Is The Affiliate Marketing Business Model Right For You?

So, do you think the affiliate marketing business model is right for you? Many people who want to start an affiliate marketing business online think they can just
plug their affiliate link all over the web and they will be inundated with sales. But it doesn’t work like that.

Affiliate marketing takes time and smart effort, and isn’t for people who are looking for a quick buck. Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative, but it has its flaws also – as every business model does.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

At its most basic level, affiliate marketing is the process of signing up with a network or company to sell its products. Every time you make a sale for the company or network, you get a portion of the sale.

The amount of money you make depends on the commission rate set by the product owner or network. And in some cases, you can make huge commissions when you
sell big ticket affiliate products.

Some of the most popular affiliate networks online that you can sign up for are:

Benefits Of The Affiliate Marketing Business Model

There are many benefits of the affiliate marketing business model. You can
make alot of money with just 1 sale, and you don’t have to create a product or create a sales page. If you’re good at writing website content, affiliate marketing can be very lucrative for you. 

There are other popular business models online that try to rival affiliate marketing, but they fall short in many ways. For example, with the
Google Adsense business model, you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad that you place on your website.

The amount of money you make is typically pretty low, so you need alot of clicks to make alot of money with this business model. Plus with Google Adsense, the probability of you
getting banned is higher than that of the affiliate marketing business model.

Most affiliate networks (like Clickbank) have
more lenient terms of service. Plus, if you do happen to get banned from an affiliate network, you can more than likely sign up to another network and promote a similar offer that matches closely to what your audience likes.

The affiliate marketing business model
beats e-commerce in many ways. You don’t have a web store to manage, you don’t have to fulfill and ship orders, you don’t have to deal with the post office, and you don’t have to manage inventory.

Your sole job as an affiliate is to market your product to the best of your ability. Everything is hands-off, and customer service isn’t a responsibility of yours either. 

When comparing affiliate programs against each other, you will probably hear about the
Amazon Associates program. While this program is great, the commission rate of the Amazon Associates program tends to be on the
lower side. This makes it tough to make money with the Amazon Associates program if you’re trying to do paid advertising.

On the other hand, if you were to promote high-priced products on networks such as
Clickbank, you stand a better chance of turning a profit because you can make $100 – $2000 per sale on every order. Alot of affiliate marketers choose this route because it’s easy, and saves them alot of time daily. 

Sometimes with affiliate marketing, you can get paid even when someone doesn’t buy anything. This is typically found in
CPA (cost per action)
offers. With this form of affiliate marketing, you get paid when a visitor takes some kind of action on your website. This kind of action can be:

• Entering their information in a signup form

• Entering their email for a free offer

CPA affiliate offers typically pay lower than affiliate offers that pay you per sale – but the conversion rate is much higher. CPA offers are very popular in the affiliate marketing space, and the high commissions help to make up for the low profits earned for each action taken.

Drawbacks Of The Affiliate Marketing Business Model

I bet by now the affiliate marketing business model sounds like the
ideal dream business, but there are some drawbacks to it. Some people feel that affiliate marketing is unethical or “scammy” in nature. This is just a myth, not a fact, and the low barrier to entry to become an affiliate marketer only helps to propel this myth.

To become an affiliate, all you have to do is sign up for a product and start marketing it. Because of this, all kinds of unscrupulous people tend to become an affiliate. This
low barrier to entry causes alot of people to sign up – causing alot of competition. You have to differentiate yourself with your marketing if you want to have success. 

Sometimes when you
promote an affiliate product, a product owner or company can remove their product for ANY reason. Which basically means that affiliate offers can come and go.

So if you’re out on the Internet promoting an offer that doesn’t exist anymore, you’d be missing out on commissions because your affiliate link is pointing to an offer that doesn’t exist anymore.

Another drawback to the affiliate marketing business model is that you
don’t have control of the product or sales process. The sales page may change at any moment, the checkout page may change, the price may change, heck even the offer may change. The only thing you control is the front end of the marketing funnel.

You control the process of getting a visitor and introducing them to the offer you’re promoting. This
lack of control doesn’t cause major disruptions with highly-popular products, but it can happen with products that aren’t top sellers on a network or marketplace. 

Final Thoughts On The Affiliate Marketing Business Model

As I stated earlier, the affiliate marketing business model is very lucrative, and many people
earn 6-7 figure incomes from it every year.

If you want to go this route, you should study how you can maximize your affiliate income using multiple marketing approaches. Be sure to have a
laid out plan that you can execute every day, and that helps you to be consistent with building your business.

So is the affiliate marketing business model right for you? If you’re someone who doesn’t like managing others, shipping products out, creating products, running reports and spreadsheets, and likes to
play all day and be lazy…
affiliate marketing might be for you.

You have to put some work in, and you have to be in it for the long haul. Plan to spend about 2-3 hours per day on marketing your business. If you can do this, then you have what it takes to
be successful with affiliate marketing.