Does affiliate marketing really work? Or is it just some kind of scam? Affiliate marketing is a legitimate online business model in which sales can be referred by third parties. When someone promotes a product through their affiliate link, and makes a sale, they earn a commission based on this sale. Affiliate marketing does really work, yes. But it doesn’t work for everyone. Many people start affiliate marketing with hopes of replacing their income through online sales, but many of them quit. In fact, there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing at around 95%. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
Why is this then when affiliate marketing is a legit way to earn money online? There’s a few reasons why so many people don’t get the success they desire when it comes to affiliate marketing.
Why Affiliates Fail
Here’s a few of the main reasons:
- There’s a very low bar to start affiliate marketing which means almost anyone can “give it a go”. When the market is so flooded, it means more competition but also a large drop out rate of those expecting an easy ride. You only need a laptop and internet connection to start promoting other people’s products online.
- People have high expectations but aren’t prepared (or don’t expect) to work hard for their success. So many people buy into the expectation of easy money with affiliate marketing, which isn’t the case. Affiliate marketing is a business and like any business it requires work to succeed.
- Most people aren’t prepared for business – coming from an employee background can easily work against you when you’re in business. Trading time for money in a “per hour” employment is very different from entirely performance based pay. When you don’t make sales, you don’t earn any commissions. In the early stages this can lead to disappointment and frustration; especially if your belief is already very low.
Does Affiliate Marketing REALLY Work? Yes – But It Ain’t Easy!
Affiliate marketing can be difficult. If you’re not prepared for struggle, it’s probably not for you. Most affiliates will struggle at least in the beginning. It can take months or even years to get an affiliate business into profit. Depending on how you go about building an internet business, it can cost a lot or take up a lot of your time.
The main two strategies for selling other people’s products online are:
- Paid marketing – using a paid marketing platform is the fastest and most scalable strategy to sell other people’s products online
- Organic/free marketing strategies – typically takes much longer and is less scalable than the paid methods.
Organic marketing methods such as blogging takes much longer because you’ll need to create a lot of content before it starts working for you. With paid marketing, you can start a campaign and have it running within an hour! This doesn’t mean your advertising strategy will be successful though. Many campaigns run by affiliates will fail to produce a profit on their first try. But when a campaign does make profit, it’s very easy to replicate this success and of course scale up to a global audience.
Whether running paid marketing or building content as an affiliate, it all takes time. If you’re desperate to earn immediately from affiliate marketing, you’re under huge pressure from the get-go! This is hardly likely to help!
Does Affiliate Marketing REALLY Work? The Negative Feedback Loop
As a beginner in affiliate marketing it can be tempting to jump from one course to another, looking for a quick way to make “it” work! This is an easy “rookie” mistake to make! It’s also known as “shiny object syndrome” and this can eat into both your time and your belief about whether affiliate marketing can work for you.
You can also spend heaps of time on unproductive activities as a beginner, such as polishing your website to make it look fantastic; even if you have zero traffic!
Months can go by without actually driving your business forwards if you fall into either one of these traps. See also 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.
All this time doesn’t equal income with affiliate marketing. Income only comes to affiliates when they actually generate sales. This can be months into your affiliate marketing journey.
This is a tough pill to swallow if you expected your shiny new course to give you instant income! Of course it won’t unless you take the right actions and take them consistently. But as a newbie, you don’t fully trust the path you’re being shown, so you make mistakes, reinvent the wheel and look for a quick and easier path!
Your lack of results testifies to your doubts and fears that affiliate marketing does not work! But in reality you just haven’t taken the right steps, or enough of them for long enough.
Does Affiliate Marketing REALLY Work? The Positive Feedback Loop
If you are able to stick at affiliate marketing for long enough to make an online sale (most people won’t), congratulations because you’ve started the positive feedback loop. You need to learn to celebrate small wins in order to begin the process of the positive feedback loop. Once this phase begins, you can see that affiliate marketing does in fact work. You have proof for yourself that you can earn from it, even if it’s only a small commission you have made.
You can even start this process before you make a sale by looking for positive outcomes from things you have done. A hit (visitor) on your website, a new subscriber on your email list, or having created your first website are all small wins you can celebrate.
Top affiliates can earn large incomes from their online businesses because they started with the small things they could do immediately in the moment. They just kept on doing them for longer than those who dropped out!
To start the positive feedback loop as an affiliate you only need to keep moving forwards slowly at your own pace. Notice (and celebrate) the small wins. Keep going and don’t quit!
Chinese Bamboo Tree
I often mention the Chinese Bamboo tree in my posts because it makes the perfect analogy with affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo tree takes a lot of nurturing. In fact it gestates underground for four to five years before it even breaks the surface of the soil! But once it does, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.
Affiliate marketing is much like this, although it may not take as long as 5 years, depending on how you go about it! It can grow very quickly once you have put in the ground work. Ultimately an affiliate business can give you a passive income too.
To get past the nurturing phase of your affiliate business takes a lot of belief. This belief is hard to come by if you’re in a hurry, especially if you have nothing to show for your efforts. Reinforcing your belief as an affiliate is therefore one of the most important skills to master on the affiliate journey. Often we aren’t surrounded by other online business people but well meaning friends and relatives who sow the seeds of fear rather than the seeds of belief/success!
Summary
Does affiliate marketing really work? Yes affiliate marketing does work for some, although there’s a huge drop out rate in this industry. Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products and services online in exchange for commissions based on their sales. As more people enter into the affiliate marketing space, it becomes more difficult to compete with other affiliates for attention.
Whether you become a blogger, use paid marketing, email marketing or video marketing, if you’re an affiliate you’re putting yourself in between the customer and the products which is being sold. This can be very competitive and not everyone succeeds with it.
Those who do succeed are able to build an independent income from anywhere in the world. If you can see this prize for yourself and keep going for long enough, you’re far more likely to succeed as an affiliate.