If you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate you may be wondering “is affiliate marketing easy to learn?” Affiliate marketing is definitely not easy and you should expect to take some time to learn the ropes. At first you will need to learn some kind of marketing strategy. Depending on the strategy you choose, it can take weeks or months to get traction.
For example, one of the fastest ways to get traction as an affiliate marketer is through the use of paid advertising. With a large advertising budget and some high ticket products to sell, your affiliate journey can be shorter. But there’s still a huge learning curve and this will take some serious effort.
Most people come into affiliate marketing because they’re looking for more money, so they don’t necessarily have a large budget for advertising. If that’s the case for you, you may want to look at other, less expensive advertising options, such as blogging. Blogging is very much slower than paid marketing and although you can see some great results through blogging, you should expect this to take some time and effort too.
There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means your new blog probably won’t get a huge amount of visitors easily. You’ll need to learn how to promote your blog and how to write blog posts with the search engines in mind so they get found.
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn? PPC Vs Organic Marketing
PPC (or Pay Per Click) advertising is the easiest method if you want your affiliate journey to be faster. With paid marketing you can set up an advert and get traffic to a website within hours. With content creation (e.g. blogging), it can take months before results of your efforts can be seen. This can be disheartening for beginners and many will quit. There’s only a small success rate in affiliate marketing of around 5%. This further suggests that affiliate marketing is not easy.
Even with paid advertising campaigns, you’ll need to test and measure different ads to find a winner. Once you do, paid marketing can easily be scaled up. Simply turn up your budget. With blogging this isn’t possible and it’s much less scalable. So ideally choose a marketing method which suits your personality. If you’re not incredibly patient, blogging probably isn’t the route for you!
However, paid advertising incurs more costs and you’ll need a good product to make a profit while running paid ads. Expect to run ads which don’t work while you find your feet. Again, this can be tough and you likely won’t hit a winner on your first outing.
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn?
The up side is that if you are a patient person and determined to succeed with affiliate marketing, there can be great rewards. With content marketing, you can earn money passively from content you created previously. Paid advertising can give you a globally scalable business quite quickly once you’ve put in the groundwork.
But you should expect to put in this work if you’re going to be anywhere near successful as an affiliate. With a 95% drop out rate, you can see that it’s not or everyone and it’c certainly not as easy as some make out.
The people making it out to be easy are usually those who are also promoting a program! So it’s buyer beware! Programs only offer education (and often products to sell too). They don’t guarantee you anything in terms of earnings. Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model which means you only get paid when you make those sales. In the early months as an affiliate this can be hard, because you can put in a lot of work for what seems like nothing in return. But think of this as your foundations and you will have more chance of success.
Summary
Affiliate marketing definitely isn’t easy and you should expect to put in several months of work before you have a chance of earning from it, as a minimum. You may of course get lucky and make an easy sale, or even more! But perpetuating this trend is much harder than landing a “one off” sale, for which you did little work.
Affiliate marketing is a globally scalable business model which can produce some great rewards. If you treat it seriously as a real business, you can earn some serious money from it. Treat it like a part time hobby and you’ll earn a hobby income from it!
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