What’s better than affiliate marketing? Well there’s a number of ways to make money online and depending on your particular personality and situation, some methods might suit you better than others.
Whether it’s blogging, Forex marketing, drop shipping or e-commerce, there’s many ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes. Before I found an affiliate marketing program that worked for me, I tried various other methods of earning online.
What’s Better Than Affiliate Marketing? Forex Marketing
One of the first things I found was Forex marketing. With Forex marketing, you can earn money by trading on the shifts in the Foreign Exchange markets. As with many other strategies, you stand to lose money as well as gain!
I wouldn’t say Forex was better than affiliate marketing, but it’s another option if you’re disciplined and willing to spend a couple of years learning the craft. Plus, you’ll need to invest in studying candlestick patterns with some kind of course or tutor if you’re serious. You’ll also need a trading bank to place your trades with. This should be a large enough sum of money whereby you only trade between 1-3% of your bank per trade. You should definitely start with a demo account and trade with pretend money at first. Most newbie traders blow their account very quickly and quit!
What’s Better Than Affiliate Marketing – Drop Shipping/E-Commerce
Some people rate drop shipping as a better business model than affiliate marketing. This can be because it gives you more control. With affiliate marketing you’re at the mercy of the rates set by the affiliate companies you affiliate with. But with drop shipping, you can set the price of a product from your website.
Drop shipping is slightly more involved than affiliate marketing because you need to deal with customers through your own website, and take orders directly before shipping the product out to them. This can be largely automated though with certain API plugins. If you’re interested in learning more about drop shipping, checkout Shopify.com.
Drop shipping can also allow you to take regular orders too, meaning you can collect subscription customers. But you can also do this with certain affiliate products too which let you earn recurring income from selling an item. See subscription affiliate programs.
What’s Better Than Affiliate Marketing – eBay
Before I found affiliate marketing I used eBay to buy and sell and although it didn’t work out for me, there’s plenty of business owners who use eBay exclusively to earn a good living online. One simple eBay strategy to use is to buy in bulk from a wholesale website such as Alibaba.com. Create a single listing on eBay from which you can sell multiple items over and over.
There’s a lot of competition on eBay from power sellers who can afford to buy huge amounts to get goods at the lowest prices, so you need to do your homework if you’re going this route. You can find items for next to nothing, especially if the item is shipped from China, for example.
Digital Content Creation
Content creation is another way you can earn online and you can monetise your content though advertising. The most commonly known advertising platform is Google Adsense but there’s many of them which pay more than this platform.
Bloggers and YouTube’ers create content which gets found through the search engines (Google and YouTube – also owned by Google). Although many content creators also use affiliate marketing to monetise their content, you can monetise only with advertising.
With the YouTube program you’ll need 500 subscribers to become eligible for their payment method. See video monetisation with YouTube.
If you’re creative and capable of uploading multiple videos over several months on the trot, this might work for you. Or you can do the same thing as a blogger and monetise with some advertising placed on your content. See also how to monetise a blog.
Keep in mind that YouTube and Google are pretty competitive and there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and 51 million YouTube channels. The best way to become a content creator is to decide on your niche and choose a topic you’re passionate about.
Affiliate Marketing Methods
If you’re looking for another “shiny object” here, which isn’t uncommon for newbie affiliate marketers, it’s probably also worth a mention here that there’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too. So if you’ve struggled with affiliate marketing that doesn’t mean to say that affiliate marketing does not work. Sometimes shifting the way you do things can have a considerable impact.
When I started out as an affiliate I struggled, and I believe it’s the same for most new affiliates. I was promoting low value items and not making any progress for some time. I changed the way I did things as an affiliate in a few ways which led me to success with it:
- I found a mentor – (Sign up here for access to a mentorship program)
- I started building an email list ( I didn’t know I should be doing this beforehand) – see also don’t forget your email list.
- I used subscription products (which pay out recurring commissions)
- and High Ticket products , which helped me to afford:
- Paid marketing – which is faster and more scalable than organic marketing
Summary
Before you jump ship with affiliate marketing remember that all of these methods will take some time and effort before you see any results and they require investment too. So if you’re looking for another “shiny object” and “magic bullet” which will allow you to make money easily and quickly online, think again! You may have struggled with affiliate marketing because you chose the wrong product or marketing method.
Still, affiliate marketing isn’t for everyone and depending on your own personal preferences and circumstances, another one of these options might suit you better:
- Forex marketing – takes a couple of years to learn properly
- E-commerce/drop shipping – visit shopify.com
- eBay – Buying and selling – Buy from a wholesalers (e.g. Alibabas.com and sell individually)
- Content Marketing – Building content and selling advertising space
See also alternatives to affiliate marketing.
