Is affiliate marketing easy? While affiliate marketing allows anyone to profit from the sale of other people’s products online, it’s definitely not easy. However, it’s easy to get into affiliate marketing because you only need to join a program and promote your affiliate link. You don’t need products of your own and anyone can “have a go”. However there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing, perhaps for this reason.
Around 95% of affiliates don’t make it and quit. So if you want to be in the 5% of affiliates who make it work, you’ll need to work hard and in the right areas. Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, you only get paid when you make a sale. If this doesn’t happen, you can be doing a lot of work for nothing, especially if you quit!
Making an affiliate marketing business profitable is the biggest challenge and requires you to actively promote your affiliate product/s through an affiliate link. The easy part of being an affiliate is joining a program and setting up your link and website etc. The hard part is actually learning and implementing a strategy of marketing which brings in customers through your affiliate links.
While an easy sale is possible, long term sustainable profits are much more difficult. This is why the affiliate marketing success rate is pretty low.
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy? Making It Easier
However, despite the large drop out rate within affiliate marketing, there have been huge leaps in software and technology over the last few years which has made becoming a profitable affiliate easier than it once was. Previously to have success as an affiliate you would need coding skills and to build your own websites and sales funnels from scratch. You can pretty much get an affiliate website (and sales funnels) up and running with a few clicks with certain programs.
This takes much of the hard work out of becoming an affiliate as well as much of the technical side of things. However, once you have set up a sales system you’ll need to learn a form of marketing. This is probably the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even with a ready made website and sales funnels up your sleeve, you’ll still need to promote your business some how. This is why many affiliates will dedicate most of their time to learning online marketing techniques and skills.
To make it easier to become profitable as an affiliate, choose high ticket products and subscription products which pay out recurring commissions. Choose a product you believe in and a topic which you have an interest. Use paid marketing if you can which allows you to get traffic almost immediately to your website or landing page.
Your Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy is probably the most important factor (besides product choice) in whether you’ll become profitable or not as an affiliate. So choosing the right one for you is pretty vital. If you’re going to become a blogger, for example, expect your journey to be much longer than if you were to use paid advertising.
It can take months or even years to build up your traffic to a substantial amount through blogging. But with paid advertising, you can see this volume of traffic instantly with a large enough budget. Paid advertising can easily be scaled up too, of course. But you don’t want to throw too much money at your affiliate business too fast. Most ad campaigns won’t work as you expect and there’s a learning curve.
The most profitable affiliates typically have been at it for years but there’s no earning cap with affiliate marketing. This makes it attractive to the masses which is another potential reason why so many drop out.
Summary
Is affiliate marketing easy? The short answer is no! While it’s easy to join a program, build a website and setup a marketing funnel, the hard part is to make sales consistently and this requires a fair amount of tenacity and patience. If you’re going to be running paid advertising, expect to spend some budget while learning.
Many ads don’t work initially and you’ll need to work at it. With content marketing (such as blogging) you could be at it for several months before things start working. With blogging though, you can ultimately make passive income from your free traffic once you’ve put in the work before hand. While it’s not as scalable as paid marketing, it’s also a viable option for affiliates to consider. But consider how long you will sustain the effort when you’re not seeing results immediately.
Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business in which you only get paid when you make sales, it also means you can make nothing for some time, before you break through. How long you can stick with it will have a say in whether or not you’ll become successful as an affiliate.
Your choice of product also has a massive factor. See also the most profitable digital products.