There’s many reasons why affiliate marketing works. It works particularly well for product owners. They use affiliates to promote and sell their products and services. If an affiliate fails to sell anything, they don’t have to pay them! This is far cheaper than hiring an employee and paying them a wage. It’s also cheaper and more cost effective than running their own advertising campaigns and potentially wasting money on testing and measuring campaigns.
This arrangement works for affiliates too because they get performance related pay. Top affiliates can earn very large incomes so the business attracts entrepreneurial types who are willing to take risks because they want financial independence and the ability to earn a large income online.
An online income is pretty attractive. It can release anyone from a job, a boss and a commute. That’s a huge incentive, even if many affiliates fail in making it into a viable income. See also why affiliate marketing does not work!
Why Affiliate Marketing Works – The Product Owner
The product owner or “vendor” is the person or company who owns the affiliate product or service. Amazon, for example is such a company. Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 11% commission based on the sales generated by their affiliate marketers. That’s pretty low by industry standards. Top paying affiliate programs will offer much more. Digital products, for example, can pay out 40-50% commissions and above.
But for many companies, creating an affiliate or partner program means that they can get affiliates to do the heavy lifting as far as advertising is concerned. Considering many advertising campaigns won’t work, that’s a great deal! It means the risk is passed on to the affiliates who are working purely on a performance basis. No sales means no income for affiliates but it means the risk is taken on by the affiliates and not the product vendor, in terms of advertising.
Meanwhile the product owner can of course run their own advertising campaigns too, and determine whether it’s worth having affiliates as well.
Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate marketing works for many affiliates because it can give them an alternative income source which is completely independent of their employment. Many affiliates will build up their affiliate business alongside a job. Affiliate marketing is perfect for this because you can work on it whenever you like, doing as much or as little as you can fit in.
Affiliates who work long hours can automate much of the process if they focus on running paid advertising. Although this comes with a learning curve, it’s a good option for anyone who is wanting to escape their current situation by building a separate income source through promoting products and services over the internet.
Successful affiliate marketers can build an income which eventually surpasses that of their regular jobs and this gives them complete autonomy over their lives. They can choose where to live, how to work and work remotely from anywhere in the world from a laptop.
The flip side is of course that affiliate marketing does take some time to generate income. There’s a learning curve which many fail to appreciate and they give up too quickly. See why do affiliate marketers fail and affiliate marketing failure rate.
Getting Affiliate Marketing To Work
Getting affiliate marketing to work and generate income can take some time. How long this takes will depend on your strategy and business model. The different affiliate marketing business models will have a say in how you can advertise too, as well as your potential earnings.
Affiliates can spend months or even years working away without getting anywhere! Here’s a few different affiliate marketing strategies which can be used to make sales online:
- Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post
- Paid marketing – many affiliates use paid marketing to promote products
- List building – is recommended for affiliate beginners and allows them to reach a growing number of people through automated email messages
- Social media – paid and free strategies can be used to lead people to various products online
With low value physical products such as those mentioned from Amazon, affiliate’s income is limited to selling many individual items over and over. This is difficult to do with paid marketing because it is so expensive and Amazon products pay so little.
With a different business model such as digital products, you can earn larger commissions. It’s also worth using:
- A multiple income funnel – containing multiple products from which to earn
- High ticket products – which have larger price tags and commissions attached
- Subscription affiliate programs – pay ongoing commissions from previous sales. These are items like software products and memberships.
When Affiliate Marketing Works
Affiliate marketing works once you’ve put in some time, learned how to promote products and improved at it over time. Once you have put in the time for long enough, and learned the appropriate techniques, you can start generating sales on autopilot.
This doesn’t happen overnight and there’s definitely some groundwork to do before you can do this. But once you do start generating sales, you have some data and will have learned from genuine experience. You can now repeat this success many times over. As you get better, and if you use automation in your business, this can also be scaled up to attract more people to your messaging worldwide.
Once you know what works as an affiliate, your job gets a lot easier. Before this happens you can find affiliate marketing to be quite difficult. But eventually you start seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, and you can generate a steady income.
When this happens give yourself a pat on the back because it’s time to celebrate.
Summary
Affiliate marketing works because there’s billions of people online and a hefty slice of them are researching things they want to buy already. Many people are finding online businesses and looking for ways to leverage the internet to generate an income from home; particularly post pandemic.
Or they are looking for guides and help and advice in the many different areas and topics. Affiliates who succeed learn how to place themselves in between the customers and the products. They do this in a variety of different ways, but if they are determined and consistent in their approach, they can learn from their mistakes and failures just as much as from their successes.
This is the key to learning affiliate marketing – stick with it and never quit! Access a free video series here to learn more about affiliate marketing.