Is Affiliate Marketing Easy? Not So Fast

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You decided to take the first steps into building your own online affiliate marketing business. Good for you.

But now you’re starting to dig in a little bit deeper and beginning to get an idea of what it’s going to take to make this business successful.

And one of the big questions that you have asked yourself and that everyone who gets into this business asks themselves is this.

Is affiliate marketing easy?   The simple answer is no it is not an easy business to be in. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of hard work, and it takes a lot of patience. There’s nothing easy about it especially when you’re first starting it.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

It’s not easy and it takes a lot of time but the rewards that you can reap down the line are absolutely worth the time and effort you put in today to make that passive income part of your financial future.

Read on to discover what makes it so difficult and how you can alleviate some of that difficulty by piggybacking off of people who have already been there and done that and learn the lessons that you’re going to need to learn in order to make a successful affiliate marketing business.

There Is Just Something About Owning Your Own Business. Being Your Own Boss. Building Something From The Ground Up With Your Own Hands. Especially When It Is This Easy To Get Started.


Affiliate Marketing Is Not Easy

I think this is where a lot of people get the idea that affiliate marketing is an easy business to be in. And that’s because the concept of affiliate marketing is absolutely simple.

It looks easy from the outside. It looks like you can just take your affiliate link put it in something like a form or a YouTube video and Wala you are making money instantly.

The simple concept behind affiliate marketing is that you are promoting someone else’s product and when that person buys the product you get a commission for it.

That’s it.

That’s the whole basic concept of affiliate marketing. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s easy to understand,  and it can be very profitable when done properly.

 So what makes affiliate marketing so difficult. If the concept is so simple why is it so difficult to really make a good amount of money with affiliate marketing?

So let’s dive into a few of the reasons why including the very first one and the biggest reason why affiliate marketing is so difficult to get started in. And that is simply traffic, how to get people to your affiliate link.

laptop with traffic date on screen
Traffic Is Tough To Get Early On

Affiliate Traffic Is Tough To Get

When you first get into affiliate marketing and really the entire time that you are running an affiliate marketing business the one overarching issue that you are always going to run into is how to get more traffic to your feelings.

With your running a blog or YouTube channel or show that links on Pinterest or Twitter or Instagram, you still need to get traffic to those links.

This can be difficult.

At least at the start.

There are few ways you can do it you can go with paid advertising which costs a lot of money and there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get the kind of traffic you need to make that investment profitable.

There’s search engine traffic where you get your articles on your blog to rank on the search engines.

But this takes a long time 6, 9, 12 months just to start to see some returns on all the hard work that you put in for the better part of a year.

And then there so many rules with search engine traffic that you can easily run afoul of and end up really hurting your business.

Or Google decides one day to run an algorithm update and it completely ruins your business so that you have to redo a lot of the Articles and figure out what you went did wrong.

Is also social media traffic, traffic from web forms, traffic from comment sections on other blogs, As well as a host of other places where you can try and get traffic from. But none of them are easy.

And this is one of the biggest reasons why fill it Marketing, in general, is a very difficult way to make money online.

But it’s not impossible.

Once you figure out traffic and how to write articles that are going to get that traffic, affiliate marketing becomes much easier.

And once you figured it out you can really tailor your articles and your content to generate traffic from a variety of sources.

scrabble pieces spelling out it is marketing missing the letter k
It Is Easy To Miss Simple Things When You Are Just Starting Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Is Hard Work

Many people think of affiliate marketing is someone working an hour a day in front of the computer at home drinking a margarita and then going out and sitting by the pool or posing in front of their Bugatti.

That’s kind of the image that people have when they look at these affiliate marketing gurus who have Hurley leveraged affiliate marketing in a way that makes the entire industry look pretty bad.

It is unfair to paint the industry with that brush, but the perception of affiliate marketing is the general public is beyond poor thanks to some of these gurus and the less than stellar training programs they have created.

However, there are plenty of Internet affiliate marketing gurus who are great at what they do and really honest and upfront about how they make their money and are helpful to those who are trying to get into the business.

Many of these people have made their own training programs that you can find online and I’ll talk a little bit about that at the end when I discuss some ways to get into affiliate marketing and make affiliate marketing that much easier.

But just be careful of anyone telling you how easy and how quickly you can make a ton of money with affiliate marketing.

There are hundreds of thousands of scams out there that say that almost the exact same thing.

“Earn $5,000 a day working an hour a week with no experience.” You have heard it all before. It sounds too good to be true.

It’s too good to be true because it’s not true.

Affiliate marketing is a lot of hard work and it is not easy. Especially if you decide to create your own blog or YouTube channel.

You have to create that content. Or you have to pay someone to create it for you, either way, you’re still going to be heavily involved in what content gets put on to your blog or Channel.

And this takes time. it takes research, it takes a lot of hard work. This along with traffic are the reasons why affiliate marketing is not an easy business to be in.

transaction between computers with arms sticking out of the monitor
The Concept Is Simple, The Execution Of Affiliate Marketing It The Hard Part

Affiliate Marketing Is Not A Get Rich Quick Business

One of the big perceptions out there is that affiliate marketing  A way to get rich quick. And nothing could be further from the truth.

It is not easy and it is not quick.

Regardless of what medium you decide to use to display your content, you’re going to need to put in a lot of time and a lot of effort to get that content to convert for you.

It’s going to take time to start making money with affiliate marketing. There certainly are exceptions to the rule and some of them are even legitimate.

You’ll see some people online who just get lucky with a niche or a piece of content that really goes viral and turns into a real money order for them.

But these are the exceptions. Whether it’s a skill or luck it really doesn’t matter, these are the exceptions.

You can not expect to jump into a new business and have it make you a full-time income in 3 months or 6 months or any short time frame like that.

For a traditional brick-and-mortar business, it can take three to five years(source) to even be profitable in whatever industry you decide to go into.

The difference with an affiliate marketing business is that The Upfront cost is much cheaper than a traditional brick-and-mortar business. 

You don’t have to buy office space or a building to display your goods in, you don’t have to worry about inventory, you don’t have to deal with customers.

It makes life a lot easier for the entrepreneur when you just focus on affiliate marketing.

 but affiliate marketing still takes time. a lot of time. Well, it might not take three to five years to get your business up and running and profitable.

You should have expected to take at least 24 months to become a full-time income if you start out on the right foot and get everything right and have some good training to guide you around the pitfalls that most affiliate marketers run into when they’re first starting out.

marketing wheel
Once You Figure Out Your Customers And How To Get Traffic, Affiliate Marketing Gets Easier

Affiliate Marketing Gets Easier And Gets Passive

At this point, you might be asking yourself what is the point of affiliate marketing.

It’s difficult to get started and then it’s going to take months of hard work to get just a little bit of success.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It is difficult to get started you got to just start cranking out content for your chosen medium.

And for months that content is going to be seen by absolutely nobody.

That’s the nature of affiliate marketing.

When you first start out no one’s going to care and no one’s going to find your content until you start getting a little bit of a reputation and Authority with the search engines or a few more subscribers on YouTube. 

It all Takes Time.

But it gets easier. And when it gets easier it’s a beautiful thing. When you start to see the traffic trickle in and then start to grow over time.

It’s a great feeling to know that you build something that people are going to be interested in and the people are going to continue to find in their searches.

And this is where I feel like marketing becomes one of the best ways to make money online. And that’s because it becomes passive.  

All that hard work that you put in for those six months or 12 months of just creating content I’ve started to grow like a tree from the seed.

 It really is incredible.

 the best thing about the passive nature of this income stream is that it can last for years with almost no more work put in by you.

But if you want to keep growing you can keep adding content to your website and growing it and increasing that Revenue.

It just means you won’t have to spend as much time doing that once you get established as you did at the start when you were just trying to find your way.

I think it’s the most important thing but I can impart on you.  

It gets easier.

Affiliate marketing is not easy. But it gets easier.

Affiliate marketing is hard work.

But affiliate marketing gets easier the longer you do it.  So you need a little time and patience but that’s going to pay off big-time for you in the future.

Only Action Takers Win At Affiliate Marketing

Now you know affiliate marketing is not easy. This might be the first step that you’ve taken to research  An affiliate marketing business.

And now you’re wondering if it’s really right for you.

There are  Millions of excuses that you can make right now to not step into the affiliate marketing world.

Millions of excuses.

And that’s the path that most people are going to take. They’re going to look at this business and say it’s too tough.

They’re going to say “I thought it was going to be easy but it’s hard work it’s a real job.”

And they’re going to go off and try and find something else. Maybe they’ll go buy a get-rich-quick scheme that uses affiliate marketing or dropshipping.

Only to find out that it’s just a pipe dream. You can’t make money without putting in the work. You just cannot do it. Unless you’re born with a huge inheritance you have to work for your money.

And that’s most of us. Most of us have to put in a lot of work to get the results we want. And many people aren’t willing to do that. Because most people are procrastinators and not action takers.

Action takers are the people that win at affiliate marketing. Action takers are the people that start today on their business.

Action takers are the people who write that first piece of content for their blog and know that it is going to be terrible.

And that’s okay.

Everyone’s first piece of content is not good.

The first piece of content that you write for your affiliate marketing business is going to be the worst piece of content that you will ever write for your affiliate marketing business.

You get better with practice you get better with hard work and you get better by taking action that is going to change your life in the future.

There’s a certain amount of faith that you have to have when you’re starting a new business. You’ve got to believe that business is going to be profitable whether it’s a brick-and-mortar or an affiliate marketing business.

You have to have a little bit of faith that you can do the work and get the results. But it’s going to take time. You’re not going to see those results right away.

You’re going to need to put the hard yards in to get to that place of success that you want to be at. That place of success that you visualized in your head when you think about your future.

You must take action.

And there’s no one action that everyone needs to take. It’s different for each person. Today your action might be buying a domain. Finding a niche and buying a domain for your new blog.

It could take 15 minutes 20 minutes to find that Niche and buy that domain. But that is action. Now you own a piece of Internet real estate. You took action and you bought that piece of real estate.

Now you have to take action again tomorrow. That’s what business is, that’s what affiliate marketing is, each and every day you take actions to make your business better.

That can be writing new articles or filming new pieces of content. That can be updating your theme to make it more manageable for your customers or your readers.

That action can be finding a training module that’s going to help you build an email list. That can be researching keywords that are going to be used later on to write your content.

This is all action. You have to be in action taker. You have to take action if you are going to be successful in affiliate marketing.

There’s no other way to do it.

You have to be willing to do something, anything for your business each and every day that you want to build it.

No that doesn’t mean you can’t take vacations that doesn’t mean you can’t take a day off. You absolutely should.

You have to take those days off because you going to be working so hard that you don’t want to burn yourself out.

But this is your business. Affiliate marketing is your business.

It is a career choice.

How to make the most of it?

You have to take action constantly.

Great Training Makes Affiliate Marketing Easier

You had to know this was coming.

Here comes the pitch. This is affiliate marketing at work. You create helpful interesting content that you want people to read.

And then you recommend a relevant product based around that content that you just wrote or produced.

In this case, affiliate marketing is the focus of this article. Affiliate marketing is not easy is the specific crux of this article.

So how do I tie that into a product that might help someone looking to get into affiliate marketing but that might find it too difficult to start?

It’s simple.

I give them the option to start some affiliate marketing training. Now traditionally in this scenario, you’ll see someone just slap a link at the end of their article.

That #1 recommendation type thing. I am guilty of that method as well. It can be effective but It is a little disingenuous.

Or maybe give a little brief summary of why this one specific product is the only one that’s it’s going to help you.

I don’t like to take that approach. I like to give a couple of options for whatever Niche or product I’m going to refer to the reader.

In this case, we’re going to talk about affiliate marketing training and how it makes your life a lot easier when you’re first starting out in the affiliate marketing business.

I can’t stress enough how important it is. It helped me immeasurably by just reducing the amount of time that I spent fixing problems that I could have avoided if I had picked up the training a little bit earlier.

But it’s never one-size-fits-all.

And it’s not going to work for everybody. Some people are going to look at this training and do it and it’s just not going to make quite as much sense as it does to someone else.

I’ve certainly been in that boat.

One of the most popular training programs that I tried did not work for me. It worked for plenty of people, according to their success stories. It simply did not work for me.

Affiliate marketing is not easy.

But affiliate marketing is absolutely worth it if you are willing to put the time and the effort and the hard work into your new online business.

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Thank you for visiting and have a wonderful day.