How difficult is affiliate marketing, and is it worth “a go”? Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which affiliates recommend products and services online. If someone clicks an affiliate’s link, and goes on to purchase something, the affiliate makes a commission.
There’s various ways of making money through affiliate marketing, and each one has a different level of difficulty. Some affiliates are bloggers, others use paid marketing strategies. Some affiliates will create and upload videos to YouTube; others will use different social media platforms to generate interest in their products and services.
You could say that everyone’s journey with affiliate marketing will be different. Some will find they take to it easily, while others will struggle for years, or quit in a few weeks without having sold anything. Affiliate marketing, like any business requires consistent effort. Over time, if you stick at it, it gets easier when you know what actions to take to get the required effect.
How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing?
But before you reach this stage, affiliates will have often have failed many times. Top affiliates didn’t reach their levels of success overnight. They go through months or years of learning and applying their strategies before they broke though and made it their full time living.
But once you find a strategy which consistently produces sale after sale, you know you can simply repeat those steps and get more of the same. Before this stage it can be very difficult and frustrating being an affiliate. Beginner affiliates will often drop out way before they should. Claims that affiliate marketing is “easy money” and the low barriers to entry does mean that affiliate marketing is very open for anyone to “give it a go”. But this also means there’s a huge drop out rate too.
For those who stick at it there are huge rewards; not just working from anywhere and geographical freedom, but financial freedom too. Affiliate marketing is a road to escape the mundane life, to escape the 9 to 5!
How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing – The Hard Way
There are definitely easy and hard ways to do affiliate marketing. As a beginner affiliate, I made many mistakes. Before I knew what I was doing, I spent a lot of time building websites and wasting time creating content. I built many websites which got no traffic. No knowing which products to use, I just joined affiliate programs which I knew about. But many of them only paid very little in the way of commissions. So I spent a lot of time working on content creation without much in the way of reward.
My first online sale came from a review article I write on a free blogging site (Hubpages.com). It was an “one off” though, and after that I didn’t make any further sales for some time. Doing it all for free, not getting the training and promoting low value products which paid even lower commissions were all mistakes which cost me a huge amount of time. I made the odd sale here and there, but was never able to replace an existing income from all the effort.
The hard way to do affiliate marketing is to go it alone. Don’t pay for training and do everything for free. Doing affiliate marketing on a shoe string can be done, but it’s so much more difficult. At the very least you should invest in your education and purchase an email autoresponder and get your own website. It will take ten times as long to make a realistic income from affiliate marketing if you don’t get help, do it all alone, and do it all for free.
The Easier Way
There’s no easy path in affiliate marketing but there’s most definitely an easier path. If you don’t have the ability to invest in your education, purchase training and get help, it will be considerably more difficult.
The easier path to affiliate marketing is to invest in yourself. Would a doctor operate on a patient without training? Would a pilot expect to be able to land a commercial aircraft without hundreds of hours in an aeroplane? But unfortunately many people start out with the attitude that they can learn to be an affiliate all by themselves, and pay dearly for it! I wasted years trying to do exactly that!
Training can help you set your trajectory in affiliate marketing. But it’s also worth investing in a product range. With a product range, you can earn much more than with low value products you’d find on Amazon; for what amounts to a similar or the same amount of work. Would you rather work for months and earn $50 a week, or $500 a day?
With a product range, and high ticket and recurring commission products, you can also afford to use paid marketing much more easily. With low value products, you’re stuck with cheap or free marketing strategies like blogging, which can take months or years before they come to fruition. See “How long does it take to make money blogging?“.
With paid marketing, it’s still difficult because you have no experience or data to base your marketing decisions on. This is similar with any form of marketing. Once you develop some experience, you’re in a far better position to know what strategies and actions have the biggest impact on your business. But paid marketing is far quicker and very scalable. Whereas content marketing is very slow and not so scalable. So it’s harder to become successful with content marketing and much slower.
Pareto’s Principle
The Pareto principle states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of the causes. Affiliates need to be aware of this principle because most of their activities, at least in the beginning, will produce nothing in terms of results. Only by finding the 20% of causes which gives them the sales, will they know how to grow and scale their businesses. Before this happens, there can be a lot of struggle with affiliates trying to make sales, but without any results or knowledge to base their strategies on.
Over time, as affiliates start generating results in their businesses, they will get more confidence and certain about the steps they should take. But without this knowledge it’s easy to become despondent, procrastinate and dawdle! No activity equals no results though. But without motivation, inspiration and certainty, it’s difficult to take the necessary steps towards building a business online – especially if your belief in it is very low.
Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Many wonder whether affiliate marketing actually works, and some even believe affiliate marketing does not work. Choose your beliefs carefully if you want to become a successful affiliate! Affiliate marketing can have some magical results and give you time and financial freedom, not to mention geographical freedom too. But you have to put a lot into it before you get a lot out. Like with any business you need customers. To get customers you need to learn how to market your products and services.
This does take time and you need to be in for the long term to make affiliate marketing work for you. With recurring income products, and through building a list of subscribers, your work compounds over time. Affiliates can build six and seven figure businesses over time, but the main difficulty in affiliate marketing is overcoming your own preconceptions and learning to trust the process. For some this will be easy. But for others this is the hardest part of becoming an affiliate.
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and get started, you can access a free webinar by clicking on the image below.
