How long does it take to learn affiliate marketing? This is difficult to answer because everyone learns at different rates and not every affiliate course is the same. If you dedicate some time to affiliate marketing, you can learn much more quickly than if you can only spare a few hours a week.
Most affiliates will spend a certain length of time in “learning phase” and then they will try out some tactics. Once you have some strategies to implement, it can take weeks, months or years before those tactics bring in results. This depends on the particular tactics you use and your marketing budget.
For example, if you’re a blogger, and you decide to create written content on a website, it can take several months before your blogging generates traction for your affiliate marketing endeavours. With paid marketing, this can be done much more quickly.
In general you should expect to spend several weeks or months learning affiliate marketing before you can make any headway in an affiliate business. Although much of your learning will be through trial and error.
How Long Does It Take To Learn Affiliate Marketing? Your Marketing Strategy
Depending on your marketing tactic and the amount of time you have available to work on an affiliate business, it can take several weeks or several months before you even make your first sale. This is after the initial learning phase. Once you have made an affiliate sale, consider this a great achievement.
Once you start making sales, you can zone in on the activities which created that sale. Before this happens, it can be easy to spend time on a variety of tasks, many of which don’t produce your best outcome – affiliate sales. But once you get some “feedback” from your affiliate business, in the form of a sale, you know what works. This is great for your belief and for your focus.
Before this happens affiliate marketing can be frustrating for many beginners which explains the large drop out rate. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
While you’re learning affiliate marketing you won’t be creating content or making sales. But this time is well worth the investment because the better you understand affiliate marketing, and the many different business models of affiliate marketing, the more likely you are to succeed in the long run.
While learning affiliate marketing you’ll be digesting video material and attending webinars and seminars. You can get started here with step by step training.
This can take some time: weeks or months depending on the rate at which you can watch, read and digest the material. The real learning starts when you apply what you have learned and begin your own marketing strategy.
How Long Does It Take To Learn Affiliate Marketing – My Journey
With my own personal journey in affiliate marketing it has taken several years before I have made a consistent income from affiliate marketing. I did however have one or two short lived successes early on, but these were sporadic because of the marketing strategy I was using: mostly blogging.
Once I learned to use email marketing and subscription affiliate products, my business took a giant leap forwards quite quickly. So it doesn’t have to take you as long if you take the right steps from the start. With subscription products you can earn ongoing commissions for referrals, rather than one off commissions. So your work can quickly produce a regular income if you use these.
One of the problems with affiliate marketing is that there’s much conflicting information over how to do it and which course to take. Because there’s so many affiliates promoting their course, it can be easy to jump from one strategy to another, without really getting anywhere. So it’s important to expect a longer journey with affiliate marketing and you need to put in some time to generate results (or feedback) for yourself.
Expect to be working on your affiliate business for several months at least before you can expect any financial return.
Months Or Years?
Affiliate marketing can be profitable quite quickly with the right strategy and products. However, most affiliates will take longer than a few months to make it work for them. There are of course exceptions and everyone is different. In the community I belong to I know a couple of people who replaced their job income inside a year. But that’s not typical.
Affiliate marketing is a performance based business so if you don’t make sales you don’t earn any commissions. On the other hand, there’s no limit to the amount of products you can sell, since it’s a global business and you can sell to anyone around the planet. So once you have learned to sell a product, you can repeat that success.
As a beginner it’s worth holding on to this idea when times are tough and you don’t have any results to draw confidence from yet. Remember the bigger picture that ultimately affiliate marketing can replace your current income. However it won’t happen overnight. You need to put in some serious effort and hard work before you can reap the rewards in affiliate marketing.
See also how long does affiliate marketing take and how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.
Summary
It can take several weeks to get to grips with affiliate marketing. Then it can take several weeks or months to develop a marketing strategy which you can get good at. Once you start making sales, you can learn from your mistakes and your wins too.
Depending on your marketing strategy it can take weeks or months to generate traction. With paid marketing you can do it faster with a large enough budget. Cheaper strategies like blogging will take much longer.
Ultimately affiliate marketing is a constant process of learning and development. Most affiliates will struggle initially but over time if you stick at it you can make a passive income from your efforts. Access a step by step training course here to get started.