What is affiliate marketing?
Considering the current financial crisis and rising unemployment, many have looked into ways of earning some cash online to supplement their income. Those looking for online opportunities to make a little extra green inevitably hear about affiliate marketing. It’s essentially the idea of promoting an online business, and receiving payments for each referral you send their way.
The method of compensation varies between companies, but the basic idea is to promote a service or product online, and if you succeed in referring someone to the parent company’s website, you get a commission payment. For the company this amounts to outsourcing online advertising and promotion to affiliate marketers who work as independent contractors
Does affiliate marketing work for businesses?
Whether or not affiliate marketing actually works depends upon your perspective. For many businesses, the idea is excellent because it operates on a “pay for performance” model; meaning that the business pays only when an affiliate successfully generates tangible results. A number of major online businesses, such as Amazon.com, did very well with affiliate marketing in their early years.
Similarly, since the online business can develop its ownaffiliate programs that operate under its own terms and conditions, many online businesses have chosen to set them up. That said, affiliate marketers get few benefits from businesses that are local or have products that are mostly off line. Further, failure to properly restrict the activity of affiliates or to monitor for abuses also leads to many unscrupulous affiliate marketers giving the business they are promoting a bad name or negative associations.
Does affiliate marketing acutally benefit the affiliates?
It’s undeniable that some have made successful careers from affiliate marketing, but concurrently, it appears the majority don’t make much more than enough to do a weekly load of wash at a coin-op laundry. Since affiliate marketers provide an independent service, the industry is more or less unregulated, meaning it is impossible to get exact numbers on how successful the venture is for some.
Also, it’s difficult to assess the effecicacy of affiliate marketing because a lot of people are selling information on how to effectively market as an affiliate. This means that there is an enormous amount of misleading information online about how successful affiliate marketers can be, since the promoters have a vested interested in getting people to buy their “how to” materials. Since affiliate marketing is an online enterprise, people can basically say whatever they want you to believe, and it’s not like there are reliable sources you can verify. Just because one affiliate marketer claims to have made $ 60,000 a month doesn’t mean it’s true, and there’s no way to find out if it’s true, which it likely isn’t.
Who’s been successful with affiliate marketing?
Like any industry, there are occasional flukes where people succeed by sheer luck as opposed to skill or talent; but as always, these are the exceptions. Generally, most confirmed successful affiliate marketers were already established and successful in marketing or advertising or had a strong background in either or both. Also, many proven successes are people who were there since the beginning in the late 1990s.
There aren’t many people who jumped in and were successful right away, and those that do are implausible at best. The few who have become successful very quickly usually have had access to some new innovation, such as the development of a completely new niche, technology, or marketing strategy. Despite extraordinary claims that a 12 year old could write, the claims can’t be verified at all and there isn’t concrete evidence that affiliate marketers make siginificant incomes from it.
Get rich quick? Probably not.
Since so many affiliate marketers are making their money by selling instructional affiliate marketing materials, there are many claims that affiliate marketing offers the opportunity to get rich quick. These claims tend to resonate loudly in the current economic climate where so many desperate people are looking for ways to make livings or supplement incomes. However, as with most “get rich quick” schemes, most often it’s a scam. Even if you have a great concept to open a new niche or market, or a strong marketing/advertising background, odds aren’t good that you’ll make a sustainable living on it for years.
While creating the online infrastructure for affiliate marketing can take a couple of months, actually making money can take a lot longer. Most confirmed successes admit freely that it took them between one to five years before they even thought about quitting their day jobs.
Is affiliate marketing the right fit for you?
If you already have a marketing or advertising background, or have a great idea, you might be able to do very well with affiliate marketing. But in this case, don’t expect it to do so overnight, or be able to without investing time and energy. If you have no experience in the field and are simply looking for a quick and easy way to make some emergency cash, realistically speaking, affiliate marketing is probably not going to be the solution to your problem.