many affiliates use PPC (pay per click advertising) to promote their affiliate products. They can either send people directly to a product sales page (through their affiliate link), or to a landing page as described above. Obviously with paid ads affiliates aim to promote a product and earn more in sales revenue than they do in advertising expenditure. Once they are in profit on a consistent basis, they can simply increase their advertising budget and make many more sales.

PPC ad platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. allow affiliates to find likely customers for their products and place ads accordingly. For example, Adwords lets you place ads in front of people according to what they search for on Google. So you can show ads only to relevant online search traffic to maximise the potential to make a sale.

Social Media Marketing – Selling Through Social Media Platforms

While you can pay on certain platforms to show your ads, you can also use various unpaid social media marketing strategies too. One strategy is to place your links in your social media profile and then find other users who are likely to want your affiliate product.

Here’s my bio on Facebook linking to one of my affiliate websites: https://escape9tofive.com

On Facebook, for example, you can do this through the use of groups. Join groups and interact with members who are within the remit of your target audience. As they find your profile to interact with you they can see your offer. A common strategy used by affiliates is to offer some kind of giveaway product (such as an ebook/video course) through their social media bio.

Once on their email list, you’ll be shown their affiliate products. Some affiliates will link directly to their affiliate products on their social media bio, if they’re not using an email list.

Summary

Affiliates use many different strategies to sell affiliate products and earn commissions based on those sales. From blogging, to video marketing and PPC (pay per click advertising).

Email marketing is one of the best strategies which affiliates use and they can build email lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. When an email is sent out to a list like this, with an affiliate link in it, even a small percentage of purchases can means affiliates have a very nice pay day!

But of course it can take some time to build a list like this. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, access course here to learn more.

How Profitable Is Affiliate Marketing?

How profitable is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model in which third parties sell other people’s products for commissions based on what they sell. So earnings reflect the amount of products affiliate marketers sell. So if an affiliate is able to sell thousands of products there’s no limit to what they could earn – simply through referring customers to products online. Affiliates can reach a global audience on the internet and therefore sell to anyone online. With the right products and services and the knowledge of how to sell, affiliates can be incredibly profitable making millions of dollars in some cases.

However, not all affiliates are profitable. Some struggle to get into profit and the learning curve for affiliate marketing is a steep one. While you’re learning how to be the middleman for products online, there’s a lot to figure out. But essentially affiliates must learn how to become profitable by understanding a method of selling which costs less than they make. Once they figure this out, and particularly when using paid ads, they can simply scale up by turning up their budget.

In affiliate marketing the affiliate essentially learns how to spend $1 and make $2. When they can do this, they increase their budget and spend $1000 to make $2000 ($1000 profit). They can spend $10,000 and make $20,000 ($10,000 profit) and so on. This is why affiliates spend thousands of dollars on advertising, because they figured out a method of doubling what they spend.

How Profitable Is Affiliate Marketing? Why So Many Struggle

However, during the course of learning, the affiliate will normally have to spend a marketing budget to find an ad campaign which is profitable. This might require them testing different adverts and trying out different audiences. Since most ad campaigns won’t be profitable, especially for a beginner who is learning the ropes, this is where many give up. In fact there’s a 95% drop out rate in affiliate marketing!

But for the 5% who carry on there can be great rewards. Especially if you are able to find a good product and crack your marketing strategy. There’s other ways of marketing affiliate products too and you don’t have to run paid ads to sell affiliate products. You can also build content. This article is an example of content marketing. Bloggers and video bloggers create content on a regular basis and sell affiliate products from their websites and/or video channels.

To generate organic traffic through content creation can take some considerable time and patience, and is less scalable than through using paid ads. But over time as your content grows, you will naturally attract traffic to your content. This can ultimately become a source of passive income if you are able to successfully monetise your website traffic with affiliate products that are suitable for your audience.

How Profitable Is Affiliate Marketing?

If you’re starting out as an affiliate you should expect to work consistently for some time before you start generating consistent sales. Depending on your marketing strategy, it can take a few months or a few years to be profitable consistently. Many affiliates drop out and it is the few rather than the many who become millionaires through affiliate marketing; although many people are able to make a living through affiliate marketing once they figure out how to make sales.

Your choice of product and marketing method will have a considerable bearing on how well you can do. With a cheap item from Amazon, you won’t be able to generate much in terms of commission. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% on most of its items. But through using digital products you can earn between 30% and 40% typically on sales you generate. The most profitable digital products are those which pay high ticket commissions and recurring commissions.

Summary

Your success as an affiliate will depend on a number of things including your ability to learn, stay the course and be persistent in the course of difficulties and obstacles. It will also depend on the affiliate marketing business model which you use.

Ideally choose a high ticket product to promote which also offers recurring commissions. With such a business model you are more easily able to become profitable through the use of paid marketing strategies. Without using paid strategies affiliate marketing is much more difficult. You’ll need to stay persistent with creation of content and there’s huge competition. But of you choose a topic and niche which you’re passionate about, you’re much more chance of staying the course.

Access an online business mentoring program here to get started.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

Is affiliate marketing easy? While affiliate marketing allows anyone to profit from the sale of other people’s products online, it’s definitely not easy. However, it’s easy to get into affiliate marketing because you only need to join a program and promote your affiliate link. You don’t need products of your own and anyone can “have a go”. However there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing, perhaps for this reason.

Around 95% of affiliates don’t make it and quit. So if you want to be in the 5% of affiliates who make it work, you’ll need to work hard and in the right areas. Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, you only get paid when you make a sale. If this doesn’t happen, you can be doing a lot of work for nothing, especially if you quit!

Making an affiliate marketing business profitable is the biggest challenge and requires you to actively promote your affiliate product/s through an affiliate link. The easy part of being an affiliate is joining a program and setting up your link and website etc. The hard part is actually learning and implementing a strategy of marketing which brings in customers through your affiliate links.

While an easy sale is possible, long term sustainable profits are much more difficult. This is why the affiliate marketing success rate is pretty low.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy? Making It Easier

However, despite the large drop out rate within affiliate marketing, there have been huge leaps in software and technology over the last few years which has made becoming a profitable affiliate easier than it once was. Previously to have success as an affiliate you would need coding skills and to build your own websites and sales funnels from scratch. You can pretty much get an affiliate website (and sales funnels) up and running with a few clicks with certain programs.

This takes much of the hard work out of becoming an affiliate as well as much of the technical side of things. However, once you have set up a sales system you’ll need to learn a form of marketing. This is probably the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even with a ready made website and sales funnels up your sleeve, you’ll still need to promote your business some how. This is why many affiliates will dedicate most of their time to learning online marketing techniques and skills.

To make it easier to become profitable as an affiliate, choose high ticket products and subscription products which pay out recurring commissions. Choose a product you believe in and a topic which you have an interest. Use paid marketing if you can which allows you to get traffic almost immediately to your website or landing page.

Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy is probably the most important factor (besides product choice) in whether you’ll become profitable or not as an affiliate. So choosing the right one for you is pretty vital. If you’re going to become a blogger, for example, expect your journey to be much longer than if you were to use paid advertising.

It can take months or even years to build up your traffic to a substantial amount through blogging. But with paid advertising, you can see this volume of traffic instantly with a large enough budget. Paid advertising can easily be scaled up too, of course. But you don’t want to throw too much money at your affiliate business too fast. Most ad campaigns won’t work as you expect and there’s a learning curve.

The most profitable affiliates typically have been at it for years but there’s no earning cap with affiliate marketing. This makes it attractive to the masses which is another potential reason why so many drop out.

Summary

Is affiliate marketing easy? The short answer is no! While it’s easy to join a program, build a website and setup a marketing funnel, the hard part is to make sales consistently and this requires a fair amount of tenacity and patience. If you’re going to be running paid advertising, expect to spend some budget while learning.

Many ads don’t work initially and you’ll need to work at it. With content marketing (such as blogging) you could be at it for several months before things start working. With blogging though, you can ultimately make passive income from your free traffic once you’ve put in the work before hand. While it’s not as scalable as paid marketing, it’s also a viable option for affiliates to consider. But consider how long you will sustain the effort when you’re not seeing results immediately.

Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business in which you only get paid when you make sales, it also means you can make nothing for some time, before you break through. How long you can stick with it will have a say in whether or not you’ll become successful as an affiliate.

Your choice of product also has a massive factor. See also the most profitable digital products.

Freelance Affiliate Guide

So here’s my freelance affiliate guide. I’ve been an affiliate for over 10 years now. I wanted to write a guide which included the things I wish I had known when I got started. If I had read this guide 10 (or so) years ago, it would have given me a much better start in affiliate marketing.

For years I struggled with affiliate marketing. When I started I was pretty desperate and in a lot of debt. So I tried to do everything for free. This means it took much longer and I was often finding out information which was unconnected.

This often sent me on wild good chases, jumping from one strategy to another, losing momentum as I did. This is known as “shiny object syndrome”! When you’re new as an affiliate you’re bound to sign up to many email lists and find out information from lots of sources. While this can be helpful it can also be confusing. Information overload is a real thing in affiliate marketing. When you’re confused, you don’t know which path to choose. As a result you’re likely to do nothing!

Freelance Affiliate Guide

Affiliate marketing is a great business when it’s working for you. But to get to this stage requires a lot of work initially without obvious rewards. That’s why around 95% of new affiliates will quit. They simply don’t see the bigger picture.

Those who stick at it do see the bigger picture. Imagine sales coming in every single day on complete autopilot and you’re getting close to what affiliate marketing can be like. But at first it simply isn’t like this. There’s lots to learn and figure out and you don’t get paid for just figuring it out. You only get paid when you make a sale. So if you’re desperate for cash, affiliate marketing might not be right for you unless you have the patience to make it though this beginning phase while you’re learning.

I like the analogy of the Chinese bamboo tree in terms of how an affiliate business can grow. Initially, with the Chinese bamboo tree, there’s a gestation period of a few years – yes years – before the plant even breaks through the soil. But if you water it and give it the nutrients it needs to grow, once it breaks the soil it can grow 90 feet in a matter of a few weeks!

That’s not to say you won’t make a sale for years. You can make sales very quickly depending on your marketing choice. But to make sales consistently and in your sleep will take some consistent effort. This is tough when you don’t see the immediate rewards!

Freelance Affiliate Guide – Products

When I started out as an affiliate marketer I made a lot of mistakes. I choose the wrong kinds of products to promote for a start. I used Amazon and eBay myself so it seemed a natural progression as an affiliate to promote products through their affiliate programs. But they both pay only tiny commissions. So when I eventually made my first sale, it was for peanuts! What I didn’t know was that I could have promoted other products which paid much more such as:

Subscription affiliate products – which pay recurring commissions
High ticket affiliate products – pay larger than average commission $500+

Just this knowledge could have shaved years of my affiliate journey! So you’re welcome! When I started promoting high value products instead of low value ones, I started making real progress. Before I only struggled. Digital products too pay much more than physical ones. Most physical products will pay between 1% and 10% commissions whereas digital products pay 30%-40%. Here again you can save yourself a heap of time.

If the same work is involved selling any affiliate product online (which is often the case), why would you sell products which only pay tiny amounts?

Freelance Affiliate Guide – Alignment

Another important thing to mention here is the alignment you have between your affiliate products and yourself. Not only that, but it’s wise to choose products you’re actually fanatical about, if you get fanatical about anything! This is something I struggled with for years. I would spend hour upon hour building websites for products I didn’t care a hoot about. They all failed. When I found something I could get behind, everything changed because I believed in what I was doing wholeheartedly.

If you go about your affiliate business in a whimsical way, with no alignment with who you are and what you believe in, it’s a much more difficult journey. It’s also easier to quit. With affiliate marketing you can expect to do more than you think to break through and start making those nice sales. When you are uncertain, or unsure of your path, this is so much more difficult.

Find a strategy and a product you can stick to and your success is much more likely. Make sure you’re in alignment and there’s no doubt in your mind before you begin. That way, you’re going to have the necessary follow-though to make a success of it.

Freelance Affiliate Guide – Marketing Methods

Whatever your marketing method is, you need to be persistent until you make your first sale. Stick with a single method until you master it. Here’s another mistake I made on my journey! I jumped from one thing to another, never quite getting any traction with any.

It wasn’t until I found my passion for blogging that things really changed. I made the odd sale here and there. But until I chose my path and got busy in it, I was always looking for results before I was off the blocks! This of course led to procrastination and inactivity. Which led to zero sales! Focus on the activities you do every day, and make some good habits. Don’t look at your results until you have them. Keep an eye on what you’re doing every day.

Here’s a few marketing methods you can choose as an affiliate:

Blogging – takes some time so you’ll need to be patient and have a passion for your topic.
Paid marketing – is fast but you’ll need to test and measure using ad budget. If you don’t have an ad budget to learn with, this isn’t going to work. Expect to invest money while learning, before you find a method which is profitable.
Email marketing – most affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they sell their products too. This is definitely recommended. Get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Social media – many affiliates find their own marketing methods using social media platforms such as Facebook. Of course you can use paid marketing on many platforms too, and there’s a few unpaid social media marketing strategies you can use as well.

Products & Blogging

Aligning your products with your audience is key to success as a freelance affiliate marketer. With a blog, for example, you want to attract people to your website who are going to be interested in your product/s. Trying to sell a motorcycle tyre from a hotel reception isn’t going to work. The same is true from a website. Despite this, many new affiliates will try and sell something from a site which is unsuitable for that particular website.

Knowing your target audience in affiliate marketing is pretty important here. Your target audience is the small sub-section of the online marketplace who will be interested in what you have to sell. So if your most passionate topic to write about is motorcycles, you’ll need some related product on your site which is suitable for the people you will attract.

Your “customer avatar” is your perfect customer. It defines them with exacting detail and if you can get clear on this, you’ll shave years off your affiliate struggles.

You can easily attract the wrong audience with affiliate marketing and not sell any of your affiliate products. So all your work is wasted if you’re unable to sell, no matter how hard you work! Working smart is therefore the most important aspect of affiliate marketing since you’re only getting paid when you make a sale!

Summary

Ok so that’s a lot of information so here’s a quick summary of some of the most important aspects I feel I should have known sooner as an affiliate:

Affiliates only earn when they sell – it’s performance related pay. This means you can earn a potentially unlimited amount of money. But it also means you can earn nothing. It’s therefore important to work smart, not just hard.
Using high ticket and subscription products will mean you can make more for your efforts when you do make those sales. This was game changing for me!
- Choose a topic and product you can fully get behind and embrace. If you’re half hearted about your product and what you’re doing, you’re likely to quit too early. If you’re creating content you need passion for your subject.
- Learn who you are talking to – your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. Know this and you’ll save heaps of wasted time and effort
- Build an email list of subscribers – with a list you have greater control over your audience. Without one you are forever working on getting traffic – either through creating content or paying for it directly.

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