The Complete Affiliate Marketing Business
If you’ve thought about earning an income from affiliate marketing in some way, I wanted to challenge you to think about affiliate marketing as more than just a supplemental income. Affiliate marketing can actually make an awesome complete business for lots of reasons. This is a case for affiliate marketing as an whole business..
For those of you completely new to affiliate marketing, the concept is simple. Lots of businesses and people online are willing to reward you for referring new customers or visitors. All you have to do is sign up for an affiliate marketing program and direct people to the program owner’s site. If those people purchase something, you earn a commission.
Affiliate marketing makes a great business because you don’t have to create products, write software or hire any employees. You just find customers who are interested in purchasing a product and show them where they can purchase it. It’s probably the easiest way to get started working online, especially if you find a good affiliate marketing guide to help.
Rinse and repeat and you can earn a full-time living just through affiliate marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing is already a $13 billion industry and growing. The major affiliate network ClickBank has paid out over one and a half billion dollars in affiliate marketing commissions alone. That’s just one network.
Affiliate marketing can be a highly scalable business model too.
Anything from a 1-page website / $100 per month business to a huge site earning millions of revenue per year can be based on affiliate marketing. Chances are, you’ve visited some big affiliate marketing sites before, but weren’t aware of it. Here are a few you might have heard of:
- Bankrate
- Epinions
- Lower My Bills
All three of those sites are basically affiliate marketing sites. That’s how each of them make money. They provide content or services based around a specific topic (credit and product reviews in this case) and refer customers to other websites as an affiliate so they can collect commissions.
Those sites are each at least 10 years old, they are run by companies with hundreds or thousands of employees and they earn millions of dollars in revenue each year. How’s that for scalable?
But you don’t want to build a big huge business, right? Maybe you want a lifestyle business.
If you’re reading this because you want freedom and the ability to decide how you spend your time, I have some awesome news.
Affiliate marketing could be the foundation of the lifestyle business you’re looking for. Just look at my friend Karl as an example. He has earned the majority of his money during the past 10 years from affiliate marketing (up to $2,000 per day he tells me). We’re not just talking supplemental income. Real, earn-the-freedom-to-live-how-you-want-to income is possible.
Karl has been able to continue to build his affiliate marketing business while spending a lot of time outside the country over the past year. Affiliate marketing doesn’t care where you are or when you work. Even better, you can continue to earn money when you’re not “working.”
Getting-rich-quick doesn’t apply.
I mentioned earlier that affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to get started working online. That doesn’t mean it is without work. Get-rich-quick schemes don’t exist in my book, and affiliate marketing is no exception. You’ll have to put in some serious hours to earn a livable wage. You’ll probably want to enroll in a course on affiliate marketing to help you along.
The best part though, is that you can start earning money really quickly (in just weeks if you’re a quick study). That’s much different from creating your own product and selling it, which usually takes at least a few months. It is also far different from blogging, where even the fastest take about a year to earn any meaningful income.
Getting quicker results is a big part of staying motivated. Many people quit online projects too early when they don’t get the results they’re looking for quickly enough. With affiliate marketing that risk is less.
Affiliate marketing really can be a complete business. To get started on the right foot, check out my review of AffiloBlueprint.
