Is affiliate marketing a scam or is it legit? Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which the affiliate promotes products and services online. If an affiliate makes a sale through their affiliate link, they earn a commission based on that sale.
There’s nothing nefarious about affiliate marketing. It’s completely legitimate and above board. However, new affiliates might think affiliate marketing is dubious for a number of reasons. Firstly affiliate marketing isn’t that easy. Making sales online requires quite a bit of work and study. Since the barriers to entry for new affiliates is very low, this makes it easy to start. It’s cheap to become an affiliate. But this low barrier to entry means many will “have a go” at it without putting in the required work.
When new affiliates don’t achieve the success they expect, it can be easier to dismiss the whole affiliate concept as a “scam”, rather than accept the reality of it being a tough nut to crack.
Affiliate Marketing Scam Or Legit?
Another reason many might consider affiliate marketing a scam can be the various courses and instructors claiming to be money making “gurus”. Some of these sales people exaggerate earnings which can be made through affiliate marketing. They claim ease of earnings online if you just purchase their course! Of course earnings are never guaranteed, but many affiliates don’t realise this until they have spent their hard earned money purchasing the course which inspired them!
However, you don’t have to purchase training in order to become an affiliate marketer. It’s worth getting educated if you intend to earn from affiliate marketing but trainings and courses are optional. Anyone can become an affiliate marketer through joining an affiliate or “partner” program. Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs on the internet. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and start promoting items from the website in order to earn commissions on sales generated.
Learning Affiliate Marketing
Once you have joined a partner program you’ll be able to get your own unique affiliate link. But in order to make sales through your affiliate link, you’ll need to find suitable customers and place your link in front of them. This is what makes affiliate marketing so difficult.
So it’s well worth getting help and support and learning this properly. Without a good understanding of a marketing strategy, it’s easy to flounder as an affiliate. There’s several ways to promote your affiliate links once you have joined an affiliate program. You can create content (like this article), create videos or build an email list. You can use paid marketing strategies too, to get your message in front of prospective customers.
Most successful affiliate marketers build an email list of subscribers and promote products to their list. Email lists can grow into the tens of thousands of subscribers. Once your list gets this large, and you learn how to communicate with your subscribers, you can make multiple affiliate sales through automation.
Affiliate marketing is a powerful business model once you learn how to use it properly. But there’s a lot of learning when you get started and many affiliates give up and drop out. See affiliate marketing failure rate.
Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
So, affiliate marketing does it work? Yes affiliate marketing does work. If you successfully promote your affiliate link and someone purchases a product through that link, you will earn a commission and get paid. However, many affiliates will struggle at first because they don’t go the necessary distance to make it work for them. Once an affiliate has made a sale online, they know the procedure with which they have made it happen. But before this can happen, there’s a lot of learning and often struggle involved.
New affiliates will have no content or list of subscribers. As they grow their understanding and learn how to build an email list and market their products, they will encounter some frustrations. Like any new skill, it takes time and effort to learn affiliate marketing. Often this frustration period can mean many new affiliates will quit long before they even have 1000 subscribers on their email list. This is a massive mistake because the beginning months are the hardest for affiliates. Once they have overcome the early hurdles, affiliate marketing can get a whole lot easier (and more profitable) over time.
Affiliate Marketing Courses
To learn affiliate marketing properly, it’s worth investing in your education. Don’t fall into the false idea that purchasing an online course is a guarantee of success. Like with any business, the responsibility always lies with the business owner. If you purchase an online training resource of some kind, consider it an investment in your education, not a guarantee of success.
This is why some new affiliates believe that affiliate marketing is a scam. They purchase training and support, and believe that the price they pay is a ticket to easy money. This is known as an “entitlement attitude” and can severely hamper your personal growth as an affiliate marketer. No one else can do the work for you in an affiliate business, however much you pay and however much help and support you enlist. Courses and business systems can take out much of the hard work of building an online business, but ultimately your success online is down to you and the work you put in.
Often with an online business, there’s an expectation that it will be easy; much easier than a traditional bricks and mortar business. But consider how much you would need to invest in a traditional business just in order to get it up and running. An online business needs the same commitment and drive in order to be successful. Automation and online systems can do the selling for you, but you still need to build your systems and understand how to grow your business.
Affiliate Marketing Scam or Legit?
Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which affiliates can promote other people’s products online for a share of the profit. However, there are many ways to do affiliate marketing and it’s not a get rich quick scheme! It takes considerable effort and motivation in order to build an income from affiliate marketing. For this reason, many new affiliates quit and consider it a scam. Be wary of courses which over-promise too. Affiliate marketing is tough, and you’ll need to bring the right attitude to the table if you want to become successful at it.
For more information and a free video series explaining some of the best affiliate marketing business models you can use, click on the image below.
