Affiliate Marketing Worth It

Many people are wondering today is affiliate marketing is worth all the effort.

the short answer is that it can be, if it's done the right way and you're promoting the right offer.

Sadly this is not what most want to be affiliate marketers and up. Often they end up with having spent a lot of money putting together a website and pushing SEO techniques that worked back in 2016 but no longer work in 2021.

For instance Wealth Affiliate promotes the idea that you can simply publish a lot of blog posts on your new affiliate site and you'll get a lot of traffic, this is wishful thinking this year.

 The problem with affiliate marketing is that there's no barrier to entry.

 Pretty much anyone can start a blog with a few dollars and some time.

 affiliate marketing is simple AF, which is why so many migrate to it.

 What exactly is affiliate marketing?

 it is promoting an offer put out by another company and taking a sliver to deliver.

 In essence you're acting as a middle sales person who makes money on commission.

As mentioned earlier, successful affiliate marketers have two things: a great offer and lots of traffic.

In fact the most successful affiliate marketers promote hundreds of offers on their website.

Their websites are not just fresh domains registered from GoDaddy and then setup on Bluehost, rather they are aged domains that took years to cook under Google's crawlers and have slowly become authoritative based on continuously updated content.

I'm talking long posts updated twice a year for several years in a row.

Then these posts get promoted by their authors via email and social media and then gather a lot of backlinks, which are when somebody else references that post on his or her website . That link back to the author's post is an authoritative signal from Google's point of view, which makes Google push up the article even further up the organic rankings. 

So is affiliate marketing worth it for you? 

The answer is probably not. Unless you really enjoy writing content and then promoting the hell out of that content so that you gather the votes to power it up the rankings.

If you still think that affiliate marketing is possible for you you're certainly right. It's definitely possible but not very probable. 

Here's the steps that you'll need to go through to be successful:

Step 1: Niche down. Pick an industry and then pick a sub-industry inside that first industry. you can't just talk about money or investing, but you might talk about cryptocurrency investing, which happens to be on the rise. 

Basically you need to establish yourself as an expert in that small sub-industry so that you get a boatload of return visitors to your website, thirsting to feed on your knowledge once again. 

Step 2: Structure

now that you've decided WHAT you're going to talk about it's time to structure HOW you're going to talk about it.

The vast majority of your traffic is like to come from the major search engine of the world: Google.

So your website needs to be in the good graces of Google.

How do you get it there?

The short answer is structure.

Make sure that your sight is well-organized, using a three tier link strategy with each subtopic in its own silo.

 A well-structured Blog is key to making certain that Google's crawlers can quickly and easily scan your content and index it. 

Whoa

 that was technical

 you might be like "hey could you run that by me again?"

 that was my reaction the first time I heard that.

Basically you need to think through your content and plan out what you're going to cover starting with the big topics and then the smaller ones and then linking from the big topics to the small ones.

Here's Part B to this: to be successful in affiliate marketing, you should have at least a introductory level of knowledge of search engine optimization or SEO.

 You should have an idea of what "no-follow links" are,  creating "meta tags", monitoring "keyword density" and encouraging backlinks through having interesting and valuable content.

One note regarding urls: short and sweet is the best way to go. (I rarely have a URL slug over 4 terms long) 

Conclusion

Hey, I hope you enjoyed my take on whether or not affiliate marketing is worth starting in 2021. It’s abundantly clear that the topic of making money online is super important right now, especially with jobs and businesses going south because of, well, you know, current events.

Making money through the internet is not going to happen overnight, but you could quit your job much faster in 2016 using affiliate marketing than you can today, because of Google's algorithm updates, the abundance of wide open niches, etc.

But if not Affiliate Marketing, what?

As I mentioned in the intro, I liked affiliate marketing a few years ago, but the past few Google updates and with many more bloggers entering the space every minute, the odds of having a successful affiliate business are stacked against the newcomer. 

What if there was a model that reduced the impact of algorithmic changes and brought the level of competition down to a 3rd-Grade level?

When I discovered Local Lead Generation, it was a no-brainer. 

The competition is low, because you're working in a city with only maybe 30 competitors, not thousands. 

Even better still, they're focused on doing their services and you're the master marketer in the space.

If you’re looking to build a real, online business where you can rinse and repeat to scale your income, do yourself a huge favor and check this out below.