Affiliate marketing is a lucrative and profitable way to earn money on the internet. Affiliate marketing is perceived to provide a passive income, but it is effective? When you choose to make money from home outside your 9-5 job, it can be a good and strategic investment for your future. If you pick the right niche, it can be a full-time source of income for the rest of your life.
Affiliate marketing, like a referral service, is promoting products and services of other individuals or companies in the hopes of converting leads (prospective customers) into actual sales and get a profit cut from them. You set up a site or maybe a blog and then join affiliate programs that apply to your audience. You can hook up to these programs via affiliate networks, which supply you with a link you include in your site. When someone clicks this link and purchases the item, you will get a percentage of the sale as a commission.
The affiliate marketing business is growing continuously, and according to Statista, the US affiliate marketing spend is projected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022 – a significant increase from 5.4 billion in 2017 and 1.6 billion in 2010. Another study from VigLink presents a closer look at exactly how much income online marketers are making. About 65% of merchants said they had made between 5% – 20% of their annual revenue from affiliate marketing. The survey even showed a link between revenues and experience. Among the merchants using the most revenue, 60% had been engaged in affiliate marketing for five years or even more.
The most considerable advantage of affiliate marketing is that you can generate revenue on autopilot once it’s up and running. Everything you will need is a constant flow of visitors to your website or blog. But along the way, you will learn several drawbacks. If a business changes the conditions of its affiliate marketing program, it might directly affect your revenues. If you become an affiliate marketer for unreliable and untrustworthy companies, it can also be problematic simply because no one would be compelled to buy the products you market from them. Also, because of affiliate marketing’s success, you will need to deal with competitors that promote the same products you market. Lastly, you will have to make sure to maintain high traffic by posting fresh content consistently. Other challenges and drawbacks include:
- It takes a lot of hard work and a considerable amount of time to build traffic that results in revenues.
- You cannot control the businesses’ fulfillment of a specific product. A bad affiliate referral can destroy your credibility with followers; therefore, you must study and select quality companies.
- Due to affiliate hijacking, you are not given credit for your referral. Hence, some companies fail to pay.
- Affiliate advertising is extremely competitive. Many affiliates market the same merchandise and vie for the same traffic. It is usually not easy to get approval for popular companies or favorite products.
- Your stats will give the number of sales you make out of a product but will not provide you with info on who made the purchase. This could make it hard to track or tap into recurring revenue.
So to explicitly answer the question, “Can affiliate marketing make you money?” the answer is a big YES!
With the countless testimonials of successful affiliate marketers, it still works without a doubt. But it is only possible if you combine strategic planning and a lot of hard work put into action. It is usually hard to generate a constant income from affiliate marketing and more challenging to stand out among various other online marketers advertising the same products. As soon as you have developed your social media platforms, newsletters, blogs, or websites, there are actions you need to take to be effective in generating a far more dependable revenue stream.
They are:
- Research about affiliate programs before joining any of them so that you have a full understanding of when and how you will be paid.
- Purchase the products you plan to market to be able to attest to their quality individually. You will be gauged by the product or service you market, so do not concentrate only on earning a profit but more so on your brand’s quality and recommendations. Based on your recommendations, you build trust with your followers, and this trust compels them to make a purchase.
- Choose affiliate products that fit your niche and also your content. Do not rely on SEO or social media alone to drive traffic to your site and affiliate referrals. Get an understanding of who your target audience is, where to find them, and how you can attract more users to your site.
- To avoid overwhelming your visitors, try to mix and match affiliate ads. Content-embedded affiliate links commonly have better click-through rates than image links. Try to use a lead page and a funnel system to promote your affiliate business.
- Be sure to comply with all legal requirements by explicitly stating that affiliate links can generate income for you. If you don’t disclose this, you can face legal penalties.
- Monitor and track your affiliate programs’ results, most especially if you work with more than one program. Determine and assess which of your programs are doing well and what products are popular with your followers. This will help you better your strategies in your future campaigns.
Like any work from home business, success in affiliate marketing depends on how much time and energy you are willing to commit to growing, achieve your business goals, and develop relationships with your customers and partner brands.
Should you choose to go after affiliate marketing, understand that it is not a fast or a get-rich scheme that most fake programs promise. But yes, you can definitely earn from being an affiliate marketer!
