Are you a
home business fanatic wanting to know what some of the pros and cons of affiliate marketing are? Thousands of people attempt to
make money with affiliate marketing every day, but only a sliver of people make it happen successfully due to their successful marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is a beautiful business to be in, but like all businesses online, it does have its drawbacks.
I want to go over some of the
pros and cons of affiliate marketing so that you can decide whether or not you want to start this kind of business online. Let’s start with the pros, and then later down the end of this blog post we’ll talk about the cons. Let’s get started.
Pros Of Affiliate Marketing
1) Billion Dollar Industry
Affiliate marketing is a
billion-dollar industry that grows bigger and gets more lucrative every day. More and more people are joining affiliate marketing and the veterans in the game are making this industry even more profitable.
Anyone with a computer and internet connection and get their share of the affiliate marketing pie – even if you have no previous business experience.
2) Low Barrier To Entry
To join the affiliate marketing game, all you have to do is sign up to an affiliate network (like
Clickbank) and start promoting! It’s just that simple, but
marketing your affiliate product takes a bit of skill. Even though it’s easy to get started, you need some marketing skills to make a decent amount of money – but this is true for any business.
Make sure you
find a lucrative niche, pick a top-selling product for that niche, and start promoting. It’s advisable that you purchase your own website when doing affiliate marketing, but technically, you don’t have to.
3) No Experience Is Needed
You don’t need experience to get started with affiliate marketing. Also, you don’t need any particular business knowledge and expertise to have success in this industry.
Many people who were new to affiliate marketing have made thousands of dollars in their very first month. And they’ve done so using a variety of free and
paid traffic sources. You can do the same too, even if you know nothing about advertising or marketing.
The thing you have to understand about affiliate marketing is that your
affiliate marketing strategy will be pretty simple. In other words, it’s pretty much
set and forget. Some people use paid advertising alone to make money, some people use Youtube, some people use SEO, and some people use social media.
It’s up to you how you want to promote affiliate products. What you choose typically depends on your personality.
4) Investment Costs Are Low
If you don’t want to, you
don’t have to invest any money into advertising. As mentioned earlier, many people are successful with pure free marketing methods. Techniques like Youtube, social media, podcasts, SEO, content syndication, forums, Q&A sites, and more are what people are using to
make affiliate commissions every day.
And guess what? Even if you do want to invest in advertising, you don’t have to pay alot of money to make alot of money. For example, you can set up a quick pay-per-click advertising campaign on Google Ads and earn commissions that way.
Also, you don’t have to
hire any staff or deal with customer service. Both of these are handled by the product owner.
With some of the pros of affiliate marketing stated, let’s talk about some of the cons of affiliate marketing.
Cons Of Affiliate Marketing
1) You Don’t Own The Product
When you don’t own the product, you’re entirely dependent on the merchant’s
rules and conditions for promoting their product. So sometimes you can’t link directly to the order page, you can’t offer discounts, you have to lead people to their landing page first (not the main offer page), or you can’t run pay-per-click ads using
particular keywords.
These are small detriments, but you can still
earn alot of money despite rules such as these.
2) You Will Have Alot Of Competition
Sometimes, you and your competition will be promoting the same product in the same places online. In affiliate marketing, competition is
second nature. But it’s up to you as a marketer to promote your affiliate product better than your competition.
When you hang out in forums, social media, blogs, and Youtube, you will see your competition there promoting the same thing you’re promoting. You have to
outsmart them with your marketing and build an email list so that you can market to people in a competition-free zone.
3) You Can’t Build A Backend Customer List
Once you
make your first affiliate sale to someone, that’s the end of the relationship between you and them. You don’t get to sell to the customer ever again, because the customer now belongs to the vendor. This means your commission rate has to be high enough to cover whatever amount it costs you to acquire a customer.
One workaround affiliates make to this drawback is by promoting
“recurring income affiliate programs”.
An affiliate program like this means that you get paid each month for as long as the customer stays a member of the program. This is a great way to continue getting sales from a customer even after the first sale.
Recurring income affiliate programs aren’t hard to find, but the
traditional affiliate program model vastly supersedes them.
4) There’s No Guarantee That You’ll Make Money
As with any business online, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make money with affiliate marketing. Even though you get to
promote proven products that have made alot of money for others, there’s no guarantee that it’ll make money for you too. But you have to have confidence in your marketing, and be confident that you’ll get affiliate sales daily.
Final Thoughts On The Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing
As you can see, there are a few pros and cons of affiliate marketing, and you have to decide if this is the right business for you. I will tell you as a
successful affiliate marketer myself that the pros far outweigh the cons. There isn’t another business in the world I’d rather be in – aside from being a movie star.
If you can treat affiliate marketing as a “real” business, you can go far in this industry. Market your product as if your life depended on it, and search for
big-ticket affiliate products that you can promote so that you can earn alot of money on each sale.
This makes achieving success much easier and helps you to focus more on treating affiliate marketing as a tangible business.
Good luck!
