Can you really make money with affiliate marketing? The answer is a definite yes, of course. But in reality many new affiliates don’t make any money and they quit. Around 95% of affiliates drop out but for those who stick with it there are great rewards. You can earn a potentially unlimited amount with affiliate marketing because you’re simply a “middle man” for online transactions. You only need to learn how to place yourself between the customer and the product and you can benefit from affiliate commissions.
Doing this successfully does take some time however. New affiliates need to learn a strategy for attracting traffic and delivering their chosen affiliate products to the customer. With affiliate marketing you don’t have to deal directly with customers or handle products. That’s all done by the product owner (or vendor). But unless you actually make sales through your affiliate links, you won’t earn anything. So it’s usually at the beginning where affiliates will encounter the most difficulties.
You need to be patient in the early phase because there’s a few technical things to learn and this can take some effort and time. Many people are impatient and expect to make money easily, which is often why they quit.
Can You Really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Ways Of Making Sales
To make sales online as an affiliate you need to choose a product which has an affiliate program. There’s thousands of affiliate programs where you can find products to promote online. Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone can join and promote any product from the site.
Once you’ve chosen a product to promote, you need a method of attracting an audience. Here’s a few of the main methods which affiliates use to attract traffic to their products:
- Blogging – this article is an example
- Video blogging – using sites such as YouTube and TikTok, for example
- PPC – Pay Per Click advertising – running paid advertising is the fastest way to generate traffic for affiliate offers
- Email marketing – most successful affiliates build an email list of subscribers and promote products to their list
- Social media marketing – there’s both paid and unpaid social media marketing techniques you can use to promote affiliate products.
Can You Really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Getting Started
To begin as an affiliate it’s worth joining a course which gives you some know-how and a few marketing skills. Many courses will help you to set up your website, give you products to sell and help you with your marketing. Check out this video to get started and find help and support.
As you go through the training you’ll be able to follow step by step instructions to build your online presence including things such as:
- Building a website – using a plug and play software
- Setting up your email autoresponder – to allow you to build a list of subscribers
- Choosing a marketing strategy which suits your learning style and budget
- Finding products you want to promote
- Choosing your niche – see also how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.
Once you have set up your basic system for selling, you will need to focus on a marketing strategy. This can involve learning technical aspects such as setting up tracking, to track where your sales come from. When you make a sale online, if you don’t know where it came from it’s more difficult to repeat your success. So tracking is pretty important. Depending on your marketing strategy you might want to run advertising, build content or use social media platforms to find your target audience and attract customers to your products.
Your Customer Avatar
Many affiliates struggle so it’s worth getting the best education when it comes to affiliate marketing. One of the most important things to understand is how to target a specific audience online. When most online users aren’t interested in what you sell, once you learn how to “zone in” on those people who are interested, affiliate marketing gets a whole lot easier.
To define the type of person who is most likely to buy from you, you’ll need to do some work on your customer avatar. The customer avatar worksheet pdf will help you here. Once you get crystal clear on who your customer avatar is, where they hang out online, what their interests are and so on, you’ll get better at targeting them with your content and/or advertising techniques.
Can You really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing ?
Your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone, so it should be celebrated! Before most affiliates make their first sale, there’s usually a lot of work that has been done. This is why many give up. They are just not prepared to lay the foundations of their business when there’s no money coming in from it immediately. But a business is different than a job and the benefits can begin to outweigh the effort over time; when sales start coming in automatically and even after you stop working!
The time it takes for this to happen can be determined by several factors but it’s an unknown since everyone is different. It will depend on your marketing strategy, the effort/time put in, products you use and so on. Two different marketing strategies will tend to give different results. For example blogging will likely take a lot longer than if you’re using paid marketing to get traffic to your website/offer.
Summary
You can make money with affiliate marketing and there’s a huge potential to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. Once you break through the beginning phase and start generating sales, you’ve stepped out of the “time for money” trap where you trade your time for income. By selling products online you have a lot more leverage and your income isn’t limited by the hours in the day.
However there’s a lot of new affiliates who quit (around 95%) which means only a small number of affiliates actually make it work for them. Affiliate marketing is a business with performance related pay; which means if you don’t make sales you don’t get paid! But if you take affiliate marketing seriously, (as you would any other business), the chances of success are far greater! You should also expect a period of learning and implementing new skills before you can make your first affiliate sale.