Niche Marketing Strategies

What is affiliate marketing?

Considering the current financial crisis and rising unemployment, many have looked into ways of earning some cash online to supplement their income. Those looking for online opportunities to make a little extra green inevitably hear about affiliate marketing. It’s essentially the idea of promoting an online business, and receiving payments for each referral you send their way.

The method of compensation varies among companies, but the basic idea is to promote a product or service online and when you succeed in getting others to visit the company’s website, you receive a small cash payment for your efforts. For the company this amounts to outsourcing online advertising and promotion to affiliate marketers who work as independent contractors

Does affiliate marketing work for businesses?

Whether or not affiliate marketing actually works depends upon your 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 number of major online businesses, such as 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. That said, affiliate marketers get few benefits from businesses that are local or have products that are mostly off line. Furthermore, failure to properly restrict the activity of affiliates or monitor abuses leads to a lot of unscrupulous affiliate marketers giving a business a bad name, and bad associations with bad marketing.

Does affiliate marketing work for affiliates?

It is undeniable that at least some people have built successful careers from affiliate marketing, but at the same time, it appears that the overwhelming majority of affiliate marketers make very little money, if any at all. 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. There is, therefore, a lot of misleading information online, and promoters typically have a veseted interest in getting people to buy “how to” materials. Because affiliate marketing is primarily an online endeavor, people are able to make whatever claims they want and it is virtually impossible to confirm them. 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.

Who is successful at affiliate marketing?

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. In general, most of the confirmed successful affiliate marketers are people who already had a strong background in advertising and marketing before they took up affiliate marketing. Additionally, most of the proven success stories concern people who have been involved since the beginning of the industry 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.

Get rich quick? Not very likely.

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 a great concept to open a new niche or market, or a strong marketing/advertising background, odds aren’t good that you’ll make a sustainable living on it for years.

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.

Is affiliate marketing right for you?

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 are simply looking for a quick and easy way to make some emergency cash, realistically speaking, affiliate marketing is probably not going to be the solution to your problem.

Tags: affiliate, affiliate commission, affiliate marketing, Make Money