Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. It offers many advantages over other sales methods, including the fact that you don’t actually have to stock any inventory to make sales. As an affiliate, you only need to advertise a product and direct the customer to the sales page of the product itself, which is usually run by the retailer or creator of that product. If the customer buys, you receive a portion of the sales price, even though you did not actually transact or deliver the product. What could be easier than that?
While the concept may be easy, most people are drawn to affiliate marketing because of the promises of making a lot of money, rather than doing it easily. You don’t have to look too far on the Internet to come across a page that tells you that you can earn thousands of dollars a day as an affiliate. While the mechanism is simple, it is actually the promise of a large volume of cash that tends to attract people to this type of business. However, many people are blinded by the big numbers and don’t realize how unusual it is to make a lot of money as an affiliate early on.
You can certainly make money as an affiliate, but those who make six figures often have something going for them that most people don’t: a huge mailing list. Having a large group of customers ready when a new product comes along is an important part of making big money in marketing. Those who have spent years building a large mailing list with ten thousand, twenty thousand or one hundred thousand names can often make thousands of dollars just by sending out a single email ad. Such success is possible, but it is the result of years of hard work. Ads like “I made $30,000 in a week advertising product X” may be technically true, but they often hide the unspoken “sending an email to all 250,000 people on my list!”
Building a mailing list takes time. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s a vital component of making money through affiliate marketing. With a large mailing list, you have a group of loyal and proven customers who are eager to buy from you. This is much better than trying to get random strangers to buy whatever it is you’re promoting. Anyone interested in trying affiliate marketing should take promises of huge six-figure income with a grain of salt and understand that such results are not typical. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money, it just means you have to have realistic expectations of how much you can earn right away. As long as you understand that you can’t get rich overnight, you’ll be fine.