Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? Absolutely yes you can. There’s a better question to ask though. More importantly to ask is what does it take to make a living from being an affiliate. An even better question might be what’s the best way to make a living from affiliate marketing. What kind of living is another question too, one we will cover later in this article.

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

Yes is a short answer but the fact that thousands of people have already made affiliate marketing their main source of income speaks volumes. Fewer have made a killing with affiliate marketing and could retire if they wanted. Most affiliates, it must be pointed out fail. The same statistic applies for most self employed enterprises though too. See this why small businesses fail infographic. So if most small businesses fail, it stands to reason that most people starting up as affiliate marketers will fail too. This is an important point to note because being forewarned is being fore armed.

Why Do Most People Fail At Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an open market. Anyone can join an affiliate network, such as the one on Amazon, and promote products online. Because of this there is a massive amount of so called affiliate marketers ‘having a go’. That doesn’t mean they will stick at it and in fact most give up before they start to see any results at all.

Another reason people quit is because they don’t understand what affiliate marketing is, what the best business models are or how to promote and sell products online. Knowing the premise of affiliate marketing and being able to do it are two different things. Online marketing is a skill, and one that can be learned. But it does take time and effort to apply these skills, fail and keep going until you succeed.

What Does It Take To Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

This is a good question and one which any serious affiliate should be asking of themselves. Perseverance, drive and a willingness to learn and have an open mind are just a few of the attributes which successful affiliates brought to their businesses. A never-ending desire to succeed in this industry will ensure succeess, no matter how long it takes or what it takes.

Small Achievable Goals (Baby Steps)

However, that being said, success comes from achieving small achievable goals over and over. Long term goals should be broken down into small achievable steps. Early success in affiliate marketing too, can make a difference. Once you make an online sale, you know it can work.

If you struggle for years and don’t ever make a sale, it can be much harder maintaining forward motivation and drive. Your strategy has a great deal to do with this. The strategy you choose can depend on your personal circumstances, though. Depending on your budget and income, you might choose one of several methods to advertise your affiliate business.

What’s The Best Advertising Method With Affiliate Marketing?

Can you make a living with affilaite marketing? Yes you can! However, your strategy for advertsing and your business model both have a lot to do with this. Let’s first look at advertising methods and then move on to your business model.

Content Marketing

The ‘best’ strategy is a subjective idea. However, certain strategies definitely have advantages over others. If you don’t have any money, but have lots of time, building content might be a good strategy. This is a longer term strategy however than using paid advertising.

Plus you will need to learn how to do this effectively, or you could be wasting a lot of time. That’s time spent learning as well as time spent building content. All of that is dead time. You can be rewarded well later for this, if your content does well and gets a lot of coverage. You can build solid traffic over time with this startegy and get ‘free’ traffic from it over the long term.

Paid Advertising

If time is of the essence, you should use paid advertising. Paid advertising has the advantage of being able to be scaled up once you find a suitable advert. Paid traffic takes time too but it can be like ‘turning on’ traffic rather than waiting for it to build momentum – as in the case of content marketing. As you test out certain adverts you can be spending money and getting nothing back.

This is the early testing phase. Don’t stop here because the ‘goodies’ are waiting for those who persevere through this point. Once you have found a paid advert which generates leads and sales, you are in a position to test and measure your advert against a similar one. Do this for long enough and you will find a winning advert.

A ‘winning’ advert will give you back more in income than you are spending. This may not be immediately depending on your sales system. But overall, your ROI (return on investment) should be larger than your advertising expenditure. Once you have found this with your advert, you can simply leave it running and go on to build another one. Or you can scale up your existing advert to reach more people in a similar target audience.

What’s The Best Way To Earn From Affiliate Marketing?

List Building

Again this is subjective. Affiliates can succeed in various different business models and have used a variety of different strategies. Some build websites to rank on Google, others concentrate on paid advertising. Most successful affiliate marketers use the tactic of list building and generate sales through their list. In terms of business models, list building is a must, whatever you do.

Sales Funnel

Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? Using a business model with a range of products within your sales funnel, gives you the opportunitiy to make multiple sales, rather than just one. In addition to this, if you choose products which are subscription based, you can earn multiple times from a single customer.

Repeat Custom

Think about how traditional busiensses work. They have repeat custom. Unless your business model has repeat custom, you will always be looking for new customers. This can become difficult when you’re only selling a single item, even with the internet. Having a range or a ‘suite’ of products to offer people immediately increases your ROI (return on investment) potential.

A sales funnel is worth more to you as an affiliate marketer with a range of products:

• Subscription products (memberships)
• High ticket products (items over $500+)
• Built in up-sells within your sales funnel

By having products like these in your sales funnel, you can earn more per subscriber than you would for a single affilaite product selling for under $100, for example. Building a sales system around these kinds of products can be much more lucrative, especially if you’re going to use paid advertising to scale up. As paid advertising gets more expensive on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, you will need these kinds of products to compete on these advertising platforms.

What Kind Of Living Can Affiliates Make?

Top affiliates are multimillionaires. That’s not to say all affiliates earn this kind of money. They definitely don’t. Many struggle and never earn a thing online.

But for the affiliates who learn how to tap into a global audience with these kinds of products there are great rewards. Affiliates can earn all level of income from their efforts. It really depends on the business system they use, their personal preferences in how they work and how they advertise their affilaite business.

However, most affiliates fail because they don’t give themselves the proper education and time to learn. They think affiliate marketing is a ‘quick buck’ and so get disappointed when they fail. If you really want to do well as an affiliate, you need to apply yourself to learning and implementing some proven strategies.

If it doesn’t work straight away, see that as an issue with your understanding, not with affiliate marketing itself. Can you make a living with affilaite marketing? Yes absolutely. But it depends on your ability to work hard, keep an open mind and persevere through difficulties and obstacles. See also why affiliate marketing does not work.

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

So can you make a living from affiliate marketing/ Yes you can but don’t quit your day job just yet. Most affiliate marketers don’t suddenly become successful overnight, although it can happen to a degree. Mostly though it is after a lot of hard work and trying and failing when affiliate marketers start to see their affiliate business grow.

The best thing about an affilaite business is that once you start seeing your income grow you can reinvest and scale up. Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? Definitely yes, but it takes time and hard work like any business. Don’t expect miracles if you don’t want to put the hours in. Initially an internet business can take up your time and money. After a while though, it can start to repay your hard work.

Once you have a business system in place which works, you can scale up and automate. This is why top affiliates say they have more time and money, but it wasn’t without the hard work in the first place. Usually they have worked hard for months or even years before they see the financial rewards.