With affiliate marketing you can do two things for your marketing; either content creation or paid marketing. Many affiliates advocate focusing on organic marketing before you use any paid marketing at all to generate traffic. But with a good affiliate business system, paid marketing can be more effective because of the high ticket products and subscription products within the sales funnel. It can mean you can have a profitable business up and running relatively quickly through the use of paid marketing.
By testing advertising campaigns to the point of finding a winning advert, you can spend only a little on your advertising budget until you find a winner (then scale up). Once you’re breaking even on your ad budget, making the spend back on the first product sale (within a range), you’re on to a winner! Now you can generate recurring income from the subscription product, and benefit from profit from any later purchases (e.g. high ticket products purchased later in the funnel).
Your marketing is effectively free once you break even on the “entry” level product. But what if you don’t have such a great sales funnel with a range of high ticket items and subscription items in it? What then?
Content Creation Versus Paid Marketing
What if you don’t have a huge marketing budget and/or a high ticket sales funnel? If you’re selling low value affiliate products, you can’t afford to be testing out advertising when you can only recoup a little on your product range. Short of finding more lucrative affiliate products, your alternative is to create content and drive traffic organically.
To drive traffic organically you’ll need to create a lot of content and promote it as much as possible. This requires quite a lot of work. Blogging, for example, can be done and it can take months or even years to generate the kind of traffic that leads to a lucrative business. Or you can create a video channel on YouTube or build organic visitors through Facebook or Instagram, for example too.
The benefit of content creation is that your content can last a lifetime and it can bring in customers for years to come. Once there’s enough content you’ve created, and if you’ve done a good job in promotion, that content compounds to generate more and more traffic over time.
The downside if this is that it isn’t immediately scalable. But the upside is that it creates passive trickles of traffic which continue to grow the more content you create.
Content Creation Versus Paid Marketing
You can of course do a combination of both content creation and paid marketing. Ideally start by creating content and once you start generating revenue, use some of that revenue to grow your business using paid marketing. While paid marketing is fast and scalable, it’s also expensive. Also you can get through a lot of budget without necessarily making any sales. This isn’t great if you don’t have that more to lose! So it can be wise to start out building content.
Content creation does work over time and although it can take a lot of content to start seeing traction with affiliate marketing, it compounds and speeds up over time. You can’t directly scale up your content as with paid marketing, but it’s free to create. So if you have the time and inclination to create content, that could be the best way to go, especially if you don’t have a massive marketing budget and a high ticket sales funnel.
Blogging vs. Ads
I’m a big fan of blogging and have blogged for years. It’s a nice way to spend time and generate content for an affiliate business. It’s also super cheap to do and less risky financially and it’s only your time you’re spending, not your money!
However, if you don’t have the time to blog, and time is a factor, it can be of benefit to use some paid advertising if you want things to happen more quickly. If so, it’s worth having some large value products in your sales system and some recurring commission products. Paid marketing can be costly and it’s worth getting help and support if you intend on going this route.
So, which is best? Paid marketing or organic marketing? I would say that if you’re working a full time job and don’t have much time, use paid advertising for your affiliate business. But if you do have time, consider building up your business more slowly using content. Find something you enjoy doing and work on it consistently.
