Why Affiliate Marketing

So, when it comes to an online business, why affiliate marketing ? What is affiliate marketing and why isn’t it going away? There are many online business models which work, what makes affiliate marketing the best and why choose affiliate marketing?

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business models on the internet. It works and anyone can do it. Some argue that affiliate marketing doesn’t work (see this article “why affiliate marketing does not work” here), but the model does work, even it it doesn’t work for certain people.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

why affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing. It rewards people for referring sales. Anyone can start up as an affiliate marketer which means it’s an open market. This can explain also the high drop out rate for affiliate marketers. You don’t need to own anything in order to do affiliate marketing. You can simply refer people to other people’s products. More and more companies are allowing affiliates to promote their products over the internet all the time. If you want to promote something online, you just need to find a suitable affiliate program and you can do it.

Amazon, for example, is the biggest affiliate marketing company on the internet. Anyone can join the Amazon associates program and promote anything from the site to earn a commission. To promote an affiliate product, you need to gain the attention of appropriate potential customers. You can do this in a number of different ways.

Sources Of Traffic For Online Sales

As an affiliate marketer, your job is mainly as the ‘middle man’ in a sales transaction. You refer a customer to a website where they can buy something. As your link is tracked, you earn a credit for the sale. You don’t personally need to speak to any customers or hold, purchase or send any products either. This is one reason why affiliate marketing is so attractive as a business model. You can find customers from multiple sources:

  • Blogging and gaining organic traffic from the search engines
  • Creating content like video, podcasts or holding webinars
  • Using social media to build an audience
  • By using paid advertising campaigns to send traffic directly to offers.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Best

why affiliate marketing

Still wondering why affiliate marketing is the best? There are other business models which offer the same automation and scalability as affiliate marketing. Drop shipping for example is a similar model which lets the affiliate (or business owner) send targeted traffic to other people’s offers. The company delivers on the goods and the referrer or affiliate takes a cut. Both models let anyone set up a simple sales website or advertising campaign which directs website traffic to good and services. Affiliate marketing works well with this model because you can choose almost any product you can find on the internet and sell it internationally.

In addition, you can also sell digital products. Unlike drop shipping, digital products don’t require any postage and can be accessed directly over the internet. This is a major benefit to affiliate marketing over other online sales models. Because of the low costs involved in sending out digital content or accessing a training website, for example, the affiliate can earn larger commissions based on the sales. Physical products which physically need to be built, stored and shipped, carry more costs and as such can afford lower rates of commission for their affiliates.

Why Use Affiliate Marketing?

why affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is also a scalable business model. Because the internet is global, the best products to sell are suitable for a global audience and can be delivered cheaply. Affiliate marketing fits both these criteria perfectly. Online marketing methods also allow anyone to test and measure advertising campaigns and use direct response marketing to sell digital products. Direct response marketing is the best method because you can start small and build up your business while testing campaigns.

Unlike a giant corporation, most people can’t afford to build a ‘brand’. Brand marketing costs a lot of money. Companies like Pepsi and CocaCola have huge advertising budgets which have been used to build their brand. As an affiliate marketer starting out, you can’t possibly do this. No-one knows you. Direct response marketing allows you to build up your advertising budget while learning. When something sells, you can track back to what element of your campaign works well and do more of that.

Top affiliates spend thousands daily on the advertising budgets but they started small. Once their advertising campaigns started generating profit, they know it is safe to scale up. Scaling up a profitable campaign is as simple as changing your daily budget. If everything is in place and you are selling and making a profit, simply let your adverts run and scale.

In a ‘normal’ bricks and mortar business, scaling up is more difficult. Locality, size and number of employees all limit your business. With affilaite marketing, you have a global audience. Providing your systems are in place, this can run automatically around the clock without anyone being present. This is a huge reason why affiliate marketing is such a popular business system – it can run automatically 24/7.

New Lifestyle Businesses

why affiliate marketing

The growth in lifestyle businesses is largely due to this business model. When I started looking at affiliate marketing several years ago, I knew it had a huge potential. It wasn’t until I discoved this business system that things began to change in my affilaite business. It’s down to a number of factors.

Education

Most people don’t understand affiliate marketing. At best they think it’s some kind of online ‘get rich quick scheme’. However affiliate marketing is a genunine business model. With the right training and education, anyone can now build an internet business from scratch.

Community

10 years ago there was much less available training for affilaites. You simply learned as you went and had a lot of failures. There were some training courses which didn’t really deliver. Now you can join an education and training program which has a built in community, regular live webinars and seminars and successful affiliates available who actually show up in person.

An Affective Business System

why affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing can many different business models. Some advise to write content, some say you should build a list of subscribers with paid advertising. However, what I found the most useful was understanding the business model. At first I used low value products which paid out $40 on a sale. I later learned to use high ticket items which paid out much larger commissions.

Subscription Products

Subscriptions can also have a huge impact on your affilaite business. By selling subscription affilaite products you can earn again and again from a single sale. Using a ‘product suite’ can also mean you can earn later on for referrals by sales closed by the company. All these strategies make for a much more powerful business system. Knowing this can save you a heap of time and money.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is A Good Choice

why affiliate marketing

As you can see, there are several ways to do affilaite marketing. Knowing the right path is vital for your success as an affilaite marketer. Here’s a few other reasons why affilaite marketing is a good choice for an online business:

  • Low entry price – You can start affilaite marketing at very low cost. One thing worth paying for is your education because free advice isn’t always the best advice.
  • International appeal – Having a product or service you can sell internationally means you have the ability to sell anywhere. Digital products mean you can earn 40% commissions.
  • An affiliate business is very scalable. Once you learn how to sell online, you have a skill which means you are always in demand, and never need an employer.
  • Your earnings aren’t capped as in regular employment. Although affilaite marketing is performance based, the ability to earn on ‘autopilot’ and scale means your earnings can grow over time and are not limited.
  • You don’t need to emply anyone as an affiliate marketer – Use the internet, automation, and systems to ‘leverage’ your time by selling digital products globally
  • You can eventually become self employed and life anywhere you choose. Work from a laptop with an internet connection.
  • You can build an internet business around your current lifestyle.

Access an online education platform and start your own online affilaite marketing business.