Due to recent events, many people are actively looking for remote work. Not being attached to a physical space like the office and your desk sounds more attractive these days. If several years ago, freelance work was considered a less reliable option, now we see it as a more profitable and sustainable way to generate income.
Along with other possibilities to work online, affiliate marketing has been gaining more and more popularity among professionals interested in trading in their desk job for a job online. Where there is interest, there are people promising newcomers easy money with zero to no effort. Using these promises, they are trying to get you interested and pay to learn more. However, after you do buy their books or courses and go through all of them, you will need to face the reality. When it comes to real work, things might not be as easy or straightforward as those “experts” may want you to believe.
We have asked the founder of the ADSbase integrated communications holding, affiliate marketing expert, and influencer Denis Lagutenko with an Instagram audience of over 470k followers to help us dive into this topic. Denis provided some valuable insight from his experience in affiliate marketing so we can learn about the reality of entering this industry in the present day.
Table of Contents
Price for the Information
This is where many people begin getting familiar with affiliate marketing. Looking up definitions and basics will surely get you to some blogs and pages arranged by financial gurus. The first thing they will make you believe is that becoming an affiliate is as easy as copying and pasting a referral link. This might be true if you want to get $5 off your next Uber ride by inviting a friend to the app. However, if you want to make stable income and make affiliate marketing your full-time job, it will not be as easy.
Information on affiliate marketing and how it works isn’t a secret. There are plenty of free resources where you can learn exactly what to do and how to start working as an affiliate. So the first lesson would be – most information is free.
“Many people trust clickbait and this is why it still works. These online gurus will make you believe that only they hold the information that will allow you to succeed. However, if that was true, hundreds of their followers would be becoming rich every day. However, there are less than 1 percent of extremely successful players in the market, and they learned their lessons by trying different things and making mistakes”, Denis warns.
“There are lucrative niches in affiliate marketing and there is a lot of competition. Experienced successful players will probably not want to share secrets to their strategy and breed more competitors for themselves. If they share a strategy that works, not only you but all of their followers will try to use the information to make profit. This will result in nothing but a completely drained budget. You should always remember that affiliate marketing is not about taking information from someone else. It’s about finding your niche, working on mistakes, and analyzing the results.”.
So if you are new to affiliate marketing and want to learn, start doing the research yourself and put time into it. Any and all information that is offered in pricey courses can be found in articles and videos about the industry that is available to anyone for free.
The knowledge
Where do you start if you know nothing about affiliate marketing? First, it’s important to understand the job is done and what exactly affiliates are getting paid to do.
Put simply, affiliate marketing is a way to earn money by promoting a product. Affiliates advertise the product through their own channel and get commissions on each sale that comes from them. There is usually a fixed reward for each targeted action. The product doesn’t have to be physical and the required action doesn’t have to be a sale. Some advertisers may pay for registrations on their websites and downloads of their apps.
You can work directly with the company whose product needs promotion or use an intermediate program to get offers from different companies.
“Referral programs allow regular users to become partners of brands and help them make more sales by attracting new leads. For each targeted action through their referral link, affiliates receive a part of the profit.”
“Another option is joining a CPA network that shares the offers from various companies with their partners,” Denis explains. “An advertiser places their offer with an affiliate program, and an affiliate marketer or a webmaster selects it and receives a unique link to which they should direct traffic. The rates here are lower because CPA networks take a percentage from each payment. On the other hand, affiliates and publishers are freed from direct communication with advertisers and receive full support: offer lists, ready-made tools, and creatives to increase conversion, as well as consultations from a personal manager and other assistance.”
Studying the available direct offers and the ones affiliate networks provide would be the first step that a newbie affiliate should do. While doing this research, you will come across the terminology such as types of payment models, niches, and tools that are used in affiliate marketing. All of this information is vital to understand how the system works and how you can succeed in it.
The budget
Entering a new field can be intimidating. If this is done in an effort to make a lot of money from point zero, the task becomes even harder. Often people who enter affiliate marketing in hopes of multiplying their investments or not making any financial investments at all, will get discouraged by the lack of results.
“Setting up an advertising campaign can be very expensive for affiliates. The higher is potential income, the more budget an affiliate needs to beat the competition and get satisfying results. Many experts do not recommend going into affiliate marketing without a substantial budget for testing the strategies,” Denis warns. “You also need to realize that at the initial stage, this entire budget can be lost. Spending your last funds in the hope of easy money is definitely not worth it.”
“Adequately assess your capabilities, carefully allocate the available budget for testing various strategies, and carefully study the results. If you come prepared and practice hard, achieving success becomes closer to reality.”
The effort
As can be understood from previous points, affiliate marketing IS NOT just easy money. It is a job that requires time, effort and initial budget. If you come into the industry determined to reach success, these things should be considered. Denis Lagutenko has achieved his expert status and amassed a large audience by putting a lot of effort into his work. There is no other way around it: to do something well you need to keep doing it.
