There’s many ways to earn online so why choose affiliate marketing? Before I chose affiliate marketing as my main tactic for earning online, I tried a few other strategies. One of them was blogging and monetising with Google Adsense. It took a huge amount of effort and time to only pay a tiny amount with this strategy. My first affiliate sale paid about the same as a month of earnings from Adsense! Of course at the time I only had a small amount of website traffic, and Adsense can work well. But in my experience affiliate marketing was much better.
Another strategy I tried was Forex marketing. With Forex you make money on small shifts of the Foreign Exchange market to make money. I studied it for a couple of years but came to the conclusion that I didn’t have the funds to do it since it requires a trading “bank”. To trade effectively you need to spend only a small amount of your capital on any one trade. So you’ll need a bit of capital just to get started.
I also tried eBay and you can read about my strategy here. I used to buy and sell products from eBay and make money on the difference. But it was a time heavy business and I wasn’t making enough income from it, despite how hard I worked. Once I discovered affiliate marketing it made more sense. Affiliate marketing can be tough too but your work compounds over time, meaning you can make sales in your sleep for the work you’ve done previously. While this doesn’t happen immediately, if you understand this idea it can be great motivation to keep going!
Why Choose Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models you can choose in order to make money online. To make a commission, you need to learn a strategy for selling a product online. You don’t need your own products and you don’t need to be a sales person to become successful as an affiliate. Websites can do the selling for you and once you understand a strategy to attracting website traffic, you can effectively sell other people’s products on complete autopilot.
There’s several main strategies which affiliate marketers use:
- Content creation – blogging and video blogging
- Social media -both paid and unpaid social media marketing strategies can be used.
- SEO – search engine optimisation is used by bloggers and content creators to optimise content and get free traffic from the search engines.
- Paid marketing – paid platforms such as Google’s Adwords, Facebook and YouTube can be very effective for finding your target audience to sell products to.
- Email marketing – is one of the best ways to build an affiliate business through lead generation and promoting affiliate products to your email list.
Because there’s so many different ways to do affiliate marketing, and you can sell so many different products, it’s a pretty versatile business which anyone can use.
Why Choose Affiliate Marketing – Methods Of Marketing
The type of marketing method you choose as an affiliate will often be determined by the products you choose to sell and the time and money you have available throughout the day. If you’re working full time in a job, you can still do affiliate marketing as a side hustle. If, on the other hand you have a lot of time available, you can also do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget.
Generally speaking if you have a lot of time but not much to invest, you should become a content creator. If you have money to invest but not much time, you can spend money on advertising.
Products too will have a bearing on how you promote an affiliate business. With low value products such as you’d find on Amazon, you’ll need a cheaper marketing method in order to make a consistent profit. With a high ticket sales funnel, it’s easier to use paid marketing and come out on top.
Paid marketing is a much faster and more scalable way to make money from affiliate marketing. But, you’ll need to spend some time and some money just to get things working. This is often where people will drop out. Content marketing is cheap but it takes much longer to get traction as an affiliate if all your traffic is free and comes from organic search.
Summary
There’s a few alternatives to affiliate marketing but affiliate marketing offers one of the simplest models for earning online. You can sell pretty much anything online as an affiliate, so long as a product has an affiliate program. Plus you can use many different tactics to sell affiliate products:
- Blogging
- Video blogging
- PPC – pay per click advertising
- Social media
- Email marketing
Certain affiliate products pay much more than others so you should think about the products you choose to promote carefully. Subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate products are the best payers for affiliates. But there’s also a lot of choice of physical products you can sell too from affiliate programs such as Amazon. See also Amazon affiliate commission.