Affiliate marketing is an opportunity for anyone to make an online business from home with little upfront cost. Though its expectations are promoting a product and getting paid for it, that’s not the reality. Many people don’t know the steps and dedication needed in order to become a successful affiliate marketer.
Affiliate marketing isn’t a quick make money scheme. It takes a lot of time and effort to earn money, gain traction on platforms, and come up with a long-term tried and true strategy. The plus here is that it doesn’t require a lot of money or skill to start, so this is attractive for beginners! Just a few hours a day will land you a stable income stream.
Let’s start by discussing pros and cons.
Pros:
- Low overhead cost
- Flexibility
- Remote work
- Anyone can do it
- High earning potential
- Generates passive income
Cons:
- A lot of time and work needed to start
- Constant search engine and industry changes
- High competition
Let’s get some unrealistic expectations out of the way. You’re not going to start affiliate marketing and begin immediately making enough money to quit your full-time job. You’re not going to nail your first campaign, find what works and be set to go on a vacation while your ads are generating money at home.
Affiliate marketing is similar to starting any other business: it requires time, dedication, and consistency. The difference in doing affiliate marketing versus starting your own business is that it requires a lot less to start and there’s a lot less to lose.
Let’s dive into the most asked questions and explored topics.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money From Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing has many channels of driving conversions. Native ads, Facebook Ads, Blog content, and organic traffic from Google are just a few. With Facebook’s everchanging policies and continuous struggle to be in compliance, most affiliate marketers aim to drive organic traffic from Google to start.
While Facebook Ads can quickly drive conversions to your offers, it requires a budget and previous knowledge of running successful ads. Organic traffic might take longer than ads on Facebook would, but it doesn’t require a budget and will pay off in the long run.
As an affiliate marketer, you can create content that are keyword rich for your niche to drive organic traffic from search engines. This method will take longer but creating a substantial blog with a hearty number of content-rich posts will set you up for long-term success. At the end of the day, your blog will be able to create a small amount of passive revenue while you fine tweak your ad skills to begin pushing paid campaigns.
Don’t expect to make a substantial income stream from organic traffic right away. This method of traffic will take several months or even up to a year. This isn’t a sign to skip this step, as it will still create revenue.
What Does It Take To Be A Successful Affiliate?
Becoming a successful affiliate is the end goal for anyone looking to get into this industry. It’s open for everyone, but not everyone will succeed. Who will?
Those who are dedicated to learning the ins and outs of this industry.With any industry, you must be willing to be flexible in learning. Showing up each day with the open mind to learn a new skill, a new method, fine-tweak your existing ads, make changes where they need to be made, etc.
This isn’t overnight success. This is the result of hard work and grit. Affiliate marketing requires active income, which will eventually turn into passive income. What do we mean by this?
Well, we all dream of being mega superstar affiliate marketers. Implementing and creating a long-term marketing strategy that earns money while you sleep (passive income ) is not easily done.
Passive income requires a high upfront dedication for the long-term payoff, which is when you will no longer have to trade your hours for money (active income).
Without active income, there is no passive income! The hours of work need to be put in to start in order to create that worthwhile strategy.
It’s important to remember that we all have to start somewhere. The revenue made from an active income will allow you to further invest it back into your business, campaigns, and affiliate marketing methods in order to act on your ideas and create a passive income.
How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?
Affiliate marketing comes with many channels of driving conversions. First, you need to know who you’re targeting. Who is your audience? Knowing your audience is crucial in creating the content that attracts the potential lead to move through your funnel.
Once you understand your audience, think of the content that resonates most with them. For example, if your offer is in the health niche, your audience is likely interested in seeing results from the product or service you’re offering. Think in the shoes of your audience and what would capture your attention.
Now that you’ve planned your content, it’s time to drive traffic. But how?
- Organic traffic from a search engine via keyword ranking
- Native advertising
- Facebook Ads
- Forums
- Social Media Platforms
These are not the only options to get traffic to your website. There are many other methods, and further methods within each of those options, as well. Our biggest recommendation is to reign in and focus on one source at a time. As you begin to master it, you can move to another method to make even more traffic.
Skills Needed As An Affiliate Marketer
Hopefully we haven’t lost you, but instead you’re really amped to get started. Let’s get to the fun stuff!
Did you know that affiliate marketing generates billions of dollars per year? Yeah. Huge industry. Affiliate marketing extends from the health niche to the wealth niche, and now has expanded into paying influential figures on social media a certain dollar amount per conversion of an ad they post.
As with every business, affiliate marketing requires skills to be able to execute your business strategy successfully.
What you’ll need to be able to do:
- Create relevant content
- Rank your articles on search engines
- Manage and track affiliate links
- Create, design, and maintain a website
- Market your content
This is just a short list of what you’ll need to be able to do to perform well as an affiliate marketer. These skills can be learned with time, but it’s best that you begin with a well-designed website loaded with relevant content. As time progresses, you will learn new skills and finely-tweak your old ones!
The More You Know!
We’re hoping this has helped guide you in understanding the expectations vs. the reality of becoming an affiliate marketer. We are not here to sell you an unrealistic dream, but instead show you the ropes and give you a clear understanding of what this industry entails.
So, is affiliate marketing worth it? Yes. It is a serious online business that requires a lot of work but will also offer the reward. There is a lot of money to be made in this business and you have the freedom to decide how you will optimize this opportunity.
Every resource needed in order to start in affiliate marketing is available to all premium members in the Powerhouse Affiliate dashboard.
We also encourage you to check out our YouTube, which is also an affiliate source! Let us teach you the tried-and-true way built by a 7-figure media buyer.
