What Is Affiliate Marketing? The Secret Life Hack Unveiled

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate marketer—or middleman—earns a commission for marketing and selling another company’s or person’s products or services.

The affiliate basically teams up with a company or someone who offers products or services they enjoy. They then go out and spread the word about those products.

Here’s the fun part: Every time someone buys something because of the affiliate’s recommendation, you pocket a nice little commission.

The sales you make are all tracked using special links to track the sales every affiliate marketer brings in.

So, whenever someone clicks the affiliate’s link and buys the product or service they recommend, they get a cut of the profit. That’s affiliate marketing in a nutshell!

The Process of Affiliate Marketing

To explain how affiliate marketing works, here’s a visual analogy that will help paint a proper picture.

Let’s say you’re really into gaming, and there’s this company called “GameZone” that sells the latest and greatest video games.

You sign up as an affiliate for GameZone because you love their games. They give you a special link that’s just for you.

You start spreading the word about the video games GameZone offers and even write cool reviews of them on your blog.

People eventually trust your opinion on video games and click your link to buy them.

So, every time someone buys a game through your link, GameZone knows it’s because of you. They then end up giving you a piece of the pie—a nice commission for bringing in that sale.

From this analogy, you’ll notice that there are three different parties involved in the entire affiliate marketing process. 

The parties involved are: 

1. The product creator or seller 
2. The advertiser/ middleman or, in affiliate marketing terms, the affiliate 
3. The consumer or the buyer. 

So, how do these three parties influence the affiliate marketing program? Does the failure of one party affect the entire affiliate marketing model?  

Well, to better understand how each party ensures affiliate marketing success, let’s examine each party individually. 

We’ll start at the very top of the affiliate marketing chain. 

The Product Creator or Seller 

The product seller or creator, whether a large enterprise or solo entrepreneur, is a retailer, product creator, or vendor with a product to market. The product in question can be anything from a service like makeup lessons to a physical object like household items. 

When it comes to affiliate marketing, sellers or product creators aren’t 100% actively involved in marketing the products or services they create. 

But for them to do it successfully, they need to find advertisement avenues like affiliate marketing.

This is where the middleman, advertiser, or affiliate steps in. However, there have been instances where the product creators or sellers have been affiliate marketers and made profits from affiliate marketers. 

For example, the seller or product creator could create an ecommerce store and use it to reach out to a a target audience. They can then create an affiliate link that ties back to the ecommerce store and make money every time someone buys using their link. 

In this scenario, it could help the seller or vendor track sales of their product and determine what advertising techniques to use. 

The Affiliate/Middle Man 

The affiliate or middleman is either a company or an individual that markets the seller’s products to potential consumers. 

It’s their job to persuade consumers that the products/services they are marketing are beneficial and convince them to purchase them. Affiliates use different channels to market their products. It could be social media channels, a blog, or a YouTube channel.

Some affiliates do have whole websites dedicated to only selling affiliate products. Like this one.

If the potential consumer buys the product, the affiliate receives a portion of the revenue. 

One way affiliate marketers make money using this business model is by defining a niche. Consumers have been known to trust affiliate marketers who have experience in a specific niche. 

For instance, if you’re looking for skincare products, you’ll probably be quick to click a link of someone who’s familiar with the skin care industry rather than someone who dabbles in almost everything. 

The Consumer 

At the end of the affiliate marketing chain are the consumers. For the affiliate system to work, sales have to be made. 

The party that makes it happen is the customer or consumer.  

Customers often discover affiliate links through channels like social media, YouTube, or blogs. If they deem the product beneficial, they follow your affiliate link and check out your other products.

However, it’s important to remember that consumers need to be aware that you, the affiliate, receive a commission from the products they purchase using your link.

This is an actual regulation by the Federal Trade Commission. Affiliate marketers are required to conspicuously disclose their relationship with the product creator or vendor.

With this knowledge, the consumer can decide whether to actually buy the product using your link.

Now that you have an idea of how the affiliate marketing program works, let’s take a look at how each of these parties ensures its success.

Here’s a table that details the three parties’ relationship in affiliate marketing a little further.

Role	Supplier	Affiliate	Consumer
Definition	The entity that owns the product or service being marketed.	The individual or organization that promotes the supplier’s product or service in exchange for a commission.	The end-user who purchases the product or service through the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Responsibilities	Develop and provide the product or service.	Promote the supplier’s products or services through various marketing channels.	Research and evaluate products or services offered by suppliers.
Relationship	Provides products or services for promotion.	Promotes products or services to attract consumers.	Engages with promotions and makes purchases.
Compensation	Receives revenue from sales generated through affiliate marketing efforts.	Earns commission for driving sales or leads to the supplier’s products or services.	Pays for products or services offered by the supplier.
Communication	May provide marketing materials and support to affiliates.	Communicates promotions, updates, and strategies to affiliates.	May provide feedback or reviews on the product or service.
Goal	Increase sales and reach through affiliate partnerships.	Increase sales and reach through affiliate partnerships.	Obtain desired products or services that meet their needs or preferences.

The Success of Affiliate Marketing

It may look like the person responsible for the success of affiliate marketing is the customer. But all parties do have a responsibility to play.

The vendor or product creator’s responsibility is to provide quality products. Otherwise, it would be difficult for the affiliate to sell the products and for the consumer to buy them.

An affiliate’s responsibility in creating a successful affiliate marketing business is to market the products through the necessary channels. It could be through social media platforms, blogs, or a YouTube channel.

Lastly, the customer makes affiliate marketing a success by purchasing the products the vendor makes through the affiliate links the affiliate marketer provides. If they do deem the links an affiliate posts worthy, they can follow them to the vendor’s website and buy the products.

Now that you know how important every link in the affiliate marketing chain is, it’s time to find out how to get started in this business model.

How To Get Started in Affiliate Marketing

As you’ve seen from the entire affiliate marketing chain, there are two ways to make money from the affiliate marketing program. You can either become the merchant or the affiliate.

Becoming a merchant is a popular route, so for this article, I’ll focus on how to become an affiliate.

Seven Steps To Becoming an Affiliate Marketer

If you want to learn how to start affiliate marketing, here are seven steps you can use to become an affiliate marketer.

Step One: Find a Niche

The first step in becoming an affiliate marketer is finding a niche. A niche is a subset of a larger market defined by its own set of characteristics.

It’s through this niche that you become a specialty so that people recognize you for it. For instance, you could specialize in selling Lego sets, and since that’s a niche, your niche audience will know you as the affiliate marketer with great Lego set links.

You could also be a travel blogger or specialize in tiny homes or pet care. Other popular affiliate marketing niches areas, according to data analytics, include:

• Health and Fitness
• Technology
• Lifestyle
• Fashion and Beauty

While these may be the top affiliate marketing niches, they aren’t your only option. So, how exactly do you choose a niche of interest? Here are a few areas you can consider.

1. Is it profitable? A busy niche means more customers. So, before you settle for any niche, conduct a quick Google search to determine its popularity.
2. Can you solve problems? Does your niche help solve problems? If you choose to promote products, ensure you choose niche products that help people solve a particular problem. People are more open to buying products if they know what you’re offering can help solve a problem they have.

For instance, if you’re a travel blogger, you could specialize in offering people affordable vacation deals.

3. Do you want to learn about the niche? Remember, you’ll need to be an expert in the said niche. So, you’ll have to be ready to stay on top of trends and constantly learn.

The goal here is to choose a niche you enjoy if you want other people to buy your products. There’s no point trying to sell affiliate products you hate; the drive to promote them might not be there.

But if you’re enjoying what you’re doing, it makes all the effort you put into your affiliate business worth it. It will also make it easier to continue even if the money isn’t rolling in quite yet.

Step Two: Join an Affiliate Marketing Program

With your niche already in place, the next step is finding affiliate program partners.

For an affiliate marketing program, you can do a quick Google search using your niche and choose a relevant one. Your search could look a little like this:

Alternatively, you could always go for major affiliate marketing programs like:

• ClickBank is an affiliate marketing program that specializes in information products such as courses, eBooks, and programs. It has thousands of high-converting, high-paying affiliate offers in almost every niche.
• Amazon Affiliate: This is Amazon’s well-known affiliate program.
• ShareASale: This platform has thousands of well-known retailers and brands, such as Etsy, Nectar, and Honey. It also has many tools and necessary equipment to help you get started.

But if you still need help deciding on an affiliate marketing program, here are a few tips you can use to choose the right one.

1. Does the affiliate program have a great reputation? You need to work with partners people trust. Fortunately, most of the programs available on the market are reliable.
2. What percentage of commissions will you receive? The entire purpose of becoming an affiliate marketer is to make money. Therefore, make sure the commissions you earn are a good compensation for your time and effort.

Most programs will pay a 10 to 20% commission. So, try to go for a rate that works for you.

Step Three: Choose an Affiliate Marketing Platform

It’s finally time to market your affiliate links. That means choosing the right affiliate marketing platform. Every affiliate marketer has a different approach to the platforms they choose to promote products.

Some may opt to focus mainly on blogs, while others may use social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok to connect with customers.

If you aren’t sure which platform to use, start with what feels comfortable for you. If you enjoy creating short videos, you can post short reels on social media channels like Instagram or TikTok. If you’re good at writing, starting a blog might be a great idea.

Step Four: Create Valuable Content

This is now where the real work begins.

According to recent stats, people spend an average of six hours and 40 minutes every day online. That data alone shows that people are consuming content. The best way to take that opportunity by the horns is through content marketing.

I’m talking about creating valuable content and slapping your affiliate links there. But if you want to stand out from the thousands of affiliate marketers doing the same thing, then your content has to be valuable.

For valuable content, you could write blogs and review the products you sell. You can also make YouTube videos and short reels for social media purposes.

But remember, if the content you put out isn’t helpful, people often tend to feel like all you want to do is make a quick buck.

While blogging is a great way to promote your affiliate links, it’s also a long-term strategy. You’ll need traffic to actually make money, so even as you write blogs, I’d advise you to still use your social media platforms and YouTube channels to promote products.

Step Five: Build Your Audience

Lots of affiliate marketers rely heavily on search engine traffic to make sales, as that’s where their target audience is.

While this strategy sounds great, it still has one huge disadvantage. You could easily lose your entire business overnight with the Google algorithm updates.

That’s why I’d recommend having an email list of your target audience to allow them to connect with you at any time. With that email list, you can reach out to your audience with updates on your new content and exciting offers.

If you rely heavily on social media platforms, you could build your audience and increase traffic to your pages by following and tagging popular influencers within your niche.

Remember, if you want your target audience to keep coming, you’ll need to build their trust. So, don’t try to quickly sell stuff at them.

The more genuine your email list or social media followers see you, the more they’ll end up trusting you.

Step Six: Follow FTC Regulations

The primary goal of the FTC regulations is to protect consumers.

When it comes to these regulations, there are certain rules in place that dictate what you can and can’t do as an affiliate marketer.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of affiliate marketers out there who are readily willing to promote misleading products and scams to make quick cash.

To prevent this, the FTC requires all affiliate marketers to disclose all financial relationships with the brands or products they promote. This means that as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need to tell your target audience that you make money every time you sell products.

You’ll also have to tell them of an affiliate link if you want to stay compliant with FTC regulations.

Step Seven: Grow Your Business With Pay-Per-Click Advertising

The only way you can start having great cash flow as an affiliate marketer is if you increase your traffic. What better way to do so than with PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising?

With PPC, you can:

• Grow your email listing
• Make more sales
• Get people to click on your affiliate links.

There’s also a guarantee that you’ll have traffic coming in from different sources. This helps ensure that your affiliate marketing business can grow.

Now that you know how to start affiliate marketing, let’s take a look at the strategies this business model uses.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

This part is specifically for vendors looking for different affiliate marketing strategies they can use to sell their products.

There are plenty of ways to run affiliate marketing campaigns in this day and age. But the most popular strategies include:

Influencer Marketing

This is probably one of the most popular strategies in affiliate marketing, thanks to YouTube and social media.

Celebrities and regular people have slowly become influential in affiliate marketing mainly because of the huge following they possess. Thanks to their influential status, they can create content and actively engage an audience with the products they have to offer.

This is why top brands pay them to promote their products or services. For them to make sales, they can share those affiliate links with their followers.

So, if you’re a business with a really huge social media following, influence marketing efforts might be your best bet for making money.

You can share your affiliate links via your social media platforms by:

• Adding them to your stories
• Using your bio
• Creating gift guides and product comparison videos.

Remember, with influencer marketing, you’ll need to build your target audience’s trust. Therefore, make sure the influence you use or the value you provide is trustworthy.

Blogging

Another popular affiliate marketing strategy is blogging. It’s popular because it allows you to specialize in a specific niche. For instance, if you’re a financial blogger, you can write about financial products and build authority in that product.

The best way to use your blog for affiliate marketing purposes is to include the links within the content. You can also choose to incorporate videos. And the best part is that you can use social media to share your content and increase traffic to your site.

But try to make sure that the links you include are done naturally so as not to appear like you’re trying to oversell.

Microsites

This is a site that’s separate from the main site and often used for special target audiences. Big brands use these microsites along with other marketing tactics like social media or blogging.

A microsite can be anything from a single page promoting a single product to different pages pushing several products. Some microsites often have their own domain, or they could be a subdomain of the main site.

Big brands use microsites to highlight something specific like:

• Events
• Campaigns
• Products
• Branded content

Aside from big brands, regular affiliates use them as well. They look something like this

As you can see from the example above, this microsite was used to announce an upcoming event. There are other examples, like ShaveGuru, that are completely dedicated to creating content around the products they promote.

But if you want to improve your chances with such sites, ensure that you:

1. Create valuable content, especially if you’re main goal is to promote certain products.
2. Make the benefits, products, or events visible at first glance.
3. Include a mix of content for your target audience. This could mean also including short videos.
4. Add product reviews

Lastly, include an affiliate link that takes your audience directly to your affiliate partners.

Email Lists

This strategy is at times often underestimated in the affiliate marketing world, but it’s also just as effective.

If you’re looking to build a relationship with your target audience, creating a mailing list might be a great option. This strategy allows you to share new content and update your subscribers with offers.

The best part about this strategy is that you can include your affiliate links and still make an affiliate income every time someone buys a product using your links.

Marketers with an email list can benefit from engaging with subscribers, no matter the niche they’re in.

Social Media

There’s no way we’d leave out social media when talking about affiliate marketing strategies. You can use Facebook and other social media sites to share your affiliate links.

But make sure you check if the platform you’re using has guidelines you’ll need to follow. Some of the ways you can share your affiliate links on social media include:

• Personal pages
• Facebook ads
• Promotional posts
• Groups

Videos

YouTube has made videos quite popular, and what better way to promote your affiliate links than with videos?

The great thing about sharing videos is that it’s quite easy for busy people to consume. It’s also the perfect platform to show people how to use the product and its benefits and highlight the pros and cons.

You can also pin your links on the video description making it easy for people who want the product to actually purchase it.

Product Reviews

These are also a common strategy in the affiliate marketing business. They’re a great way for partners, influencers, and bloggers to offer their unbiased opinions about the products they are promoting.

Brand partners with retailers, and through the sales the retailers make, they can get honest reviews about the product. I’m pretty sure you’ve also gone to the Amazon reviews section to check out if a product is worth the hype.

Based on what you saw in those reviews, you were able to decide whether to buy the product.

How To Pick An Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Now that you know what strategies exist, how do you choose one that works best for you?

Here are a few tips you can use to pick the right affiliate marketing strategy for your business.

Your Audience

Your audience will play a huge role in helping you determine which strategy works best for your business. Where does your target audience frequent the most? Are they on forums, Google Search, Social Media, or YouTube?

Knowing where they are will help you pick a strategy that might work for your business.

The Content

What type of content will get your target audience clicking? As a new affiliate marketer, it might be difficult to narrow down the type of content your audience might prefer. In that case, I recommend trying out a few different strategies and seeing what works best for you and your business.

Offers

Most affiliate marketers occasionally provide offers to their target audience. So, you’ll need to work out what offers work best for your target audience.

Is it discounts, free gifts, or competition? However, if you choose to go down this road, ensure that you go for the right offers, as they can make or break your affiliate marketing business.

Your Customer Pain Points

One of the major goals of any business is to solve a customer’s products. One way of picking the right strategy to promote your business is by addressing your customers’ pain points.

You can choose to address those pain points using content or through videos.

Whatever strategy you choose, ensure that it fits within the few factors I’ve mentioned. You can also try different strategies to find out what works best for your business.

How To Track Your Success

Now that you’ve finally set up your affiliate business, you still need to find out if it’s a successful money venture.

So, how can you tell if an affiliate marketing side hustle is right for you? Well, there are different metrics you can use to track your business’s success.

These key metrics include:

• Ad spend: How much you spend on ads either on Facebook or Google
• Traffic: How many people are visiting your site?
• Return on Investment
• Monthly sales
• Overall revenue
• Click-throughs

These metrics will tell you how many people have seen your offers, the number of people who’ve clicked your links, and those who’ve actually bought your products.

But for you to get results, you’ll need the right tools to track these metrics. One tool you can use is your affiliate marketing dashboard. Google Analytics, which will help show you the amount of traffic to your site, is also helpful.

If you really want to dig deeper into your affiliate marketing business metrics, there are paid tools you can also use.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Now that you know how to make money with affiliate marketing, let’s take a look at a few benefits this program offers.

I’m going to take a rather different approach for this section and divide the benefits into two parts: the benefits affiliate marketing has for a business and an affiliate.

Let’s start with the business side.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing for a Small Business

The benefits affiliate marketing has for a small business include:

Boosting Brand Awareness

Every small business’s goal is to become easily recognizable to potential customers. However, that isn’t possible if you don’t know how to reach out. What better way to boost your brand awareness than with affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing drives traffic directly to your website, which in turn helps increase your brand’s awareness. Because affiliate marketers earn revenue every time they get someone to buy your products, they can help you build trust with potential customers.

Enhances Your Social Proof

Affiliate marketing has helped enhance social proof for many small businesses. Social proof does tie into a brand’s reputation, and if customers don’t know who you are, they’ll be less likely to buy your products.

Improves Your Conversion Rate

With affiliate marketing, small businesses can better track the progress of their affiliate sales with the data this business generates. By collecting the data through affiliate marketing tracking, small businesses are able to determine where their customers are from and who exactly is buying their products.

Higher Return on Investment

The entire goal for any small business with affiliate marketing is to make closed sales. Since they aren’t paying for impressions or clicks simply after a sale is made, there’s a better chance of a higher return on investment.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing to The Affiliate

Honestly, when it comes to affiliate marketing, as an affiliate marketer you might be at a disadvantage if you aren’t the vendor/supplier.

But before I get into why you are at a disadvantage, let’s look at some of the few benefits affiliate marketing has to offer to an affiliate.

You Don’t Own The Products

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It’s an advantage because if you’re looking to join affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate, all you need is an account and a website.

You don’t need to buy any of the products you sell, which makes it the perfect way to start, especially if you don’t have much money to start your own business.

The downside to this is that if the business happens to collapse, your entire affiliate marketing business also crumbles.

Targeted Traffic

As an affiliate, you have the opportunity to partner with almost any brand you desire. You also get to build traffic that pretty much involves people who value the products you do.

These are pretty much the benefits an affiliate marketing business has to offer an affiliate. As you can see, affiliate marketing actually favors the business rather than the affiliate marketer.

They have more to gain than you do.

But someone would ask, what about the money?

That leads me to my next point: what are the risks of affiliate marketing?

Challenges in Affiliate Marketing

Like any other business model, affiliate marketing does come with plenty of downsides. The challenges in affiliate marketing largely affect the affiliate and not the business or vendor.

It Isn’t As Passive

One of the main challenges of affiliate marketing is that it isn’t as passive as most people portray it to be. It doesn’t matter whether you learned your strategies from the best affiliate marketing courses on the internet; it still won’t change the fact that this business model isn’t a form of passive income.

There’s a lot of work involved in running an affiliate business, and the process I listed for starting affiliate marketing says it all.

You can’t just go to your Instagram page, post your links, and wait for millions of dollars to show up. That’s not how this business works.

You’ll need to build a system that your target audience wants, and that could take months or even a year to get the traffic you want. Let’s not forget you’ll also need to do your research if you want to provide content that actually matters, especially if you want people to trust you.

That means spending over eight hours every day reviewing what your competitors have to offer, and that’s a lot of work.

Inconsistent Income

If your true goal is to make money with affiliate marketing, you might be in for a rude awakening. Only 5% of affiliate marketers make money within the first year of business, and the other 95% close their businesses after six months.

Why? Because the income isn’t as consistent. Some affiliates have been known not to make any money even after six months of business. That’s a lot of time to keep on putting money into ads and not seeing any results.

Also, the fact that this industry has lots of competition, so your chances of making any money at all might be slim.

Strict Terms and Conditions

There are plenty of new trends in affiliate marketing. And with each new trend comes strict terms and conditions you’ll have to follow.

Let’s take Amazon Affiliates, for example. In April 2020, they had to adjust their commission rates because of the pandemic. This change meant earning way less than you were used to.

Such conditions end up changing the trajectory of your business, as you’re only left with two options: either comply or look for another program. If you opt for the latter, you’d have to start your affiliate marketing program all over again and build trust from the ground up, that’s a lot of work.

It’s Getting Harder To Penetrate Affiliate Marketing Niches

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you can sell products of any niche. However, therein lies the problem.

It doesn’t matter whether the niche you choose has fewer affiliate marketers; it still means you aren’t the only one selling those products.

This ends up making it even harder to penetrate even the craziest niches.

Also, while choosing a profitable niche like gardening or pets is a great idea, you’ll need to be prepared to compete with known brands for customers.

Audiences Are More Knowledgeable

In this day and age, it’s impossible to pull a fast one on your target audience, as the internet has made them more knowledgeable.

They can quickly learn about the features and benefits of products even if you don’t want to inform them. This has made it even more difficult for affiliate marketers to know how to approach their target audience.

Strategies like simply posting a few words on your blog are no longer enough to keep your target audience hooked. You’ll have to be prepared to create valuable content if you want to keep your target customers glued to the products you have to offer.

Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?

With everything you know about affiliate marketing at this point, can you still say that affiliate marketing is worth it?

My answer is No. It actually isn’t if you’re looking for a way to make a consistent, semi-passive income stream. Why do I say so?

For one, it isn’t the type of “laptop lifestyle” allure someone pitched you on. Most affiliate programs often try to pass off affiliate marketing as something so easy anyone can do it.

All you need to do is pick a profitable niche, and you can sit back and watch the dollars roll in.

Well, that in itself is a dream that is completely far from actual reality. Let’s break down why affiliate marketing sucks.

You’re Competing Nationally

Let’s get it clear: You aren’t the first or last person to start an affiliate business. This means that there are millions in the game already who’ve had a headstart while you’re testing the waters.

It means that you’re already at a disadvantage. This is one reason why affiliate marketing does not work for 95% of people three months down the line.

Every niche, including the unpopular ones, is oversaturated. The only people actually making money are big retail brands that push their own unique affiliate links.

The downside of competing with these big brands, even with the help of affiliate marketing partners like Amazon, is that you’ll never catch up. Some of these big brands have had affiliate networks running for years, and that’s a lot of experience.

Money

When affiliate marketing gurus often pitch affiliate marketing courses, they often sell people on the idea of earning thousands of dollars in a few months.

But rarely are people told of the overhead expenses they’ll have to cater for once they start an affiliate marketing business.

Let’s take running a blog, for example, which is one of the affiliate marketing strategies most affiliate marketers will have to use.

Most affiliate marketers have been known to spend over $250K to run their blogs, as there’s a lot more to running a website than creating content.

You’ll need to pay for:

• Content writers
• Ads
• Guest posts/ Backlinking

That alone could end up costing you a lot at the end of the month. And for an ordinary person, those overheads would end up digging them even deeper into the debt trench.

Skills

As an affiliate marketer, your only job won’t be posting links and hoping people click on them. You’ll need other skills if you really want your business to make money.

Some of these skills include:

1. Copy and Conversion: You’ll need to know how to create copy that can actually convert.
2. Ad management: You’ll need to know which ads are working and which aren’t, which means knowing what metrics to track.
3. SEO. You’ll also need to know how to manage your site, as you can’t just throw money at a site and expect it to fix itself.
4. Prospecting. You’ll need to find the right products for your target audience.

I’m pretty sure you won’t have most of these skills as a beginner. This means outsourcing most of these tasks to VAs to help you accomplish them, which translates to even more money.

Even accomplished affiliate marketers can tell you that handling all of these responsibilities does take a toll on them.

Getting Paid

Most of what’s online about affiliate marketing is mostly the roses and rainbows aspect of this business. Rarely do people see what happens behind the curtain.

The majority of affiliate marketing networks have been known to delay or withhold payment from their affiliates. A delay in payments means you won’t make any money from the items you sell.

These same affiliate marketing partners will also have a fine print that’s out to hurt the affiliate marketer and keep the money all to themselves. After all, you can’t bet against the house.

If this happens, good luck trying to contact support.

Stolen Content

Very few people mention it, but there’s always the possibility of having your content stolen. Imagine researching and tolling away to create a perfect review page only to have another affiliate marketer steal your content and claim it as their own.

Sadly, that has happened even to the most established affiliate marketing businesses.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and if that happens, it can be pretty demoralizing.

Now, with all of these challenges I’ve mentioned, it’s pretty easy to tell why affiliate marketing sucks.

But if you’re looking for a way to make money online, I’d recommend the lead generation business model. Here are a few differences between affiliate marketing and lead generation.

Aspect	Affiliate Marketing	Lead Generation
Definition	This is a performance-based marketing strategy where a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.	This is the process of attracting and converting prospects or potential customers into leads for a product or service.
Objective	To drive sales and generate revenue for the merchant or advertiser through commission-based referrals.	To gather information about potential customers (leads) who have shown interest in a product or service.
Focus	Primarily focuses on driving traffic and sales to the merchant’s website or product through affiliate promotions.	Primarily focuses on gathering contact information and qualifying potential customers for future marketing efforts.
Tracking	Tracking of sales or conversions is essential to attribute commissions accurately to affiliates.	Tracking of leads and their interactions with the business is crucial to gauge the effectiveness of lead generation efforts.
Business Ownership	Affiliates usually don’t own the business or the products they sell.	Lead generators own the business as well as the digital assets required for this business model
Revenue	The revenue flow isn’t consistent, as it depends on how frequently the customers use your link to purchase products.	Income is consistent, as generating and converting those leads is possible with the right tools and training.

The best way to get started with this business model is through the Digital Rental Method. With this method, you own digital assets and can help business owners grow without having to depend on their products to run their business.

That’s a huge upgrade from what affiliate marketing work has to offer. Let’s not forget that you actually get to create a consistent monthly income stream of $2,000 to $10,000 a month.

That’s complete freedom to focus on yourself and the things you love instead of always worrying about money.

Frequently Asked Questions on Affiliate Marketing

Since I’ve pretty much covered almost everything there is to making money online with affiliate marketing, let’s look at the frequently asked questions around this industry.

Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?

Is affiliate marketing dead? This is a question that’s been asked a lot. My answer is no; affiliate marketing isn’t dead. But does that mean that you should start affiliate marketing?

After all the reasons I’ve listed as to why affiliate marketing is bad, it wouldn’t be a wise idea to jump in knowing all the risks you’ll have to take.

Does Affiliate Marketing Really Work?

My answer to does affiliate marketing really work is yes. You can make money but only if you’re the vendor or a big corporation. Most of the time, the affiliate is often at a disadvantage, and I just wouldn’t advise you to start one,

What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing?

If you really still want to start an affiliate marketing business, there’s always the option of high-ticket affiliate marketing.

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? It involves promoting products or services that pay high percentage commissions. Using this strategy, you can make a lot of money for every product you sell.

But how often will you make a $1,000 product sale? It could be once every month, and that’s not enough money to cater to your needs.

Why is Affiliate Marketing Bad?

So, why is affiliate marketing bad? For one, you don’t own the business or products you’re marketing. If anything were to happen to that company, you’d be left with nothing.

Second, your income won’t be consistent. Lastly, you’re simply acting as someone’s sales rep for a fraction of the pay.

Are there any legitimate affiliate marketing alternatives if you’re looking to make money online? Yes, there are, and let’s take a look at my number #1 alternative.

What’s My Number #1 Way Of Making Money Online in [Year]?

I’ve personally tried all of the major online business models:

• I’ve sold women’s health supplements via Clickbank affiliate marketing
• I’ve sold fidget spinners through Amazon FBA
• I’ve drop-shipped a toilet bowl, putting green on Shopify

And I made money with all of them, so trust me when I say there is no “perfect” business model.

That being said, my #1 recommendation for making real money online is hands-down, Digital Rental Method.

Whether you’re a complete newbie or you’ve been around the block before but have never had that “big win” to propel you forward, Digital Leasing is for you. 

Why?

1)Time commitment: If you have an hour or two per day, you can do this. Even if you want to drop everything and commit fully, that works, too.

You don’t have to be constantly working to make money. The income you generate is recurring. Imagine taking off for a month to places like Hawaii, Paris, National Parks, & other spots people only dream about – all while collecting dozens of little $500-$2,000 checks. It’s like a dream come true.

But it’s only possible to do it when you’ve separated your income from your time.

2)You Own & Control EVERYTHING: With affiliate marketing, you don’t really own a single thing – not even the customers you worked so hard to “acquire”.

Don’t believe me? Go read the terms of service for any major affiliate program – they can fire you or change your compensation at the drop of a dime.

With the Digital Rental Method, you own everything, so you have ultimate control.

3)It’s Effectively Copy-Paste: Here’s my favorite part: once you have your first Digital Rental Property up, you can literally copy-paste another version of it and find another willing “renter” in a few days. DOUBLING your income doesn’t get much easier than that…

If you wanted to double your income as an affiliate, you would need to sell twice as much inventory, or double your profit margins. And I can guarantee you (from my days selling women’s health products as an affiliate) that’s a lot harder than a few clicks & a phone call.

4)Great Margins: Margins on affiliate products can be pretty low unless you’re selling high-ticket products. When you sell high-ticket stuff, you typically have a lot of competition, and so driving traffic is expensive.

In the Digital Rental Method, your profit margin is nearly 100%.Watch here to learn how.

Just a reminder: these Digital Rental Properties are worth (at a minimum) $500/mo in semi-passive income. And each time you create another one, your income increases and the effort put into creating the next property decreases.

Best case scenario, you have properties bringing in over $3,000+/mo on auto-pilot.

5)You’re Helping REAL People: My biggest gripe with affiliate marketing is that you’re selling products that will bring you the biggest commission, not the products that will help people the most.

It’s cool in the short term to make a quick buck, but in the long term, it eats away at your soul.

But when you’re talking about the Digital Rental Method, you’re helping solve REAL problems that people are ASKING for help with:

Small local businesses around the world need one thing: customers. Without them, their businesses would fall apart. If we can provide those customers, they’ll be really happy—and they’ll pay you for it.

You’re helping a struggling mother or father put FOOD on the table for their families, put their kids through college, or simply live life a little bit more comfortably.

Having this type of impact on the world is what will help you sleep soundly at night.

So, the rest is up to you. You could keep looking at other affiliate programs, which might make you money 12 months from now.

You could keep researching and researching for the next few months (or few years), never making a concrete decision.

OR, you can look deep inside, think about those dreams, hopes, & desires, and make the decision to ACTUALLY make it happen, just like it has for thousands of other students before you.

Making a fortune while actually helping real people who need it.

If this sounds like you, click here to see how it all works.