Affiliate marketing: does it work? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the affiliate promotes a product online. If it sells, the affiliate earns a commission. If the affiliate doesn’t make a sale, they make nothing! This is the crux of the issue when discussing whether affiliate marketing works or not.
There’s many affiliates who have made affiliate marketing their main source of income. So it definitely works! But the question on most minds of new affiliates is whether it can work for them or not! And that of course will depend on what they do! There’s many courses of action for affiliates and depending on the method you use to put products in front of customers, it can take you anywhere from several months to make money with affiliate marketing, or several years.
Are you going to sustain the necessary effort in order to make affiliate marketing pay you, even when you see nothing in terms of income for several months, or even years?
Affiliate Marketing Does It Work?
If the answer is a resounding “no”, affiliate marketing is probably not for you. It takes more than most people are willing to accept. In fact the affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high. At 95% it means that affiliate marketing doesn’t work for a large majority of those who attempt it. Why affiliate does not work can come down a few things.
Affiliate marketing is easy to jump into because you only really need a laptop and internet connection to do it. Join any affiliate program and you can call yourself an “affiliate”. This could explain why there’s such a large “failure” rate. Most people aren’t business minded and there’s an expectation for it to be easy, whereas in truth the opposite is true; it’s very difficult.
There’s also many paths an affiliate marketer can take. They can promote affiliate products using many techniques and strategies. Blogging, video marketing, paid marketing and social media are just a few of them. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. In the beginning this can cause a lot of confusion, especially if you jump from one strategy to another, or one training course to another.
You can spend several months jumping from one strategy to another and get nothing done. You can get caught up in “education mode”; watching endless training videos and assuming that you are making progress. Whereas in fact you are just learning, not applying.
Affiliate Marketing Does It Work – Fast & Slow
The slowest strategies in affiliate marketing are often the only ones which are accepted by many new affiliates. Many are attracted to the idea of making money online because they don’t have any money. This can be a massive problem. When you have no money, you can’t use paid marketing techniques which can make your life easier. You can’t pay for good training and support. So you go it alone and this means you fall down the many rabbit holes of affiliate marketing. Months later you’re still none the wiser!
Would you start a normal business on this basis? Probably not. The internet attracts many people from all walks of life. But many think it’s a quick path to riches. The get quick rich mentality will work against you too with an online business. With a normal “bricks and mortar” business, you expect to have many more costs: building, rates, insurance, staff etc. But for some reason people think an online business should be free!
A slow marketing strategy is blogging. See what is affiliate blogging. A faster strategy is to use paid marketing and build an email list. Depending on what you choose, expect a journey of several months minimum or several years.
Affiliate Marketing Success
You can “gear” your success with affiliate marketing is a few ways:
- Have a “die hard” mentality – never quit! Just learn from each hiccup on the journey. Consider “failures” as learnings, helping you towards your goal.
- Join a community and get help from coaches and mentors.
- Use a sales funnel which offers multiple payment methods: one time, subscription products and high ticket products
- Choose your marketing strategy wisely but use an email list.
Considering most affiliates will quit before they have even 1000 subscribers on their email list, use this information to make a decision: don’t quit! Use 1000 subscribers as your initial “benchmark” to achieve and consider the journey to 1000 subscribers the first step to a larger goal! Once you have reached this point, you will be armed with strategies and tactics to build your affiliate business on.
Keep in mind affiliate marketing is a path to financial, geographical and time freedom. If this isn’t important to you, you probably won’t maintain the necessary motivation to keep going through the barriers.
Why So Many Quit
Affiliate marketing does work, but it takes some time to generate regular sales and earn an income from it. Most affiliates don’t understand this, and just get frustrated and quit. But it’s a mistake because once affiliate marketing starts working, it can generate a passive income for you. Especially if you choose to use subscription affiliate programs. With subscriptions, a single sale is an ongoing income.
Some strategies take some time to work too. An email list of 100 people won’t make many sales. If just 1% of your email list converts into a sale, you’ll only make 1 sale per 100 people. But with a list of 10,000 people you’ll definitely see things growing in the right direction.
Likewise if you decide to create content on a blog or a YouTube channel. One or two videos won’t allow you to quit your job. But once you have created hundreds or thousands of videos, you will start to see some traction. Both content marketing and paid marketing can present problems for new affiliates. The hardest thing is to keep going when you don’t see any results. But over the longer term if you keep consistent and keep learning and growing, your business will do the same.
Affiliate marketing is like the Chinese Bamboo tree. Before any signs of growth, the Chinese Bamboo tree gestates for 4-5 years underground. But in 5-6 weeks it grows to 90 feet tall. Similarly with an affiliate business, you need to put in the time and effort in the early days. Day after day keep putting in the effort. After several months you should see some activity from your work. It might not be much, but it’s the sign of the things to come. Not quitting during this time is the hardest part of affiliate marketing.
You’ll need a patient mind and a strong will to succeed with affiliate marketing. It’s a business and like any business it takes time to build up. Success doesn’t happen overnight and affiliate marketing definitely isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme! But it does work if you put in the effort, maintain consistency and choose to never quit!
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