Is Affiliate Marketing Hard Or Easy? [ANSWERED]

Is Affiliate Marketing Hard Or Easy?

Affiliate marketing is a powerful business model that is being used by countless online businesses to bring in a good relatively passive stream of income.

Online businesses require you to put in the hard work upfront before you can reap the benefits of passive income and affiliate marketing as a business model is no exception.

One of the things that makes affiliate marketing hard is the fact that you need to build up an audience online or run paid ads.  Both of which require a large amount of time or money.

Getting past the initial years of growth for building up an audience organically is ultimately what determines whether or not you succeed as an affiliate marketer.  It takes a tremendous amount of hard work focusing on growing an audience that will know, like, and trust you.

In return, people will start to want to hear about what you’re recommending for certain products to get and be asking for your affiliate link.  The big problem though is that most people quit before they reach the critical mass point where they have a large enough audience that trusts them to where they’re earning several thousand dollars a month.

From my experience and others, it takes anywhere from 2-5 years on average to gain a level of success with an affiliate marketing business to where you’re bringing in a full-time income of greater than $4,000 per month.

In fact, the course that I’m taking on learning how to build an affiliate marketing business by growing an audience and brand through blogging and YouTube is called Project 24. 

What’s great about this course is that it walks you through step-by-step how to build up an online business in 24 months that’s making a full-time income.  I highly recommend it if you’re looking to get started online.

Once you’ve made it past the initial growth years for your business, you can then start to really reap the benefits of passive income that the affiliate marketing business model offers.  

Certainly, there’s going to be maintenance that’s still required to maintain your income at that point due to affiliate programs cutting commissions and other unexpected things but it is very minimal.

How To Get Past Affiliate Marketing Being Hard And Leverage The Benefits

Now that you’re aware of the reality of affiliate marketing being hard in the beginning and having to grow an audience, let’s take a look at some of the ways that affiliate marketing can be so beneficial to increasing your business’ income.

Here are some of the benefits you can leverage with affiliate marketing:

1. Leverage Big Brand Names –  Affiliate marketing specifically is an incredible way to break into a niche or just get started with any online business in general.  Chances are you don’t really have an audience when starting out and you certainly haven’t built up your company name to be a worldwide brand.  The cool part is that you can promote products on Amazon and other huge global retailers and online e-commerce stores that people are already familiar with.  By leverage big brands, you can greatly increase the conversion rate and profitability of an ad campaign giving you more commissions.
2. Super Scalable –  When you create an online business, you can either drive traffic from organic or paid methods.  Unlike consulting or any active job, affiliate marketing doesn’t directly trade time for money.  This means you just need to create more content or put more money into profitable ads to scale up and generate more sales for your business.  Additionally, you can start to earn money quicker.
3. Just Drive Traffic –  My favorite part about affiliate marketing is that you can get started promoting a product right away if you want to.

   It’s not like creating software or any other product because the product is already made for you.  Simply apply to an affiliate program within your niche and grab your affiliate links to start promoting.  All that’s left for you to do is simply drive traffic to the affiliate offers by recommending products to your audience to start generating sales.

Final Thoughts: Is Affiliate Marketing Hard?

There’s no doubt that affiliate marketing is hard when you’re starting out.

You’re simply trying to figure out how to start gaining traction online to build an audience and generate a steady passive income.  I recommend finding something you are already familiar with and enjoy and share the knowledge you have by producing content on a blog or YouTube channel.  This will start to bring in organic traffic from people searching and build your audience slowly but steadily over time.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, it will likely be several years before you make a full-time income from affiliate marketing simply because growing a large enough audience to make a considerable income takes time.  There are definitely some exceptions to this but you should expect it to take a couple years to have built up momentum.

You can learn more about the course I’m taking called Project 24 to have a business plan set in place for you that shows you exactly how to grow an audience and build a brand online primarily with blogging and YouTube.

If you’re interested in more posts on affiliate marketing, then you can keep reading by checking out some of the suggested posts below.