The question: is Affiliate Marketing still profitable today?
Current state of Affiliate Marketing
In today’s What’s Up Wednesday, we will take a closer look at the current state of affiliate marketing because of all the changes that have taken place in recent times and the old rehashed garbage that still remains.
If you really examine how the top earners who are making money online today, very few of those online marketers, who are in the upper 5% of all Internet marketers, make income strictly from affiliate marketing, even though many began their success that way.
Which begs the question; is affiliate marketing still profitable today?
The Answer
The immediate answer is yes, but it is not nearly as easy as it used to be!
The reason behind this is that competition has become very fierce in the major and larger sub-markets, and the methods needed to reach your market has expanded.
In the past, you could jump into a niche market, and with a little effort, you could drive a reasonable amount of traffic to your offer and make a healthy profit.
The options available for driving that traffic were much smaller back then as well, with the biggest focus on search engine results and PPC ads. Or you could just run a blog with AdSense and make a consistent income that way.
However, this is NOT the case today!
What changed?
With just the introduction of social networks, this automatically increased the number of channels needed to reach-out to your audience.
Also the methods people use to access the Internet as changed big time, too. In the not too long past, PCs and laptops were THE mode people used to surf online. Not any more!
Smart phones, iPads, readers, game consoles, HDTV, and now smart watches have all become methods people use to get online. With each new device requires a way to reach those users. If you have a website (or blog), your site has to be responsive to whatever device is viewing it, or you lose.
But those are not the only reasons why affiliate marketers find it more difficult to make money in the way which they do today. Even the top marketers had found affiliate marketing to be more difficult and have expanded their methods for making money online.
How do top online marketers make the money that they do, now?
Many of the top earners haven’t completely abandoned affiliate marketing as they will still promote affiliate products to their lists. These are lists of buyers they have accumulated over time that have purchased from them before (why having your own list is important).
But most of them have also added their own products or services into the mix. That is where you can take your online business to the next level like they have done, by having your own product or service.
So in a way, affiliate marketing has evolved as well, not only by promoting other people’s products, but also by promoting your own. What tends to remain the same is that they still seem to stick with the niche market they became familiar with and achieved success.
So what does that mean for you?
By starting out in affiliate marketing and learning how to sell online, to whom, and being able to offer a valuable solution to their needs still works. Building upon the principles you learn as an affiliate helps set the foundation to future business success.
What has become more complicated is finding enough interested people to offer that solution to make a difference (and a profit). That is why it is important that you develop a system which includes a web presence (website or blog) and build your own list.
The challenge
The really big challenge in any online marketing endeavor, including affiliate marketing, is finding where the largest part of your market is hanging out and then communicating to them effectively.
Once you have overcome these obstacles, adding your own product or service will help add to your income and online success.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment or question below and invite you to sign-up for my free affiliate marketing eCourse to build upon the information presented to you. 🙂
