The Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

As most of you that have been reading this site for awhile already know, I originally got my start as as blogger, made my first online paycheck through blogging, and to this day still have a strong passion for blogging. I even feel that my readers have contributed a lot to where I am today from their comments here and reading their posts on their blogs.

No matter what reason we all start out blogging, I think it is only natural to eventually look at blogging as something you enjoy and something you would like to do for a living. Who wouldn’t want to? With that said, only a select few bloggers are able to make a full time income blogging. This is especially true when you factor in a lack of benefits and other things that you would normally get from a normal job.

But what about affiliate marketing? There are thousands of people (if not more) making a full time income online, and it really isn’t that difficult. Add in the people making a very good 2nd income doing affiliate marketing part-time and you’ve got something special.

For the purpose of this post, I decided to write about the advantages of affiliate marketing. This post is intended to cover the overall advantages, but you’ll find that many comparisons are drawn up against blogging, which is what I know and being a blogger is what most of my readers are.

The Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

As you probabaly noticed from my May income report, affiliate marketing has already been very good to me and I’ve only been really attacking it for under a year now. I do think it is important to note that I am still drawing some income from private advertising and Google AdSense, though it is fairly minimal and mostly offsets my advertising costs, etc. Prior to focusing on affiliate marketing, my online income came exclusively from Google AdSense, private advertising, and Text Link Ads.

Here are a few advantages I’ve noticed already from shifting my primary focus to affiliate marketing:

• Easy to Take A Break - If I decide to go on vacation, move, or take some time away from my computer, there is nothing to do. No guest bloggers needed, no scheduling ahead posts, and no dip in income while I’m away. Your sites should continue to perform while you are gone as long as you have good webhosting. Shoemoney once posted something along the lines of “I knew I was in the right business when I went on my honeymoon and returned to find that I made more money while on vacation than I spent on the honeymoon.” That is paraphrased of course, but it really sums up the power of affiliate marketing, and possibly the one statement that has truly inspired me and drives me to work so hard each day.
• No Maintenance - Once your site is setup and tweaked to perform optimally, you are done! Ideally you will want to, over time, launch more sites and look for better performing affiliates, but these are methods to improve your income, not sustain it.
• Being Social Not Needed - One aspect of blogging is growing your brand and building a strong following. Build up your feed subscription count, encourage comments, submit your posts to DIgg and Stumbleupon, etc. None of that is needed with affiliate marketing. You technically don’t even need to be social with people (though there are advantages to developing friendships and bouncing ideas off others). Success is determined with dollar signs, not subscriber counts. This also means you won’t have to spend any time supporting products, answering contact form questions, researching/reviewing things.

So, those are the three major advantages that jumped out at me. I’m sure I could easily draft up a post that covers the other side of the coin with advantages to blogging. After all, some of the things listed above as advantages might be disadvantages to others. Some people love to interact with other people. It really depends on your business plan, how you work, and your preferences.

Is there anything you would add to this list?