How hard is affiliate marketing to start and make money. The best job in town however you must have the right template to begin your journey
Table of contents
- Why be an affiliate marketer for other people's products
- What is better than affiliate marketing
- Is affiliate marketing that hard
- The best Affiliate training for free
- How affiliate marketing works
- How long does it take for affiliate marketing to work
- Growing your audience
- Branching out to new products
- Banking the money or reinvesting
- Conclusion and wrap up
Why be an affiliate marketer for other people's products
Having no stock, no debtors, no customer support, and a bundle of marketing materials are four really good reasons to sell someone else's product.
However, the rewards must be worthwhile.
Amazon, Walmart, and a few others have reduced commissions so that unless you achieve a high volume of sales you will not make a profitable return. You are looking at 2-3% commission on a sale and a minute return on effort.
Add to that you must sell products with a high retail price. If you sell a book for $20 and make even 5% or a single dollar you need to move a thousand books a month, the impossible dream.
Finally, our favorite products are those with recurring billing where you get paid a percentage every month and build your empire. More on that is below.
What is better than affiliate marketing
Marketing your virtual products where you get paid the full retail value is always an optimum experience. It may be Training programs, eBooks, Lectures, white papers, or any other virtual product that you develop and can market.
Blogging can be worthwhile
Whilst blogging is often associated with affiliate marketing it need not necessarily be so.
You may blog purely for advertising revenue as you achieve a high number of readers.
The sales funnel
Another great channel is building your sales funnel where consumers wander into the top of the funnel and come out to the bottom having spent their money.
Every product can have a funnel and every funnel produce massive results.
The downside to this is cost however it can be recovered quickly if you are successful.
Writing product reviews
This can generate many opportunities to gain income by selling the products reviewed.
There are many readers for reviews so many now that we hardly buy anything online without seeking an opinion. The field is broad so the opportunities endless.
Is affiliate marketing that hard
Known as the “best game in town ” affiliate marketing is arguably the easiest entry to the market and with potentially large rewards.
You can enter the market for very little money output and soon be making great returns.
However, it takes some learning time to understand a few rules that will provide a chance of success. There is no easy money on the internet however this can come very close if you have the right products and apply the skills needed to be in the top 20%
The best Affiliate training for free
When I started my affiliate journey I made a heap of mistakes and even though it did not lose me a lot of money it lost valuable time. I chose the wrong products, used the wrong domains, and went about the marketing without sufficient knowledge to win the game.
A couple of years back I came across Wealthy Affiliate and started their training with the initial free courses. This turned into a monthly payment and now the yearly master subscription.
Without a doubt, this is the most honest and straightforward product set on the market. Nothing else comes near it as you will quickly learn as you join in the member's forum.
Nothing comes to you without input. You will quickly learn what products or markets suit you so that you tackle a direction that will take you through to a conclusion. There are millions of niches and perhaps just one that will suit you and your lifestyle.
Understanding all the above will set you on a path to success.
Furthermore, you will get your first affiliate product
How affiliate marketing works
You are marketing a product for someone else. To do that you will need to display the product using a web page, blog, funnel, Facebook post, or any other available media.
When someone purchases the product you get a cut of the pie.
If you sold a $5000 training product, as an example, you may be rewarded $1000 for your effort, or a quarter of a million-dollar property may give you a 2.5% or $6250 return.
As stated above a $20 book might make you $1 hardly a return you will rave about.
The Wealthy Affiliate program pays a percentage of the regular payment amount. It may be just $24 a month however that may go on for several years amounting to a $1000 sale.
The idea is to sell many of the monthly payments so you build a regular monthly income
How long does it take for affiliate marketing to work
One month or perhaps one year or more depending on all the variables that go into this.
You can generate little or tens of thousands of dollars every month depending on products, and marketing. returns and customer acquisition.
Many will start with friends and family and grow their audience from a small base while others may pay for an audience using advertising on places like Facebook or Instagram.
It will also depend on the time invested and the output created to gather your return. If you contribute a few hours a week the return will be far less than someone that takes it on as a full-time pursuit and has a far greater reach to the market.
Growing your audience
Affiliate marketing comes down to sales and these come from someone seeing your offers and taking advantage of them by clicking and buying.
It may be from a web page, a blog, a funnel or posts on Social media, or even a combination of all of these.
Great SEO, Keyword selection, and the quality of your work can grow a base that costs you little in monetary contribution.
Maybe you want to fast-track this by paying for ads on Google, Facebook, or Instagram and soliciting new subscribers through the various paid channels.
Paying for subscribers can be rewarding if the cost of purchase is less than the funds achieved.
If you paid $20 for a customer that returned you $30 then it is a no-brainer and you would do it all day.
Branching out to new products
Fortunately, you don't need to concentrate on just one affiliate product. The number is unlimited however I would suggest that there is a reasonable amount.
You want to give every one of them a full opportunity to be successful so spreading yourself too thin will generally decrease returns.
My bank of products is about twenty related around online income and stretching through to investing, and mentor training and I also write self-help and self-development blogs to assist those that need a bit of help along the way.
Once you establish yourself as a marketer the world of options is yours however always choose with long-term potential in mind. I recently had a product that I have invested heavily in selling their business and dropping the affiliate program.
Ways to get your Mojo back
Banking the money or reinvesting
This decision will come to you at a time in the future. You are making a bit of income and may decide to invest that into extra customer acquisition schemes, for example, advertising, high-priced training programs or even purchasing products to review.
Reinvesting is a great idea if it will boost your return. However, if you are throwing good money at bad returns then quit early and don't ride the long path to reality.
Conclusion and wrap up
Finally, you have enough information to start a journey that can reward you handsomely. However, I will reinforce that few get-rich-quick schemes are realistic.
You may see some advertised that look very attractive however treat everyone with caution. My saying is with many of the schemes only the promoters get rich, and that is not you.
Like any industry, a percentage will make it to the top and those are the ones that contribute a lot whilst many will moan about the lack of opportunity without having a hard look at themselves.
With many millions of people doing the same thing, you need to be better than them.
Fortunately, this is easy to achieve as long as you follow some rules and do the work then results will come.
Start by doing the basic training and quickly build a career of your own.
How hard is affiliate marketing to start and make money by Peter Hanley
