Many people jump into the online world and begin an affiliate business without giving it much thought. They hear all the hype on the internet about people making thousands of dollars a month and think that will be them too.
They soon realize that affiliate marketing is not as easy as they though and some lose hope. This is the reason most people who start an online business never succeed.
People like things easy and they are lured in by hype that tells them exactly what they want to hear. Things like;
- It is going to be so easy
- You will start making money in less than a week
- If you follow so and so steps, you will make money by the bucket loads
- You can even make money on autopilot.
It is true that many people have made it big in affiliate marketing. If you look closely at these successful people, you will see that they did their home work before starting a business.
Many of them have had a few failures before finally succeeding. It takes time, it take work and it takes dedication to succeed in affiliate marketing.
To set yourself up for success, you need to do your homework. You need to study those who have succeeded to find out what they are doing right.
The biggest reasons people fail to make passive income with affiliate marketing are;
- People choose the wrong niche to begin with
- People quit too soon
- People fail to put in sufficient effort
- The competition is crazy
Niche picking
In my opinion, the most important step towards success in affiliate marketing is niche picking. Choose a highly competitive niche and you will drown and die.
Choose a niche with little or no traffic and you will fail. It is a delicate balance.
When choosing a niche, you want to find one with little to moderate competition and plenty or moderate traffic.
To find such a niche, you need to do a keyword research. A keyword research will tell you how many people search for that keyword a month and what the competition for that keyword is.
Niches that are lucrative for affiliate marketing include;
- Money making niches
- Relationship niches
- Health and weight-loss niches
- Education niches
- Baby niches
- How to niches
How to niches are especially great if you are going to use YouTube to promote your business.
Even after you choose a good niche and start business, you need to write great content and share this content in order to reach many people.
Facebook, Pinterest, twitter and YouTube are good ways to do this.
Quitting too soon
Many people fail online because they quit too soon. They come in thinking it is going to happen over night and when it doesn’t, they are disappointed.
The thing is, even if you do everything right, It is going to take a while for your site to mature. Many websites get their traffic from google and other search engines and these engines don’t just recommend your site to visitors from the word go.
It takes a while for your content to rank on these search engines and it also takes a while for you to gather enough traffic to make good passive income.
So, while you are waiting for your site to mature (it takes at least 6 months in most cases), you need to write excellent content and share your content. Be sure to do a thorough keyword research before writing your content to improve your chances of ranking higher on the search engines.
In each content I write, I try to target at least 3 keywords. This improves my chances of ranking high.
Failing to put in sufficient effort and income
Many people start a website and write a few pages and post it and expect to make big money from it. I blame this on the hype that has taken over the internet. People are told that they can make it big with little or no effort but that is not true.
You need to put in plenty of effort into keyword research, content writing and social media marketing to succeed.
More so, people are inclined to go for free or cheaper things. This is not necessarily bad but those who invest both effort and income in a business are more determined and dedicated and are the most likely to succeed.
Too much competition
Since the recession, the number of affiliate websites have risen drastically. Some niches are so competitive that only experience marketers can survive in it.
If you happen to choose such a competitive niche as a newbie, chances are you will make little or no money from it no matter how hard you work.
It is getting pretty tough to find lucrative niches with little competition but if you do your homework right and find one, you will join the ranks of successful affiliate marketers.
A great keyword research tool to use is Jaaxy. You can try it for free.
Are there alternatives to affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing has become so popular that many people think it is the only way to make money online. There are many other ways to make money that are not as labor intensive as affiliate marketing.
Other ways to make money online include,
- Adsense
- E commerce
Those are not the only two methods but those are the two I have experience with.
Adsense website
Adsense websites are websites that are designed to generate income with the use of ads from google, clickbank and other sources. It only takes a few minutes to set up an adsense account and start posting ads on your website.
Adsense websites do not take a lot to build. All you need to do is to find a nice niche with good traffic and little competition. Register your domain name and then personalizes your site as you see fit.
Then write content for this site. Usually, 8 to 10 post is enough to bring in good traffic if you choose a good niche and do a good keyword research.
Typically, a website that draws about 150 visitors a day can generate between $100 to $300 a month. The key to making passive income here as I mentioned earlier is to build many of such small websites.
If you have about 10 of these websites, you can make about $1000 to $3000 a month. Some people make even more with more effort.
You can get a group hosting package at many of the renowned hosting sites or you can join the premium membership of wealthy affiliate and get up to 50 websites hosted for free. You will also benefit from the lessons offered to premium members.
E commerce
Another way to generate income online is via E-commerce. You can set up a website purposely for E-commerce. With a plugin like Woo-commerce it is pretty easy to do.
It is hard at the beginning when there is little awareness of your website and it is also hard to compete with the likes of Amazon and E bay.
However, if you deal with specialty niches that are hard for the giants to deal in, you can be very successful.
More so, at the beginning, you can sell on some of these giant sites to draw awareness to your business.
E bay for example will let you list up to 50 items for free a month. The good thing with E bay is that when people buy from you and pay via PayPal, you have access to their email. You can then build an email list and use it to promote your E-commerce website.
If you know the right thing to sell, you can be very successful. You can use best seller list and google trend to research possible goods to sell on your E-commerce site.
Then you can contract with wholesalers to purchase these items at a lower price to sell for profit.
Alibaba and aliexpress are great places to go to find cheap commodities.
Bottom line
If you do a combination of different marketing techniques, you have a higher chance of succeeding online. Sticking to one techniques is like eating the same thing all the time; it gets old quick.
Use a combination of content marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, E-commerce and more to build your passive online income.
I hope this post was helpful. I will like to hear from you. How do you market online?
Cheers Denise
