Affiliate Marketing: Making Money While You Sleep

Affiliate marketing is just that, “affiliate” and “marketing.” Basically, you would become a third-party publisher to generate traffic and leads to another company’s gain. Using your website, various companies can have you post banners or have you promote their products or services through blogs and other means. You would earn an incentive every time a sale is generated from your promotions. Because of this, you would need to target a certain company’s audience or market, becoming an “affiliate” in the process.     While the choice may be a matter of preference, there are certain factors that should come into play when determining which of the two is the better money-making platform.

Upfront Costs

But probably the most important aspect of this venture would be content. You need to fill your website with content that people would be interested in viewing. Writing content is fairly cheap: You can either have other people write for you or you can write the content yourself for free. Afterward, most of the costs would just be for the promotion of your website. Once all of this is done, you would just have to wait for some results. Starting as an affiliate marketer does not need a big amount of money because you won’t be buying products. Not only that, but you would also need the upfront costs of starting a website, getting a website hosted, building your brand, and couple that with the costs of getting software for product research and securing capital for your products, you may be looking at a lot of money.  

Ease Of Starting

While becoming an affiliate marketer has little upfront costs, the waiting time may be a bit too extensive. The reason for this is that you would have to wait for your website to grow and join the Google rankings before you can attract potential revenue from various companies. It is estimated that websites need about six to nine months before they can show up in the rankings at Google. Once your website has grown, you can then join an affiliate network or program. This would require a bit of patience because this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Of course, there are other ways for you to earn while waiting for your website to grow, such as pay-per-click advertising or even Facebook advertising, but the true money lies after you have joined or built an effective affiliate program.  

Upkeep

Getting started is one thing; maintaining it is a whole other idea that you should take into consideration is another. Remember that once you have gained momentum, maintaining or nurturing it would be the key to your success. Affiliate marketers don’t need much upkeep besides the constant content creation their website needs, as well as the content needed by their client companies. But if you wish to grow as an affiliate marketer, you may need to expand by building more websites and providing the content that the websites will host. Not only that, but you would also need to think about social media and gaining attention at various social media platforms to reach a wider range of people.  

Profit

As an affiliate marketer, analyses show that you can earn as much as over $50,000 in affiliate income. About 9% of affiliate marketers back in 2016 earned such an amount while about 65% of affiliate marketers earned an estimated 5% to 20% of their annual revenue from affiliate marketing alone.  

Conclusion

Furthermore, you should not just limit your choice to one option. Once you’ve found success at either one of the two, you can also try your hand at the other.