What is the affiliate marketing reality? The truth about affiliate marketing is often hidden by marketers intending to sell you their courses! If you believe it’s easy to make money as an affiliate, you’re more likely to purchase a course or buy into a program. In reality affiliate marketing is a tough nut to crack and it’s not for everyone.
Yes, you can make money as an affiliate, but this can take months or years of work. Not everyone can work alone under their own steam. With affiliate marketing you’ll need a great deal of self motivation to succeed. Many affiliates quit before they even make a sale. The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high at around 95%. This means of all the people attempting it, only 5% actually succeed and make an income from it.
Affiliate Marketing Reality
But it’s not all bad. Part of the reason why so many quit at affiliate marketing is that there’s such a low barrier to entry. Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote a product online through their unique affiliate link. That doesn’t make them successful affiliates however.
To become successful, you need to stay the course and actually start making sales. Making your first sale online is a monumental moment and it should be celebrated! You need to celebrate small wins. But before this happens there’s a lot of time and effort which goes in. Most won’t make it through this long, arduous road which offers no guarantees.
Many newbie affiliates simply quit when they put some time in and get nothing in return. But you need to keep putting in the work in order to break through and start earning revenue. Depending on the direction you take in your marketing, and the affiliate marketing business model you use, this can take months or years.
Blogging, for example is a very slow marketing strategy. As a beginner I thought I could throw up a website and instantly earn from it without paying for marketing. Nothing happened for a very long time! Only when I understood the reality of affiliate marketing did I change my behaviour and start working at the right activities. Before that I expected far too much for very little input. I suspect many new affiliates are the same.
Affiliate Marketing Reality – Financial Freedom
Affiliate marketing is a path to financial freedom. Of that there’s no doubt. Many long term affiliates have set themselves free of the need for employment. This is one of the motivations for newbies to get involved in affiliate marketing. But there’s an investment involved on both time and money.
Without a financial investment in your affiliate marketing business, you’ll have to work much harder using free traffic generation strategies. These types of strategies can take much longer than through using paid marketing. Without an email list it’s much more difficult selling affiliate products too, although you can get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
The best thing you can invest in as an affiliate is your education. When you understand the various affiliate marketing business models, you’ll want to use subscription affiliate programs which pay you recurring commissions. High ticket affiliate marketing products can pay you much more than most other products too. With a high ticket sales funnel, you can more easily afford paid marketing and scale up your business more quickly.
Without investing in a high ticket business model, you’re stuck with lower paying affiliate products which limit you to cheaper and free marketing strategies.
Automation
The automation which goes hand in hand with affiliate marketing can allow affiliates to a earn passive income long after they stop working; especially if they use recurring commission affiliate programs. Through using marketing platforms and email marketing software, affiliates can automate their marketing to sell products around the clock, even when they are away from their laptops.
But setting up such a system means investing in the right tools, software and know-how. This means commitment and unless you have a good mindset towards your affiliate business, you’re likely to quit before you see positive results. There’s a time period of learning and understanding. You don’t simply set up an advertising campaign and start making sales immediately. There is a period of learning and failing.
This can be psychologically tough, especially if you’re spending money on advertising and not making immediate sales. For an affiliate to get through this period and keep going takes a lot.
Mindset & Perseverance
The pull of financial freedom is often what gets affiliates through these tough periods in building their business. If you’re not massively motivated to build a profitable business, it will be much easier to quit.
Many people come into affiliate marketing because of difficult circumstances and they simply “have to” make it work. These are the people who will succeed. If you have a “I’ll give it a go” mindset, you probably won’t last. It’s far easier to proclaim affiliate marketing does not work and quit, than persevere and prove to yourself that it does!
Competition
Depending on your marketing strategy as an affiliate, and there’s many, you will come up against a lot of competition. (See 22 ways to promote affiliate products). As a blogger in this niche it’s been a long hike to get my content seen on the search engines. Video is the same and many organic marketers will create thousands of pieces of content before they break through and start making a regular income from affiliate marketing.
But again, if you use recurring income affiliate programs and learn how to use the right marketing techniques, you can save yourself a lot of blood and tears and get results far quicker. It comes down to developing your knowledge, having a growth mindset and “never quit” attitude.
Summary
The affiliate marketing reality I have come to know is very different to what I initially believed affiliate marketing was as a beginner. I thought I could jump in, throw up a website and make millions overnight! How wrong I was. Before I made my first sales online I had written a lot of content and tried many marketing strategies. It didn’t happen straight away for me. The one sale I made was a “one-off” and it didn’t happen again for a long period of time. I jumped from one strategy to another though, and wasted a lot of time trying to do everything on the cheap.
If you’re serious about building an income online with affiliate marketing, it can be done. Just don’t expect to hit a home run straight out of the gate! For a free video training series to learn more about the various affiliate models available, click here.