Is affiliate marketing a scam?
Or is it a legitimate way to make money online?
Many people go into affiliate marketing thinking it’s going to be easy, that with just a small amount of work and splashing a few affiliate links all over the internet the commissions will start rolling in and keep on coming.
The affiliate marketing game, while a basic business model that anyone can do, is not that simple.
Affiliate Marketing Is Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme
This is the very reason why people give up on affiliate marketing so quickly. They go into it with the “get rich quick” mentality. No one is ever going to get rich quickly with affiliate marketing. Yes, you can get rich off of it, but certainly not when you first start out.
It takes time and effort to build momentum with online marketing, sometimes years before you can even draw a fulltime income from it. Some people reach a level of fulltime income within 6 months, others take longer. It depends on so many things.
- Your niche
- How much time you put into your business
- Whether you get the right training to speed up the process
- If you have an advertising budget
- How quickly you can learn
- Persistence and patience
- The kind of products you promote
The variables are many, so no one can really put a deadline on affiliate marketing success in monetary terms. What I can tell you is this: If you stick with it you will eventually have success. But you’ve gotta really want it so bad you can taste it, and you’ve got to be willing to always be learning.
Some highly successful marketers build up huge email lists of subscribers that they can promote to. Once you are on this level you can pretty much make money at will. Imagine having a list of 100,000 people you can blast an email out to with your latest promotion. If you were selling something that paid a $50 commission and only 1% of your list bought the offer, you’ve just made yourself $50k from one email! That’s massive. It takes a while to build up this kind of list, but it certainly can be done.
Email lists are just one facet of affiliate and online marketing, but they are a big component in terms of their power and potential.
You Need To Learn How To Build An Affiliate Marketing Business
Another very important reason why many fail at their affiliate marketing business – apart from not giving it enough time – is because they didn’t seek out the right training, or they opted to go it alone and had no training at all.
Training is a real short cut. Being shown what to do from the very start saves so much time and potentially money as well by not making mistakes and spending months going in the wrong direction.
My number one choice is a company called Wealthy Affiliate. It’s free to join (no credit card required) and you can even do the first 10 lessons of their easy to follow training free of charge to see if it’s for you. There is an upgrade option where you pay monthly to complete the training, but it’s totally optional.
It’s well worth doing the training if you have your heart set on creating and growing a successful online business that will be feeding your bank account with dollars for many years to come. Click below for my complete review.
Conclusion
Is affiliate marketing a scam?
No, it’s definitely not. It’s a legitimate online business that takes time, learning and some hard work to establish, but it can be very profitable given time and can turn into a passive and residual income stream once things are flowing.
You can set up your financial and lifestyle futures with a solid affiliate marketing business, so it’s definitely worth doing. Anyone can do it.
Darren Burton
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I have to agree that Affiliate Marketing is not a scam. There are a lot of scams out there that say they can help you get rich, as you say but they are definitely not worth the time and money. Affiliate marketing takes time to build up an audience and get ranked on Google. You are right about persistence and patience. I have been very persistent and trying to be patient 🙂 Wealthy Affiliate is great!
It’s hard to be patient, because it can look like nothing is happening for a while, but stick with it and the traffic and money will come. It all increases over time if you keep working on your business.