Organic marketing vs inorganic marketing, or paid marketing; which is best? The best thing about organic marketing is that it can attract free traffic, while the best thing about paid marketing is that it’s super fast. Both organic and inorganic marketing have their benefits and drawbacks and you might choose a particular strategy based on your personal needs and circumstances.
If you lack time, paid marketing is fast and scalable. Once you have a paid marketing strategy which consistently produces a profit, you’ve got it made! Simply scale up by adding more to your marketing budget and make more sales. This is the position every affiliate marketer wants to get into: where they pay $10 on advertising and make $20! Once you’re in a profitable equation such as this, you can scale up easily, and spending $10,000 on this advertising campaign should produce $20,000 worth of sales (assuming the equation holds).
But on the flip side of this coin, you can spend thousands just getting to this point. Many affiliates quit because they can’t find a profitable campaign with which to scale up. So if you spend all this cash on marketing and then quit, you’ve lost a lot. But if you learn from each campaign and stick with it, eventually you should get to this point. At this point you’ve effectively built a money tree! Just pump money in and get profit out! It’s the dream of many entrepreneurs.
Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing
But if you don’t have a large budget and money is a concern, you can go another route when building an online business or selling affiliate products. You can build content. Content creation is the organic method of generating sales with an business. This blog, for example, is an organic method of generating traffic. Organic marketing requires you to build content and then promote it. Over time, as you make a habit out of the building and promotion of your content, you should start to see people coming to your website (for free).
The upside to this is that older content can work for you as much as newer content can. This creates a compounding effect of generating traffic from multiple sources: social media, search engines, back links, blog commenting, forums and so on. As you continue posting highly useful and relevant content (relevant to your target audience), you start to see more and more visitors coming to view your content.
This doesn’t happen straight away of course and many affiliate will quit because they don’t see the longer term picture here. Results don’t show immediately like with paid marketing. You can’t control the flow of traffic quite as easily as with paid traffic. Some days there’s less traffic and other days there’s more.
Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing: Which Is Best?
Many online business owners will recommend to build up organically first, and only pay for marketing when you’re making money from your business. This can be good advice but it also depends on your business model. With high ticket affiliate marketing, (multiple income products including high ticket items and recurring income items), it’s easier to use paid marketing from the get-go. You have a greater chance to earn back your marketing budget more easily (and make profit). If you’re selling low valued products, this can be more tricky because you have less margin to play with when you sell something.
It also depends on your particular circumstances. If you’re working in a highly paid job, but have little time for content creation, paid marketing is better. If you have the time and are creative it can be better and more enjoyable to create content instead of paying for marketing. You can of course do both. Use organic marketing and a little paid marketing once you start generating sales. If you reinvest your profits back into your marketing budget, you get the best of both worlds; organic sales and a potentially scalable business through paid advertising too!
If you’re persistent enough to maintain a habit of content creation, it can ultimately give you free traffic and sales. You’ll also save a heap of costs not running paid advertising, so sales become more profitable. However, organic marketing can take months or years to come to fruition. Paid ads work straight away.
Summary
There’s good points and bad points of both organic and inorganic marketing (paid marketing). Paid marketing is fast and you can see immediately (well, almost immediately) whether a campaign is working for you or not. This comes with the downside that you’ll need to test your advertising before you find a profitable one. This can get costly too and many marketers quit even after spending a huge amount in marketing costs. Once you find a profitable campaign though you can add more budget and have a scalable and profitable business pretty pronto!
Organic marketing is slower and less scalable than paid marketing. But with organic marketing you can ultimately make sales for free once you have enough content working for you. Building content takes time and effort and there’s no guarantee of getting a ranking on Google for it either (in the organic search results). There’s huge competition for organic content and so it can often take months or years before your efforts are rewarded by free traffic and sales in enough quantities to build a profitable business from it.
The upside to organic marketing is that once you’ve put the work in, your content is doing the work for you, generating traffic, leads and sales. That’s a great position to be in if you have the capacity to put the work in upfront with often nothing much to see in terms of results in the early days (weeks, or months)!