Is affiliate marketing a scam? Affiliate marketing is definitely not a scam, no. It’s a legitimate business model in which third parties are rewarded for recommending other people’s products and services online.
When someone buys a product online through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission for making the sale. The sale is tracked back to the affiliate marketer’s unique link. They receive a commission based on the value of the product they have sold.
Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means that for a large percentage of new affiliates, making money from it is a considerable problem. As a new affiliate without any experience, it can take some time before you see any results in terms of sales. It is during the first few months of learning affiliate marketing where most people will quit, believing it to be a scam! But just because affiliate marketing is difficult, doesn’t make it illegitimate.
Is Affiliate Marketing A Scam – Why Affiliates Struggle
New affiliates struggle for a number of reasons. Often people will give up long before they should, having lost hope. But like any business, affiliate marketing takes time and effort in order to become successful. Most businesses will fail in their first 5 years and affiliate marketing is no different. A massive 95% of affiliate marketers will drop out. That leaves only 5% who carry on long enough to make it into an income. See also affiliate marketing failure rate.
Initially beginner affiliates will have a lot to learn before they can even make a start of their affiliate business. Websites, for example, can take months before they show up in the search results and get regular traffic. Even using a paid marketing strategy, which is faster, it can take several months before you gain traction. If in these few months you lose belief in what you’re doing, it’s far easier to quit than to carry on!
Affiliates have many barriers to overcome and the first of which is their own belief. If you believe affiliate marketing is a scam, and that there’s no hope for making money from it, this will affect your actions in a negative way. It’s impossible to make a success of something if you already don’t believe it’s possible. You won’t even try!
Overcoming Doubt
If your mind is full of doubt you’ll definitely struggle to make money from affiliate marketing. Doubt holds you back, and your actions flow from your beliefs and attitudes. To become successful as an affiliate marketer you need to promote and sell affiliate products. If you don’t believe in your products, or in the business of affiliate marketing, it’s already a barrier to your success.
To build a successful affiliate business takes time and effort; more than most people expect. Some courses and “gurus’ even profess that affiliate marketing is easy in order to sell their courses! This of course gives the beginner affiliate a false expectation of what affiliate marketing really entails. When reality doesn’t match up to this expectation, it can be easy to think that affiliate marketing is a scam.
By assuming this, you give yourself a way out! If you take responsibility for your lack of success, a different picture is painted. You need to keep working and enduring more challenges in order to break through and start making sales.
All of this starts in your mind, long before you either fail or succeed with affiliate marketing. So overcoming the seeds of fear in your mind is a useful first step in achieving something positive from affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Training & Expectation
Since the main aspect of affiliate marketing is the actual “marketing” skill, many affiliate training courses focus on helping new affiliates with this. Training can take the form of mindset, psychology, and the various actual marketing methods you need to implement as an affiliate such as:
- Blogging
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Video marketing
- PPC – pay per click
- Tracking
- Optimisation
- Etc
There’s various ways you can do affiliate marketing and everyone’s experience of it will differ according to their own personal approach. A course might not be right for everyone and you can still fail at affiliate marketing even after investing in your training and education. The key is to commit to the journey, get help and support and make it an ongoing priority to build an affiliate business over the longer term. Don’t expect to start earning from affiliate marketing without having put the work in first for several months or years.
Learn more about the different types of products you can promote as an affiliate with this free video series.