The affiliate marketing industry is growing at a remarkable pace. Experts estimate that the industry is growing around 10% a year. It is likely to be worth $6.8 billion by the end of 2020.
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Aspiring affiliate marketers are drawn to the industry, because it offers a number of benefits:
- People can do their work from anywhere in the world. This isn’t just a benefit from a lifestyle perspective. It is also a great opportunity from a financial point of view. The cost-of-living is typically higher in urban areas, where the highest paid jobs have traditionally been. Affiliate marketing gives ambitious entrepreneurs the opportunity to make a lot of money and still live in an area with a low cost of living.
- The opportunity to make money is virtually limitless. Some of the most successful affiliates are earning seven-figure incomes. Consumer Search is an affiliate marketing venture that was later sold for $33 million to the New York Times.
- You have virtually complete autonomy over your work schedule as an affiliate. You can set almost any hours that you would like.
There are a lot of great benefits of being a successful career. However, there are some challenges as well. Fortunately, those challenges pale in comparison to those faced by other business owners.
One obstacle that you need to face is coming up with financial capital to create your affiliate marketing business. The amount of money that you’re going to need is going to depend on your approach to affiliate marketing. If you take the wrong approach, you could be fighting an uphill battle throughout your entire marketing career.
This simply won’t be an option if you are strapped for cash. You need to consider the different routes that you can take to affiliate marketing and find one that is ideal for your impoverished situation. It is a good idea to understand the basics of affiliate marketing to get an idea before moving forward.
What are the most impossible options for affiliate marketers with limited budgets? What are the most feasible?
There are a number of approaches to affiliate marketing. However, it can pretty much be divided into two categories:
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- Approaches that involve promoting offers with free, organic traffic sources (SEO, Pinterest and Facebook pages)
- Approaches that involve media buying, PPC campaigns and other types of pay traffic
The concept of “free traffic” is a little misleading. It isn’t always free, because you might need to pay for links to improve your SEO or hire people on Upwork to manage your social media. However, it is almost always going to be cheaper than using paid traffic.
I discovered the hard way that the biggest mistake that you can make is choosing a very competitive niche and using a very competitive and expensive traffic source. I tried promoting adult dating and weight loss affiliate offers with media buying traffic and PPP. This is a mistake for a couple of reasons:
- The cost of traffic in those niches was incredibly expensive
- Even after I found profitable channels, they wouldn’t work long-term. The traffic sources that I used had high burnout rages, so you couldn’t just create a campaign and forget about it.
If you are trying to start an affiliate marketing business with a small amount of money, then you will probably want to focus on free traffic. You can start your own website and track traffic with social media and organic search.
However, it is still important to choose the right niche if you want to be successful. Some of the biggest issues, such as weight loss have people that have spent tens of thousands of dollars on organic search marketing.
The good news is that there is a lot of money to be made with hate we define issues with little competition. One of my friends created an affiliate marketing website with about 200 pages of content and only 20 back links. That website makes him about $3,000 a month in revenue. It has been surprisingly stable and the creative, considering the little amount of work that you put into it.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money to make it big as an affiliate. You may not need to spend money at all. However, you need to plan well.