With the current financial crisis and increased unemployment, many people have explored the various possibilities of making money online in an effort to subsidize their incomes. Those looking for online money-making possibilities have inevitably come across the concept of affiliate marketing. This is essentially the idea of promoting an online business and receiving payments for every referral you manage to send to the business.
The method of compensation varies between companies, but the basic idea is to promote a service or product online, and if you succeed in referring someone to the parent company’s website, you get a commission payment. For the company this amounts to outsourcing online advertising and promotion to affiliate marketers who work as independent contractors
Whether affiliate marketing is effective or not depends on perspective. For many businesses, the idea is excellent because it operates on a “pay for performance” model; meaning that the business pays only when an affiliate successfully generates tangible results. A lot of online businesses, like Amazon.com, did well with affiliate marketing in the early years.
Similarly, the online business can therefore develop it’s own affiliate programs that operate under it’s terms and conditions, many an online business has set them up. On the other hand, affiliate marketing offers few benefits for businesses that operate on a local basis or whose product or service is off-line in nature. Further, failure to properly restrict the activity of affiliates or to monitor for abuses also leads to many unscrupulous affiliate marketers giving the business they are promoting a bad name or negative associations.
It’s undeniable that some have made successful careers from affiliate marketing, but concurrently, it appears the majority don’t make much more than enough to do a weekly load of wash at a coin-op laundry. Since affiliate marketers provide an independent service, the industry is more or less unregulated, meaning it is impossible to get exact numbers on how successful the venture is for some.
Another difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of affiliate marketing is that one of its primary niches is the selling of information about how to become an effective affiliate marketer. This means that there is an enormous amount of misleading information online about how successful affiliate marketers can be, since the promoters have a vested interested in getting people to buy their “how to” materials. Since affiliate marketing is an online enterprise, people can basically say whatever they want you to believe, and it’s not like there are reliable sources you can verify. Just because one affiliate marketer claims to have made $ 60,000 a month doesn’t mean it’s true, and there’s no way to find out if it’s true, which it likely isn’t.
There is the occasional fluke of course, just like any industry, but many succeed through sheer dumb luck rather than through anything else, but exceptions do occur. Generally, most confirmed successful affiliate marketers were already established and successful in marketing or advertising or had a strong background in either or both. Also, many proven successes are people who were there since the beginning in the late 1990s.
There aren’t many people who jumped in and were successful right away, and those that do are implausible at best. The few who have succeeded quickly usually had access to some new innovation, like a new niche, technology, or marketing strategy before many others caught on. Despite extraordinary claims that a 12 year old could write, the claims can’t be verified at all and there isn’t concrete evidence that affiliate marketers make siginificant incomes from it.
Since many affiliate marketers are making the bulk of their money selling instructional guides on affiliate marketing, there are lots of claims of affiliate marketing able to get you rich quick. Claims tend to resonate loudly during desperate times, and the people are looking for an extra boost for their income. However, as is the case with most “get rich quick” schemes, more often than not it’s just a scam. Even if you have an innovative concept that might open a new niche or market and even if you have a strong background in advertising or marketing, the odds are that it will take years to turn these ideas into enough money to live on.
While setting up the basic online infrastructure for affiliate marketing can be done within a couple of months, actually making money from it always takes much longer. Most of the confirmed successful affiliate marketers freely admit that it took them anywhere from one to five years before they were making enough to even consider dropping their day jobs.
If you already have a marketing or advertising background, or have a great idea, you might be able to do very well with affiliate marketing. But in this case, don’t expect it to do so overnight, or be able to without investing time and energy. If you have no experience in the field, and you’re looking for a quick, easy way to make a little cash on the side, affiliate marketing can be a good way to make it happen.