How long does it take for affiliate marketing to work? To start making money from affiliate marketing it can take several weeks or several months, depending on your marketing strategy.
If you are focusing on a cheaper strategy which relies heavily on SEO (search engine optimisation) for example, expect to be working at it for several months before you can make consistent sales. On the other hand, with a paid strategy you can start generating results much more quickly. With paid marketing and email marketing, for example, you can see sales within a few weeks, depending on your marketing budget.
With a large marketing budget you can quickly put your marketing message in front of a large audience, and this can speed things up dramatically. Blogging on the other hand is much more limited, at least at first. Over a period of months though you can build enough content to start getting more regular traffic and consistency.
How Long Does It Take To Make Affiliate Marketing Work – Speeding Up Your Results
You can make faster progress with affiliate marketing in a number of ways such as:
- Getting help and support – join a step by step program here.
- Using subscription programs which pay out recurring commissions – see subscription affiliate programs
- Promoting high ticket affiliate programs which pay out larger commissions – this also helps you access paid marketing platforms and profit more easily
- Using an email autoresponder and building an email list – see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing
Slower marketing strategies are those such as blogging and other organic marketing methods. These can take much longer to get traction with as an affiliate. However, over time organic content can compound to generate more and more traffic as your content grows.
How Long Does It Take For Affiliate Marketing To Work? Study Time Vs. Marketing
When you start as an affiliate marketer it will be necessary to spend some time learning. You’ll need to set up a website, or a landing page. You might choose to use paid marketing and if so you’ll need a compliant website/landing page and access to a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords, Bing (Microsoft Ads), Facebook, YouTube etc.
You might also spend some time looking for the kinds of affiliate products you want to promote. This all takes time and that’s before you start off with actually marketing your product. In general you should expect to spend a few weeks or months in learning mode as a beginner in affiliate marketing: researching, studying, watching and absorbing materials. Your ratio to studying and doing will be something along the lines of 90:10. Once you have figured some things out you will want to switch this to 80:20 marketing to studying.
Don’t get caught up in being a perpetual student without implementing some ideas that you have learned. Your real learning begins when you start making mistakes and failing! There’s a saying in affiliate marketing “fail forwards”. Which means unless you’re trying stuff out and making mistakes, you’re not really learning.
When It Works
When you start generating sales with affiliate marketing it might not be consistent. This also might come after a long period of nothing much happening too! If you’re an organic marketer (blogging/YouTube channel), expect it to take much longer than with paid marketing.
When you make a sale congratulations! But this is only really the beginning. You will then have to determine which activities brought about the sale and focus more on doing more of that!
Most of your advertising campaigns won’t work straight away, and a small list of subscribers will have much less of an effect than a large one. So it’s important to have a long term focus with affiliate marketing because over the longer term, your experience will help dramatically.
As you collect more data, you’ll know which actions produce the best results. This is Pareto’s principle or the 80:20 rule which states that 80% of results come from only 20% of actions. When you focus on the money producing activities which make the best out of your time, you’ll be in a much better position as an affiliate. At this stage you can dramatically speed up your results through learning from your data.
Summary
It can take several weeks or months to get any traction out of affiliate marketing and it depends on your learning style and the actions you take. Some people will naturally take longer than others to generate traction. Over time, if you stick at it, you will start generating sales. Once you are at this stage you have some data of your own to work with. You can then focus on the actions which have generated the best results for you, rather than wasting time on superficial activities.
Affiliate marketing does take time. It’s a shame so many quit before they see any results because if you stick at it, it can be very worthwhile. The early stages of affiliate marketing are definitely the most difficult. You need to believe in the journey and that you will eventually break through and start generating income. Having help and support is vital if you’re serious about making affiliate marketing your living because there’s a huge drop out rate among affiliates. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
For step by step training and support join a program here.