Does affiliate marketing really still work these days? As someone who owns an affiliate marketing business and having my best year ever, I can say with certainty that yes, affiliate marketing does work. However, it’s no secret that the vast majority of people trying to succeed with affiliate marketing are unable to earn even a single dime. But how could this be?
In this article, I will explain why affiliate marketing does not work for so many people.
The Biggest Barrier To Entry For Affiliate Marketing Is Patience
Many people will work for months at building an affiliate marketing business without seeing any success and thus assume that affiliate marketing does not work. Unfortunately, for so many of these people, they were just getting to the point where they would start seeing success.
The biggest issue for most new affiliate marketers is they are learning from, well, affiliate marketers. There are countless courses, e-books, and training programs out there made by affiliate marketers for new affiliate marketers. So, why is this a problem? Because most affiliate marketers are unfortunately only interested in fattening their own wallets by selling their training courses to people like you. In order to make a sale, they lure you in through promises that simply can’t be fulfilled.
The truth of the matter is, whoever tells you affiliate marketing is easy or a fast way to make money online is lying to you. Sure, there are some people out there who got insanely lucky and began bringing in a ton of money in the first month of business, but this is extremely rare. I am certainly NOT one of those people. In fact, it took me 6 months of solid work daily before I saw a single penny.
Want to know the truth about how long it will take to succeed at affiliate marketing? First, read this article and then check out my video below:
Now, as time goes on, it’s taking longer and longer to succeed with affiliate marketing online. If you’re interested in getting started with affiliate marketing, I highly suggest you start RIGHT NOW because it’s not going to get easier as time goes on, it’s going to get harder.
With that said, it’s really unfortunately that so many people give up on affiliate marketing after 3 to 6 months. As you can see in the above video, it will take at least 6 months to really get a nice website going and start gaining a decent amount of traffic through search engines. But after that, things really start to take off if done right. So, hang in there and don’t expect your business to be a huge success until at least 6 to 12 months. After that? It’s all gravy. All that hard work and effort you put in during those initial months will pay off month after month after month… every month. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check to see how much money I made while I was sleeping. When success does finally come, there is no better feeling.
Affiliate Marketing Does Not Work Because People Don’t Know How To Do It Properly
If you go over to WarriorForum.com, a popular internet business forum, you will find a section that is called “Warrior Special Offers” or WSO’s. In that section, you’ll find literally THOUSANDS of affiliate marketer training courses for sale and even some that are for free. Let me tell you, about 99% of those are complete crap.
On of the biggest reasons affiliate marketing does not work for most people is because they are learning from fraudsters. These fraudsters give you *just enough* information to be able to get away with selling a product, but they don’t really teach you everything. They leave out the juicy parts and their real secrets remain that way.
That’s why it’s so important to make sure you’re learning from the best. Now, I am extremely pleased with this affiliate marketer training program. At the very least, I highly recommend you hop over there and set up a free account as you’ll get access to over 100 training videos for new affiliate marketers. Once you have a free account, they do have additional services if you want to speed the process along. For example, they will help you find the best niche, help with content creation, setting up a website, etc. Those are all services that cost extra as you’re basically paying someone else to do the work, but the free account is more than enough to teach you how to succeed with affiliate marketing yourself.
It’s difficult to know who to trust out there and I wouldn’t expect you to blindly trust me, either. But check out the above service and see what you think. It is perhaps the ONLY affiliate marketer training program I can recommend at this time.
Many Affiliate Marketers Are Using Outdated Tactics
Affiliate marketing does not work for so many people because they are using outdated strategies. A good example of this is “churn and burn” affiliate sites. In short, affiliate marketers used to set up 10 or 20 page websites, send a whole bunch of unnatural links to that site by spamming blogs, comment sections, etc., which used to make a site rank well in Google for maybe 2 or 3 months. Once Google would find out all those inbound links are spam, the site would be penalized, de-indexed from Google’s search results, and the entire process would start over again. That party ended in 2011 when Google made some major upgrades to its search algorithm.
These days, in order to truly succeed at affiliate marketing, you must provide REAL VALUE! It can’t be a digital brochure for whatever service you’re promoting and you can’t trick Google into ranking your crummy website at the top of search results anymore (thank goodness!). You actually have to build something that is of real quality and value to your website visitors.
Take, for example, my affiliate website DogFoodInsider.com. That site provides a real free service to people who are attempting to find the best dog food for their dogs. It has a following (more than 30,000 Facebook followers as of this writing), it gets shared through email, recommended to people by friends and family, linked to by other high quality websites, etc. Google picks up on those signals and is now sending me about 4,000 unique visitors every single day (and still climbing). I am then rewarded when people click on my Amazon affiliate links and make a purchase. My website visitors win, Amazon wins, and I win. It’s a perfect business.
Make no mistake, if you truly wish to succeed with affiliate marketing, you can’t just throw together a website with 20 pages and thin content then expect to gain piles of traffic where people will click your affiliate links. You must provide value to your visitors in order to succeed.
Affiliate Marketing Is Not Treated As A BUSINESS By Most People
New affiliate marketers will often say things like, “I just started my new website!” And yet, they have done no niche research, they have no idea which search terms they will attempt to rank for, they have not established a legitimate business (mine is Rogers Concepts, LLC.), and they have no real plan for growth. There are very few financial barriers to starting an affiliate marketing business, so most affiliate marketers will just dip their toes in the water by building a website, playing it by ear, and hoping it will work. It won’t.
Let’s take a restaurant business as a comparison. If you wanted to open a restaurant, you would need to invest some serious capital. For that reason, before you ever opened your doors, there are many steps you’d have to take. You would need to determine the best location based on where the population is and where the competition isn’t. You would have to find the best places to source ingredients, find the best employees, and make damn sure it’s going to work, or else you risk losing your life savings.
With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to take that type of financial risk, which is fantastic, but because there is little risk involved, people don’t actually put in any research or develop a business plan. After all, it’s “just a website.” This is the type of mentality that causes people to fail before they even start. Affiliate marketing does not work without a business plan.
Don’t know how to put together an affiliate marketing business plan? This might help.
Conclusion
The sad fact is that affiliate marketing does not work for MOST people who try it. The reasons above only scratches the surface as to why. But know this… Affiliate marketing DOES work for a lot of people, myself included. However, affiliate marketing is a business and if it’s not treated as such, you will fail. Get educated, put together a business plan, get to work, and be patient. When success does come, this is the best way to make money in the history of marketing. You CAN do this.
