There’s several drawbacks to affiliate marketing despite it having several advantages. Affiliate marketing can give you independent income, allow you to travel and work from anywhere. It can free you from a job, a boss and a commute. We’re all pretty familiar with the sales pitch of affiliate marketing – it’s great and can give you a huge amount of freedom! But what are the drawbacks of becoming an affiliate? What about the downsides?
From a business point of view and having an affiliate program of your own, there’s fewer downsides. Businesses use affiliates as a form of cheap advertising. When an affiliate makes a sale, the business pays them a commission. They only pay when a sale is made, so the only real downside from a business owner’s point of view is recruiting good affiliates who can help drive the business/product.
The affiliates themselves take all the risk, though. So the downside from their point of view is risk: risk of time spent or capital or both. Both without the assurance that you’ll even sell anything! Many affiliates will quit and there’s only a small percentage of affiliates who actually go on to make it their full time living. See affiliate marketing success rate.
Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing – Risk
So that’s a pretty big drawback. You can spend heaps of time and money on learning and studying affiliate marketing. And you can spend a heap of cash promoting affiliate products, too. Nothing is guaranteed after all this investment. You could just end up out of pocket. All this time and money could have been spent elsewhere and you will have saved yourself a whole heap of trouble!
Affiliates are entrepreneurial and take on board this rick because they believe in themselves and want something more than the standard nine to five employment can give them. Affiliate marketing offers the opportunity to become self employed and earn an independent income from the internet. This is an attractive proposition for many, but most simply won’t make it work for them. In fact 95% of newbie affiliates will drop out and only 5% go on to make affiliate marketing their source of income.
The risk involved and the commitment needed to become successful as an affiliate are huge. Without capital to invest you put yourself at a much greater disadvantage too. If you go the cheap route to making money as an affiliate, it will take much more time and effort to make an impact because you’re relying on cheaper and free advertising methods such as blogging and social media.
Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing – Competition, Time, Money
There’s huge competition in the affiliate marketing space too. If you choose a competitive niche to build a blog in, for example, you could have set yourself up for failure. It can take years before you get traction from a blog in a competitive niche. Even in a less competitive niche, it will take a lot of commitment to make an affiliate marketing website profitable.
With paid marketing you can get traction much more quickly. But you’ll need a high ticket business model to compete with the “big boys” who are spending thousands every day on YouTube and Facebook. This isn’t cheap and then you’ll also need to spend money on your advertising.
Most of an advertising budget will disappear without trace before you get traction too. 80% of adverts simply won’t work so you’ll need to spend some time testing and measuring campaigns to see which ones are profitable and which ones don’t work! This is all time and money and if either is in short supply it can all be very frustrating!
Confusion
When you start out as an affiliate, you’re bound to make many mistakes. It’s an exciting prospect earning money from the internet and your first sale is a good milestone to base your enthusiasm around. But when this doesn’t happen right away, this can get frustrating. Disappointment doesn’t generally lead to more productive activity. In reality it can lead to disillusionment and frustration, which only fuels the fire for more procrastination.
This means you become less effective the more hurdles you bump up against. Affiliates need to be self motivated and self reliant. It’s tough getting 1 to 1 affiliate coaching, and help and support, especially if you’re on a budget. Initial passion and motivation can quickly turn into disappointment and frustration. You need to learn strategies to keep fuelling your desire to succeed with affiliate marketing.
Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing – Doubt & Fear
Affiliate marketing can provide a passive income, make no mistake. But this will be after having spent considerable time and effort in building your online business. If you’re juggling family and a full time job, you need to make time for your affiliate business. If you don’t commit, your chances of success are considerably lessened. You can of course use paid marketing rather than content marketing, which will considerably speed up the process. But again this is a commitment.
Without positive results in your affiliate endeavours though, you’re basing your affiliate assumptions on the advice of others – often those who are benefitting from your participation! When results aren’t forthcoming, it can be easy to become disillusioned. How can you promote and sell something you don’t believe in yourself? This is a catch 22 situation! If you’re sceptical this only hinders your progress. Your doubts and fears can eventually cause you to give up entirely on your affiliate business.
Summary
There’s many drawbacks of affiliate marketing, as you can see. But it pays to look to the positive if you’re looking for a genuine way to earn an independent income through the internet. Affiliate marketing can be a great source of income – either full time or part time. Depending on your particular situation and available time and budget, it may or may not be the answer. Like any self employed venture, not everyone will be successful. The success rate of affiliate marketing is around 5%. See also advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing.
If you’re serious about learning affiliate marketing, checkout a free video series here to learn more.