Proven Benefits and Drawbacks of Affiliate Marketing

You don’t have to own a product to be in affiliate marketing. Just help to market it, that’s all and you get paid commissions for your efforts. You don’t even have to search for great ideas as most entrepreneurs do to help create a best-selling product. As an affiliate marketer, your major duty is to find or create an audience of buyers and you are in business. With that audience in place, what affiliate marketing requires is that you can simply choose an existing product that you have confidence in and you are passionate about to market. That sounds so simple and easy but there are clear benefits and drawbacks which most affiliate marketers get to experience. Here are some of them.

Proven Benefits

You don’t have to create a new product/service to be in affiliate marketing.

You don’t even need to have a product/service of your own. All you need do is to help others market their products/services.

It involves very low or even free start-up costs.

Most referral programs are free of expenses except those related to the referral/marketing methods. Your choice of marketing methods can even keep such expenses at the barest minimum.

It is easy to combine affiliate marketing business with any other online activity like blogging and social media influencing and you make more money.

It is an ideal business for everyone who wants to work independently and even at home.

Provided it has internet connection, you can work from any location you want.

Affiliate marketing is a very good business with a great potential to earn passive income in perpetuity.

You can work at your own pace and your own time and what you earn depends on how you are selling the products/services you have chosen to market.

There is no limit to what you can earn.


 
Expected Drawbacks

The competition in affiliate marketing is characteristically very high. It is a very simple online business for everyone so typically, a huge number of people get involved.

Generating the required amount of traffic to your website most times poses a very huge challenge for affiliate marketers. For some, it may take quite a bit of time to get the required traffic and for others not at all. Without traffic, your marketing efforts flounder.

Affiliate marketers have no control over the product/service they are marketing.

They have no idea how their affiliate partners run their businesses.

They do business with affiliate partners on trust and how the commissions they earn are computed and determined they don’t know.

Finding the right, reliable and honest affiliate program is at times hugely challenging.

You have no way of knowing who made a purchase and in what quantity. A dishonest affiliate partner can systematically reap you off with that alone.

The buyer deals directly with the seller and it is only the seller who knows the buyer even if the affiliate marketer made the connection.

You can easily destroy your credibility when you make bad affiliate referrals.

If you fail or neglect to choose honest affiliate partners for cooperation, your business can suffer for it.

Conclusion

No matter the drawbacks, affiliate marketing is one great online business worth working on no matter your experience and background. When properly set up and with good affiliate partners, you can earn unlimited passive income in perpetuity for as long as the products you are marketing are in demand.