There’s a few pros and cons of affiliate marketing. If you’re a business owner, affiliates can provide you a good cheap way to market your business/product. Plus you don’t pay them until they have successfully referred a customer. This means for a business, affiliates offer a very cost effective way of advertising.
The affiliate on the other hand takes all the risk! Affiliates are third party referrers who only get paid for referring online products and services. But affiliate marketing has it’s up sides too. If you an become successful as an affiliate, your online activities can replace an existing income. This can give you a huge amount of freedom, especially if your marketing is scalable.
If you’re a brand new affiliate, or thinking of becoming one, there’s a few things to consider before taking the decision to sell other people’s products and services online for an income.
Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing – Cons: Trust & Belief
There’s a few downsides to affiliate marketing if you’re thinking about being an affiliate. Affiliate marketing can be great, but it can also suck! In the beginning, you start out with a lot of enthusiasm, which can quickly turn to disappointment. This is because making sales online is a skill and as such it requires a lot of work initially to acquire that skill. A lot of newbie affiliates will quit when nothing seems to be happening. This is where you should keep going; when others quit! See also affiliate marketing success rate.
In the beginning phase of being an affiliate, you won’t know exactly what to do. You need to get some education and follow some training or a course. You can access one on this website by signing up to the free video series. Obviously courses cost money and this is how many affiliates earn their income; selling courses to other would-be affiliates!
If you’re sceptical this can act as a barrier to your building an affiliate business because of lack of trust in the process (or lack of money). When you don’t immediately start selling things, it can fuel this doubt, which leads only to procrastination and more scepticism!
If you are fuelled with passion and belief and you get the right help, it can get you beyond this beginners phase to your first sale! Once you have proved to yourself that you can make a sale online, you have achieved something really worthwhile and it can help you overcome the fear and doubt which can hold you back.
Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing: Pros
The pros of affiliate marketing are really worth paying attention to. Affiliate marketing is a business model which can give you a huge amount of freedom. Once you have made your first sale, you will have overcome two really significant mental hurdles of doubt and scepticism. These hurdles will often keep many would-be affiliates from taking the right actions which could completely change their lives.
Although affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, this really is a double edged sword. While on one hand this means if you don’t sell anything you don’t make any money, on the other hand there’s no limit to the number of products you can sell. You can also sell products in your sleep on complete autopilot!
In a job, you’re tied to trading time for money. But with affiliate marketing you can escape this trap. Once you have learned how to sell a single product online, you can sell many more, and in greater numbers. Affiliate marketing can give you time and geographical freedom, freedom from a job or a boss and freedom from a commute.
Competition & Slower Methods
The downside to all of these benefits is that there’s thousands of other people doing affiliate marketing. This means there’s plenty of competition. In the most lucrative niches this is all the more true. So if you decide to start blogging on a particular topic, for example, it can take years to gain traction and start making an income which is capable of replacing your salary.
The cheaper methods of doing affiliate marketing are often much more time consuming than the more costly paid advertising. So if you don’t have much money to invest, you’ll need to invest a lot of time to make affiliate marketing work. See also PPC vs organic marketing.
Content creation is one method of marketing affiliate products but there are many other ways. With content creation, you create video or written content and upload it to YouTube or a blog, for example. Because of the vastness of the internet, and the many other competing affiliates, you’ll face stiff competition and it can be difficult to get traffic to your content unless you have been at it a while. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
It Can Be Fast
But saying all that, there’s faster ways to do affiliate marketing. The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is through using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs. Using both these methods in unison can help you build a profitable affiliate business much more quickly.
This is all the more true if you can use paid marketing methods which are also much more scalable than blogging, for instance. One of the pros of affiliate marketing is that you can build an affiliate business very quickly if you can invest in your marketing and in a high ticket product range.
A product range can take the heavy lifting out of an affiliate business because it offers a means to sell larger value products to a scalable number of people. With most affiliate products you only earn once for each sale. With a product range you can sell an individual product and benefit from subscriptions and recurring income from up-sells which are bought later on. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.
Summary
There’s pros and cons of affiliate marketing and depending on how you approach it, your journey will be different. With paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel, you can get your business going very quickly. Cheaper routes to success involve building content and advertising for free, but this route is much more time consuming and much slower.
Many affiliate quit because they don’t get the traction they need to keep going. Getting over the initial hurdles of self belief and time management are key to success. Once you’ve made your first sale online, consider it a massive achievement, because it is! Many fall before they even reach this point.
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