June 26, 2015

There are many lures to affiliate marketing. Just about everyone I know desires to make money from home (or anywhere else with an internet connection), work there own hours, spend more time with family, and be their own boss. Affiliate marketing is a means to provide all of this and more. So, if affiliate marketing can provide this type of lifestyle, is affiliate marketing oversaturated? Or, if it isn’t oversaturated by now, it will be in the future, right?

The answer to both of these questions is a RESOUNDING NO! In fact, we’ve seen a huge decrease in the number of affiliate marketers since 2011. Let me get into an explanation about why affiliate marketing is definitely NOT oversaturated and why successful affiliate marketers have nothing to worry about in the years to come.

Affiliate Marketing Is Not Some Get-Rich-Quick System

If you’ve been researching affiliate marketing for any great deal of time, you have no doubt come across websites, articles, e-books, and training programs that tout how you can start earning money TODAY with affiliate marketing. If you’ve actually tried putting all that stuff into practice, you will quickly find out that’s all a bunch of bullshit. Maybe you’ve learned this the hard way by giving your hard earned money away to “guru’s” promising to teach you how their “system” works? Don’t feel bad, I’ve been there and done that along with millions of others. You’re not alone.

Yes, it really is possible to earn a full time living with affiliate marketing. I’ve recently surpassed the $1,000 PER DAY mark (still feels like a dream), but that doesn’t mean it came fast or easy.

The truth is, affiliate marketing must be run like a business. So many people get into affiliate marketing just to “dip their toes in the water” or say things like “I’ll start a blog and just see what happens.” Well gooood luck with that. Even more people sign up for some training course that makes all sorts of huge promises in the sales pitch, and then when those promises fall flat, those individuals scream that “affiliate marketing is a scam!” or “affiliate marketing is oversaturated!”

The issue isn’t that affiliate marketing is oversaturated. The issue is that the vast majority of people who try to get involved with affiliate marketing do not treat it as a business. As soon as the work gets too hard, they give up.

And that, my friends, is what you call a “barrier to entry” in a business. With some businesses, the biggest barrier to entry is having enough start-up capital. With other businesses, it’s the high risk involved. With an affiliate marketing business, it’s the lack of patience and hard work. This barrier to entry naturally keeps the affiliate marketing industry from becoming oversaturated.

Hardly Anyone Researches Properly

One of the big problems with people just getting started is they don’t perform enough research BEFORE starting their affiliate marketing business. Again, this impatience is what keeps the market from over-saturating, but everyone wants to make money right now. Think of it this way…

If I wanted to start a restaurant and I wanted it to succeed, would I just find the closest nice looking building, purchase it, and then make whatever food I like best? Hey, it could work, but probably not. Instead, I would find a building in a great high traffic location and do some research into the competition in the area along with what people in that area like to eat. I’d find the perfect balance – a restaurant in a prime location with limited competition serving excellent food at a price people are willing to pay and in the atmosphere my customers want it in. If I’m going to invest 10’s or 100’s of thousands of dollars into building a my own restaurant, I’m going to make darn sure I’ve done my research first.

Now, take affiliate marketing. You need essentially no start-up costs and you can have a website up and running in about an hour from now, easy. From then on, the only real investment is your time. That’s when people hit the barrier. They realize they don’t know what they’re doing and they put in all this effort trying to copy some “system” they learned from a guru and the whole thing ends in frustration. They aren’t making money, they have no idea if their efforts will even result in any income, and they’re left right back where they started.

In order to truly succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to put in research BEFORE you get started. You need to learn about how to choose a profitable product or service to promote in a niche that doesn’t have too much competition. You have to learn about search engine optimization and how to write great content on your website or blog. Make no mistake, affiliate marketing takes time to learn. That’s why 99% of affiliate marketers never make a single penny. While most brick and mortar businesses take 2 to 3 years to become profitable, new affiliate marketers seem to think they can make money right away. When they find out that isn’t true, they scream that affiliate marketing is oversaturated and one big scam.

I think one of the best places to at least start researching is at this free service. Just click on “Create First Project” and follow the steps. You can also watch over 100 affiliate marketer training videos there.



Click Here To Get EVERYTHING You Need To Succeed Online


There Are Always New Untapped Niche Markets Emerging

If you try to get involved with weight loss affiliate marketing programs, you will probably find very quickly that it IS indeed oversaturated. However, that doesn’t mean every niche is oversaturated. In fact, there are new niche markets coming out all the time. Also remember that you can almost always “dig down” into a niche and find a niche within’ a niche. Take this website, for example. The “make money online” niche is definitely way oversaturated. However, I chose to dig down a little deeper and focus solely on making money from home through affiliate marketing. I also set myself apart by being an alternative to the massive amount of get-rich-quick phonies out there.

We can even use the weight loss nice I mentioned before as an example. If you attempt to build a website about weight loss in general, you’ll get lost in the noise. But what if you created a site just about one specific diet or weight loss fad. That is winnable and even if you can win in a very tight niche in the weight loss industry, it will be extremely profitable.

The point is, there are already thousands of untapped niche topics to pick from and thousands more are emerging every day. Profitable topics with almost no competition are right in front of all our noses, but we can’t see them. That’s where doing proper industry research is important, which this service can help you with.

You Must Give Before You Receive

Another reason affiliate marketing is not oversaturated is because you must truly provide value to others before you can expect to get anything in return. Gaining thousands of website visitors and thousands of email subscribers and thousands of social media followers doesn’t come overnight. You have to build that following over time and gain the trust of search engines so that they send you free traffic everyday.

When most people start off with affiliate marketing, they are asking themselves, “how can I make money from home?” What they should be asking is “how can I provide enough value to others in order to make a full time income from home?”

When you build an affiliate site, you don’t put up a digital brochure. It should be helpful, as I hope you’ve found this site to be helpful. If you aren’t providing real value to others, your site will never get popular enough to earn a full time income from it. For me personally, it usually takes a good 6 to 12 months of producing fantastic content and resources for my website visitors before I begin to see a decent amount of money. I wish there was a shortcut and God knows I’ve tried finding as many shortcuts as possible, but in the end, I always go back to my roots – provide phenomenal content which will then attract targeted visitors which I can then passively sell to. That’s the only “system” that has worked for me and there is no shortcut to creating quality content, especially if you have no funding to outsource.

The Number Of Affiliate Marketers Is DOWN Since 2011

How could this be? How could there possibly be FEWER affiliate marketers now than there was in 2011? Two words, Panda and Penguin.

Back in 2011, Google began releasing updates to its search algorithm. These updates were given the names Panda and Penguin. They CRUSHED low quality affiliate marketers and spammy websites. Before the 2011 updates, a lot of low quality affiliate marketers figured out ways to trick the search engines (mostly Google) into ranking their websites highly for very profitable search terms. After months of warnings from Google, they finally put a stop to it. People who were making thousands of dollars daily saw their income disappear overnight. While some good affiliate marketers got caught in the crossfire, most of the ones who got hit were using unethical black hat SEO methods.

It’s amazing to see how many people are now saying “affiliate marketing is dead!” and “you can’t make money with affiliate marketing anymore!” Not true! Affiliate marketing has simply changed and evolved. The barrier to entry is much higher now, because you can’t slap together a half-ass website and trick Google into ranking it highly. These days, to rank in the search engines, you’ve actually got to create a quality site that is helpful to others.

This is the best friend for modern day affiliate marketers. Those of us who focus on quality content are not only winning, but there’s fewer of us out there than ever before. This year (2015) is the best year I’ve ever had as an affiliate marketer so far, BY A LONG SHOT! Do I think affiliate marketing is oversaturated? Heck no!

Final Thoughts

My personal belief is that affiliate marketing should be one of many monetization models for your website or blog, but if you want to earn a full-time living with affiliate marketing, it’s entirely possible assuming you have enough passion to get through the learning curve. As a full time affiliate marketer with dozens of websites across a a couple dozen niche topics, I can say with certainty that affiliate marketing is not oversaturated. If anything, it’s undersaturated.

Summary
Is Affiliate Marketing Oversaturated
Article Name
Is Affiliate Marketing Oversaturated
Description
Everyone wants to make money online, so is affiliate marketing oversaturated? Not even close. Here's why affiliate marketing will never be oversaturated.
Author

Related Posts

Page [tcb_pagination_current_page] of [tcb_pagination_total_pages]