Is Affiliate Marketing Still A Good Way To Earn Passive Income? 

by Tamesha Redford
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a website geek, or a new business owner, you’re likely always looking for new and innovative ways to diversify your income.

And, you’ve most likely heard about how easy and profitable it can be to earn a passive income through affiliate marketing. 

You’ve most likely heard about how some lucky entrepreneurs can generate full-time passive incomes by doing nothing more than placing affiliate links on their websites. Then, they simply sit back and watch the money roll in. 

While this may be factual for some bloggers or website owners, the fact is that affiliate marketing isn’t a completely hands-off way to earn money. 

Therefore, many site owners and businesses are left wondering whether or not affiliate marketing is worth investing in. 

Below, we’re looking at the pros and cons of affiliate marketing to help you determine if affiliate marketing is still an excellent way to earn a passive income. 

Let’s start with the downside of affiliate marketing. 

 

The Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

Websites that generate tons of organic traffic can easily be monetized through affiliate marketing. 

But for individuals building their affiliate sites from scratch, it’s essential to understand that a lot of effort and planning should go into making a successful affiliate website. 

For starters, you’ll need to research whatever industry you plan on being a part of to learn as much as you can about your competitors. 

You’ll also need to do a bit of audience research to determine who your ideal customers are and what type of products, services, and content will benefit them the most. 

Performing keyword research and knowing what keywords your target audience use is also essential to proper planning and building a successful affiliate site. 

Unless you’re already a tech-savvy person, you may also need to enlist help building or designing your website, writing blog posts, ebooks, and site content, or even learning how to optimize your website for search engine visibility. 

All of which helps illustrate the fact that affiliate marketing is not a hands-off approach.

And that it takes a lot of hard work to build a site that will generate any significant passive income.  

 

The Advantages Of Affiliate Marketing

The most significant advantage and why most people are interested in affiliate marketing is that it’s an easy way to generate income without owning any product inventory or providing any services. 

With affiliate marketing, you get to build a website the way you want, write the blogs you wish to, and label everything using your very own business logos and branding. 

However, you’ll be marketing and promoting other people’s products and services on your website rather than your own. 

You also won’t handle any of the actual sales processes. 

For instance, when using an affiliate program like Amazon Associates, you’ll place links on your website that point to products available for sale on Amazon.

Therefore, when one of your website visitors clicks one of these links, it’ll bring them to Amazon to view the product you’ve mentioned and (hopefully) buy it. 

They won’t even need to purchase the product that you’ve linked to from your site. Instead, the link will bring them to Amazon, and if they buy ANY product from the platform within a certain amount of time, you’ll earn a small commission on the sale. 

So with that said, it’s easy to see why affiliate marketing is an attractive prospect for website and business owners everywhere. 

 

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Investment? 

In short, affiliate marketing is a perfectly good way to monetize your website and earn passive income. 

However, you need to understand that you’ll need to put in a bit of hard work before you can reap the rewards of a steady passive income from your affiliate website.