How legit is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is as legitimate as any other business. The affiliate model works through tracking back affiliate links to the third party referrers. When a sale is made, the referring affiliate gets credit for it and is paid a portion of the sale value. This makes affiliate marketing an attractive proposition; you don’t need any products of your own to make money from it.

Affiliate marketing isn’t as easy as some make out however. Some marketers will over state how easy it can be to earn money online in order to sell their course. To earn from affiliate marketing takes some considerable effort. (See affiliate marketing failure rate). There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too and not all affiliates use the same strategy. Some use paid marketing, and others create content through blogging or uploading videos to YouTube.

Depending on your marketing strategy and understanding of affiliate marketing, it can take several months or years to make it pay a consistent amount. In the beginning particularly, affiliate income will be variable and inconsistent, particularly if you’re using an organic marketing strategy such as blogging. But over time it can grow into a more substantial amount if you stick at it long enough.

How Legit Is Affiliate Marketing – Training

There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join if you decide to become an affiliate. But product promotion is the key element if you want to make any money out of it. How you choose to promote your affiliate link will determine how successful you are. To become successful takes more than most people think when they start. It can take years to make a consistent income from it.

Training is therefore an important part of affiliate marketing and there’s plenty of training courses which offer to help you in this regard. A truly legitimate course won’t claim over the top results for you because this is totally unrealistic. Any course which does claim that you can make “fast and easy money” is lying to you! So this is an important thing to realise. Affiliate marketing isn’t an easy thing to learn and become successful at.

Like any business it can take years to succeed and most businesses will fail in their first 5 years. It is no different with affiliate marketing and just because it offers convenient flexible hours doesn’t mean it will pay out, particularly if you are doing the wrong things.

How Legit Is Affiliate Marketing – Performance Related Pay

Affiliate marketing offers performance related pay and while this means you can earn a potentially uncapped income, the opposite it also true – you can earn nothing! All beginners will start at this point and unless they do the right things in their business, it can be easy to quit having seen no results. Even after several months of work this can still be the case if your results bring about no sales.

This can be demoralising as a beginner and many drop out at this stage. So you’ll need a big enough reason to become successful because there’s plenty of hurdles to jump in order to make sales consistently.

The affiliates who break through and eventually make a career out of it have often been at it for several years. They have learned some techniques which work and do them consistently.

Affiliate Strategies & Products

You can also speed up your affiliate marketing progress by using certain products and strategies which work faster. Subscription affiliate programs, for example, pay out recurring income from each sale you make. High ticket affiliate marketing offers the affiliate the chance to make larger commissions for often the same work as a smaller one would take.

Paid marketing offers a faster way to generate traction than organic marketing does too. See PPC vs organic marketing. Using a high ticket sales funnel can be a better way to get traction more quickly using paid marketing, because it offers the chance of higher commissions and recurring commissions.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which third party referrals are rewarded with commissions based on sales. However, affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means if you don’t make sales, you don’t earn anything. Many beginner affiliates will struggle making money with the business model and drop out.

To give yourself a good chance at succeeding with affiliate marketing it’s worth investing in your training on an ongoing basis, and treating it seriously as you would any other business. Long term affiliates have often overcome many of the difficulties which beginners will see as insurmountable when they quit.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing here.