I am tired of seeing the affiliate marketing industry being misrepresented as just another one of those get-rich-quick schemes! Hundreds, if not thousands, of websites are full of promises of helping you turn in a quick buck if only you buy their eBook or, even, join their affiliate program. Twitter is also full of tweets on “easy cash,” “lazy affiliates,” earnings of “$1000+ a day,” etc. So is YouTube… Furthermore, a Summer 2008 article in Entrepreneur.com read that affiliate marketing “may possibly be the absolute laziest way to make money because it doesn’t require you to have a product, make a sale or ever have any interaction with customers.” [source] The author seemed to equate all of affiliate marketing to pay-per-lead programs, but in this post I will not focus on this flaw in his argument. I want to pause and ponder on that first half of his statement where he suggests that affiliate marketing “may possibly be the absolute laziest way to make money.” C’mon! This is a huge misrepresentation that does not do justice to what one of the most sophisticated elements of e-marketing consists of!!
Let me make my point in a video:
Affiliate marketing is neither a recipe for easy cash, nor “the absolute laziest way to make money.” Getting to the pinnacle always involves a lot of hard work, and I do not know of one super affiliate who has not spent endless hours in front of their monitors, or has never been burned and lost money on ineffective campaigns or poorly converting merchants.
If you disagree, my challenge to you is this: post your arguments below, and I will entertain every one of your comments. I promise to respect your point of view, and do everything possible to understand where you’re coming from before posting my reply. If, however, I see no opposing views (which I explicitly welcome here) expressed, my case will only be further proven to be true.
Thanks for that post Geno!
I work for an affiliate marketing training site, and get so tired of the amount of misinformation that’s out there about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing can make a lot of money… but it is no get-rich-quick scheme! It, like all things worth-while, takes good old fashion hard work! Those who claim otherwise only end up demonizing all the serious and hard working affiliates out there!
We always try to tell people that while you may not have to make a huge financial investment, the one thing that you do have to invest is your time.
I will be interested to see if any of these “lazy affiliate” can make a sound, reasonable argument in defense of this claim.
Look forward to your next post!
Chris,
Thank you for your comment.
Yes, substantial time investment is required, and whatever little (it really depends on what can be afforded) money you do invest – you can loose if you don’t do it the educated way.
So far: not a single response to my challenge from “lazy affiliates” (neither here, nor on YouTube). Some good feedback from the hardworking ones though. 🙂
Excellent video Geno. Affiliate marketing is more work than my previous job was for sure. It is very time consuming getting started as well as maintaining campaigns. There are definitely people making good money in this line of work, but they are working many many hours.
Logan,
Thanks for commenting.
Some of those that are already making good money can afford not to work as much as they used to, but the online space is changing so rapidly that to keep up with the new trends, and maintain good SE positions and keep other marketing campaigns (paid search, for example) profitable, they still have to work.
It takes years of experience before you can just plunge in and particularly to be earning big money, the ones that just plunge in still have to work their way around and spend more hours to catch up to their competitors.