If you have heard some success stories of people making money with Affiliate Marketing you are probably wondering how hard it can be before deciding to get started.
Whether you find Affiliate Marketing hard or not will depend a lot on personal factors. For someone who works a strenuous physical job, being able to earn money while sitting in a computer from the comfort of their home might seem super easy.
On the other hand, someone with a corporate job who is used to following orders might find it hard to be disciplined and put in the work someone else telling them what to do.
While the answer will depend a lot on individual factors like your experience, personality and skills, I will give you an honest look at the ‘easiest’ and ‘hardest’ parts of Affiliate Marketing so you know exactly what to expect and can make an informed decision.
I’ll also share the differents ways to do Affiliate Marketing that beginners usually don’t know and that will help you choose the best and easiest one for your success.
What affiliate marketing is really about?
“I promote existing products and make a commission when someone makes a purchase”
“I partner with companies I like and promote their products in exchange for a commission on every sale”
“I share products I like and make money when people buy through my links”
If you ask any affiliate out there what they do of how they earn their money, they’ll give you their own version of one of the sentences above.
While that is technically correct, it is not the full picture nor the most important part of your job as an affiliate.
Finding the right affiliate programs to promote is definitely one key step in your affiliate journey but what will determine your success is knowing how to create an audience of potential buyers and send lots of targeted traffic to said offers.
This is what most affiliates find hard and the reason why they quit before seeing results. They spend too much time worrying about finding the perfect offer and creating landing pages but not enough learning how to drive traffic consistently.
Without that, you can’t make a single commission and will be tempted to give up.
Affiliate Marketing Methods, which one is easier?
When you first hear about Affiliate Marketing you usually learn about one of three available methods. However, those that are teaching it will present it as the only way to succeed so you’ll just assume that it is the way to go.
While people teaching affiliate marketing will naturally share the method that they know and that has worked for them, it won’t necessarily be the one that better aligns with your skills, and that will be the easiest one to succeed with.
Alternatively, you might’ve also heard about different methods and thought you needed to learn all of them to be successful which is not true.
You can get great results with any of the methods I’ll share below. Take a close look at them and the skills they require to you can decide which one will help you get results more easily.
1. Content and SEO
Search Engine Organization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing your content in order to appear on search results.
Put simply, your goals is to put your content in fron of people who are already looking for related topics.
For example, if you were promoting a weight loss product using this method, you’d create articles or video and optimize them to appear on search results when someone looks for related keywords like:
- How to lose weight fast
- Best diet to lose weight
- How much weight can you lose in a week
- etc.
This is what bloggers like myself and Youtubers do.
- We find out the problems and questions of our target audience
- We create content that helps them where we can present our affiliate offers as part of the solution.
- We optimize that content to rank on search results.
What skills you should learn to succeed:
- Content creation: whether it is blog posts or videos, you need to learn how to create content that helps and provides value to your audience so they trust your recommendations. This also involves researching and learning about your niche if you are still not familiarized with it.
- SEO: not only does your content needs to be helpful but you need to master the art of SEO if you want it to ever be found by potential clients. This includes keyword research, quality content, and authority building.
What is the hardest part about this method?
While doing Affiliate Marketing this way a great way to create long-term sustainable passive income, it also takes a while to see results. If you are creating content consistently, it can take 6-8 months to get significant organic traffic on Youtube and 12+ months in the case of a blog.
If you have a hard time working for delay gratification, you might find it hard to stay motivated and keep pushing content when you are not getting immediate results.
What is the easiest part about this method?
Using content and SEO to get organic traffic is one of the cheapest and lowest-risk ways to get started with Affiliate Marketing. You can start a Youtube channel for free and a blog for $3/month.
2. Authority and audience
This method of doing affiliate marketing is based on building your authority and positioning yourself as an expert in your niche in order to build an audience of followers who trust you and are interested in what you have to say.
In a lot of ways, this is similar to being an ‘influencer’ and also involves creating content. But instead of doing it through a blog or website, it is usually done through a social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
The way this method works is by sharing entertaining or educational content that is relevant to your target audience. This is also known as attraction marketing and will inevitably attract people who are potential clients for your affiliate offers and motivate them to follow you.
You can then create content where you sahre your affiliate offers or present whenever somebody asks a relevant questions.
This method involves creating a more close relationship with your followers in order to gain their trust and build your leadership. Depending on the platfrom you use, you can do this through Live Streaming, direct messaging or simply responfing ot heir comments in your posts.
Some of the most common platfrom to do Affiliate Makreting with this method include:
- Facebook Personal Profiles
- Facebook Groups
- TikTok
- Instagram Personal Accounts
What skills you should learn to succeed:
- Expertise in your niche: While you need this skill for any method, in this case, you’ll have more direct interaction with your audience so you’ll need to understand their problems and be able to help and answer their questions at any moment.
- Copywriting: You won’t be contrary to blogger, you won’t be writing long-form copy but you’ll need to learn how to create short-form copy for social media posts or emails that catch the attention of your audience and turns them into buyers. This involves clear thinking and simple language that connects with your readers and moves them to engage with your offers.
What is the hardest part about this method?
Using Social Media to build an audience and send traffic to your affiliate offers is one of the fastest ways to start making money with Affiliate marketing. Hwoever, it can be challenging if you considerin yourslef shy and don’t enjoy to be on the spotlight.
This method is based on building a personal brand and using your influence to promote your affiliate offers so if you don’t enjoy attention, it will. be hard to be successful with this strategy.
What is the easiest part about this method?
This method can help you send unlimited traffic to your affiliate offers for free and faster than other organic strategies.
It doesn’t requiere a lot of time investment eiher and you can you can grow a your audience with only 1-2 hours a day and start getting commission on your first month.
Platforms like TikTok have made it possible for beginners to grow a following of 10k-100K in months and it is still a good time to jump on it. New adaptors on an app always get a head start so keep an eye for these type of opportunities.
3. Paid advertisement
This last method involves using paid ads to get in front of potential buyers and drive traffic to your affiliate offers.
While you can get instant traffic on-demand that doesn’t mean you will necessarily make money as fast. The key to being successful with this strategy is testing and optimizing the different pieces of your ad campaign so you can make a profit after deducting the ad spend.
As a beginner, it might take some time to familiarize yourself with the platform you choose and you might lose some money during the process. But, if you have the budget to invest, this is the most scalable strategy of them all.
Some of the most popular platforms for paid advertisement include:
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads
- Google Ads
- Snapchat Ads
- TikTok Ads
- Pinterest Ads
- Native Ads
While each platform is unique and has its own learning curve, most of them have something similar: they are not super fond of affiliate marketers so you can’t use your affiliate links directly as the destination for your ads.
Instead, you’ll need to use a landing page or ‘bridge’ page in between. The other goal of doing this is to capture your visitors’ emails so you can follow up with those that din’t buy on the first time and increase your conversions.
What skills you should learn to succeed:
- Copywriting: This is a highly important skill for different methods of affiliate marketing. In this case, you’ll be writing ads and landing pages that should attract visitors and pre-sell them on your affiliate offer.
Your copy will influence key factors like your click to rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC), and Cost per purchase (CPP) which will ultimately determine the profitability (or lack of) of your ad campaigns.
- Ad management: To be successful with this method, you need to master the art of creating and optimizing your ad campaigns in order to reduce costs and maximize profits, This includes targeting, creatives, a/b testing, and scaling.
What is the hardest part about this method?
While this method can bring you quick results, you need to have a siginifcant budget to invest and be willing to lose some of it before seeing profits.
All ads platforms are competitive and the costs increase regularly so you need to be able to keep up with the trends, push out new creatives constantly to avoid ad fatigue and be able to scale your campaigns without increasing your costs.
What is the easiest part about this method?
The easiest part about this method is that you don’t need to create content or build an audience to get results. A lot of people don’t have the time to create articles or videos and prefer to see results faster by putting some money up front.
You also don’t need to show your face or put yourself out there which is something that attracts a lot of people to this strategy. You can run ads under a brand and stay behind the scenes.
While you can be successful with any of these methods, most affiliates tend to diversify their traffic sources once they have mastered their first strategy.
You have probably witnessed this with content creators that have a presence in more than one platform or when you’ve been targeted with an ad after visiting a blog or Youtube channel.
This is a good idea because you don’t own most of these audiences and you don’t want to rely on a single platform that can cancel your account overnight. But as a beginner, the best you can do to get results is to focus on one strategy and stick with it until you have mastered it before spreading it to a second one.
Why people think Affiliate Marketing is hard
By now, hope you have make your own decision on whether affiliate makreting is hard or easy. But to help you, I’ll share some of the reason why people can think Affiliate marketing is hard and why most of them are wrong.
“You need to have a website”
As you have seen on the methods I have shared, having a website is only one of the many options to do Affiliate Marketing and there are other strategies that don’t require one.
People also confuse a website with a landing page which is most often needed in Affiliate Marketing. But a landing page is easier to create, doesn’t need more than a few paragraphs of content, and can be done in minutes using a funnel builder like Clickfunnels.
Additionally, if you decide to create a blog or another type of affiliate niche site, I can honestly tell you, it is not half as hard as it sounds. Nowadays there are templates and drag-and-drop builders for everything and you can have one ready in a couple of hours.
“You need to have a lot of followers“
Also false. You don’t need a lot of followers to make a significant money with Affiliate Marketing.
There are affiliate offers that can pay $1000 to$2500 on commission per every sale you can make a full-time income with a few sales a month.
Recurring commissions like those from software and memberships are also a great way to grow up your income every month with just a few referrals.
“You need to have a big budget for ads and courses”
Another common myth is that you the only way to be sucesful with Affiliate Makreting is to spend a lot of money on ads whic is very far from true. 90% of the most sucesful affiliates I know have never paid one dollar on ads and are making multiple 7 figures/year.
Thanks to the interent and social media, anyone can build a profitbale affiliate business from with nothing but consistency and determination.
When it comes to education and learning Affiliate Marketing, most of the content is of out there for free if you take the time to look at it. But you can also save yourself a lot of time and improve your chances to succeed by following the steps of people who are already getting the type of results you want to aim for.
Honestly, I think most of these are excuses from people who’d rather find a reason not to try than to actually put on the work.
How to make Affiliate Marketing easier?
Stick with one offer and one method
Any respectable affiliate marketer will tell you this. The fastest way to failure os to change offers and strategies every week just becuase you haven;t seen results yet. Success requirres consistnecy, it is the ony way you’ll learn and perfect your skills. If you stick with something long enoguh, you’ll get results sooner or later and can then simply risne and repeat.
Do your research before starting
The best way to be confident about what you are doing and don’t feel tempted to t ry a different thing is to do some research about your options before commiting to one.
Research affiliate offers, the mehtods that cathc your attention, how are other affiliates doing in the niche, etc. This way when you decide on your products and strategies, you can be confident that there is no something else out there you should be doing.
Invest in your success
Having the right guidance and support can make the whole process easier, increse your chances of success and help you get better results faster.
A lot of people also quit too soon because they have no idea where to start or what to do next. But that can be easily solved by learning from a course of a mentor who already knows what to do and can give you the formula you need to follow to succeed.
This 15-day challenge is taught by 9-figure Affiliate Marketer David Sharpe and will guide you step by step into building your own profitable affiliate business. Best part? it is only $7.
Is Affiliate Marketing Hard? – Final thoughts
Is Affiliate Marketing Hard? What would you say now?
I think Affiliate Marketing is simple. The process and the strategies are out there for you to follow and you only need to stay focused and consistent to succeed.
Now, it that hard or easy? It totally depends on you.
For me, it is easier to make more money from home with 4-5 hours a day than what I used to do at my soul-sucking 9 hours a day corporate job.
But it also requires some self-motivation and discipline. Some clear vision and determination of why you are doing this and what type of life you want for yourself. (Which is not always easy)
It has allowed me to quit my job and travel the world for 3 years full time (before covid). But most importantly, it has lifted the worry of money of my shoulders and given me space to enjoy life on my own terms.
The hardest part is getting started and overcoming your own doubts but once you see you first commission, there is no going back!
So, what is your verdict? let me know in the comments!
