If you’re looking for the easiest affiliate marketing method, you’re not alone. Most affiliates want to know this. Why choose the hard method, right? Unfortunately it’s not always so cut and dry with affiliate marketing. There’s so many ways in which affiliates can promote their products, and there’s so many affiliate products to choose from. Your choice of product and your promotion method/s will have a huge impact on your ability to make affiliate marketing work for you.
Your budget plays a significant role in your marketing method as an affiliate too. If you don’t have an advertising budget, you’ll need to find some methods which are cheap or free. Sadly these are typically going to take a lot more time and effort than if you’re using paid advertising.
Free traffic methods for affiliate marketing aren’t the easiest! They are slow and unpredictable. Blogging, social media marketing and building a YouTube channel are examples of cheap or free marketing methods. Depending on the competition in your affiliate marketing niche, it can take months of hard work before you break through and start generating sales. Many affiliates quit for this reason, even after months of hard work.
Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Think Big!
One factor which can dramatically alter the course of your affiliate marketing journey is scale. With pretty much any affiliate offer this is true; the more people you can get in front of your product, the more you’ll sell. To reach people in larger numbers requires getting a lot of website visitors and/or building a huge email list. The email list is the best resource for anyone who wants to build an affiliate business and reach a large number of people quickly. You can access an email autoresponder for free here.
To build an email list takes time and/or money! To build one fast you’ll need to use paid advertising. Otherwise you’ll need to build a resource such as a YouTube channel or through blogging, for example, but this is far slower. So, to answer the question “which is the easiest affiliate marketing method” succinctly I would have to say:
- Build an email list
- Using paid marketing
But there’s a few caveats to this premise too, because you can still burn through a lot of cash using this method and still fail!
Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Types Of Products
Your choice of product has a huge deal to do with whether you’ll be successful as an affiliate marketer too. Even with a large marketing budget, a good product, and an email list, you can make mistakes. For example, you can send the wrong kind of traffic to your list. You can pay too much to build your list, and not recoup your marketing budget, or make a profit.
With the right product and audience, you are in with a much greater chance for success as an affiliate. So what is the right kind of product to promote as an affiliate?
There’s many products to choose from an you can become an affiliate marketer quite quickly and easily through joining any affiliate program. Amazon is a good example of where many affiliates will gravitate to. But with Amazon, you can only make tiny commissions on sales you make, depending on what you sell. Amazon pays between 1% and 20% on items you promote from their site. So with a $100 item, you can make as little as $1 for making the referral. If you’re paying for advertising, that only leaves a tiny margin for profit and you’re more likely to run up debt than to make a profit.
But you can also sell subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products which pay much larger commissions. These kinds of products give you more leeway to make a profit while using paid marketing tactics.
Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Target Audience/Customer Avatar
With paid ads and email marketing, you give yourself the best chance of reaching the most amount of people in the shortest possible time with your affiliate products. But what if those people aren’t interested in your product, or can’t afford to buy it? You’ll spend a lot of money and sell nothing! This is why it’s vital to understand who you are aiming your advertising at – your target audience or perfect customer “avatar”.
Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will love you, your products and become a lifetime fan. When you can understand them and their needs, you can “zone in” to what makes them tick and communicate in a way which will appeal to them personally.
You can also aim your advertising campaigns to your target demographic using the various online marketing platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Google Adwords, Bing etc. You can do this by age, location, marital status, income, interests and a whole host of other important demographics. When you define your ideal customer very specifically, you can save a heap on otherwise wasted advertising and marketing aimed at the wrong type of person.
Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Products & Passion
What product do you genuinely want to sell? Do you have an interest in the product yourself? Who is your target audience and how are you going to find them? Answer these questions well and you’re in a much better position to do well with an affiliate marketing business.
When I started doing affiliate marketing I rushed in trying to promote anything and everything to anyone! It just doesn’t work because 99.9% of people online don’t want the thing you’re selling! You need to find the 0.01% who do! To do this in a competitive market is either time consuming or expensive or both. Running ads is expensive if there’s a lot of other competing affiliates in the same niche. Blogging, or building a YouTube channel is competitive too if you’re going after free traffic.
But if you can align your passions with your product, you can keep going for much longer than most people will. You can sustain the necessary effort much longer than your competition, which is particularly important if you’re building some kind of authority website for traffic generation.
Power Of The Email List
I’ve already mentioned the email list in this article but it deserves a bit more attention because of how important the email list really is. Some affiliates will try and sell directly from a website, which can be done. However it’s much easier to sell from a list because of the timeframe you can cover with an email list.
On a website, someone only hangs around for a few minutes at the most. After that they are gone forever. Statistics show that most people don’t buy immediately from a website, especially one which is unfamiliar to the visitor. It takes several touch points before someone buys from you. This can’t be achieved on a one-time visit to a website. So if you’re an affiliate who is struggling making sales, this might be the reason.
Offer your website visitors a free giveaway and collect their email details from your website. Now you can follow up with emails, giving them help and advice and building trust over a much longer time frame. I have sold affiliate products to subscribers on my list who have joined it years before hand. This simply could not happen on a website.
Summary
So if you’re read this far you have probably realised that it’s not so simple as the “easiest” affiliate marketing method. You could choose a single “method” such as paid ads and building an email list, but falter on your product or get your target audience wrong, or even your messaging. I would definitely attest to the significance of using an email list and paid marketing. But for some, paid marketing might be out of their budget.
Even with paid marketing, some adverts will fail, and you should expect to lose some marketing budget while you’re learning. (See this as investment, rather than loss). If you’re not in a position to do this, you’ll need to use some cheaper marketing methods such as blogging, for example.
Blogging certainly isn’t the easiest way to earn from affiliate marketing. But if you find a topic you love, you can build a huge resource and attract free traffic, potentially for years to come. This can give you a nice, passive income if you align an affiliate product which is compatible with your topic and offers good value to the customer.
Overall, a single “method” of doing affiliate marketing is not really enough. You also need a strategy – a guiding overview which covers methods, messaging, marketing and product choice, and aligns with your long term goals, values and ideals.
If you’re serious about building a sustainable affiliate business from scratch, have a look at this video.