Scam or Not? What Is Affiliate Marketing and Does It Work?

The rise of the internet has led to the proliferation of a plethora of new business models. A few decades ago, you would’ve very likely raised a few eyebrows if you expressed the desire to get paid for sitting in front of your computer at home. Fast forward to the present day and, lo and behold; it is a viable business model, and quite a lucrative one if put to good use.

Affiliate marketing is one such business model which allows you to make money from home, and all you need for it is the internet. However, the term “affiliate marketing” is also shrouded in controversy. There are a lot of myths surrounding the concept of affiliate marketing, and these myths have put doubt into the minds of anyone who wants to associate themselves with this form of marketing.

Some myths stemmed from the scams surrounding the concept of affiliate marketing while others have been built up by the collective unreal expectations of thousands of “wannabe affiliates.”

But before we get into the business of myth-busting and explore the scams and unreal expectations that have given it a bad name, let’s first answer a basic burning question: what is affiliate marketing and does it work?

So, let’s start with some definitions.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing started off simply as an advertising model whereby a company would pay a third-party publisher to generate leads or drive customers to the products and services that the company sold. The third party in this transaction is the affiliate who works to earn a commission fee for all the sales that he or she would facilitate by promoting the company’s products or services.

With the advent of the internet and the ensuing transformation of the commerce and marketing landscape, this model of advertising and promotion grew in popularity. The majority of businesses today engage in the practice of affiliate marketing. The e-commerce giant, Amazon really popularized it when it first created its affiliate marketing program. Online bloggers and website owners could now direct their audience to Amazon’s website through links on their sites. Whenever anyone of the directed audience would go on to make a purchase from Amazon, the blogger or the website would receive a percentage of the revenue as commission. This effectively makes it an outsourced promotional function that pays for performance. A number of affiliate programs and affiliate marketing networks have since risen up in this scene.

To thoroughly understand how modern, internet-driven affiliate marketing works, let’s look at all the players involved in the activity. There are 3 main parties involved in the process of affiliate marketing:

The Merchant: The merchant is the company, also known as the producer, seller, retailer, vendor, etc. The merchant creates the product or provides the service that needs to be marketed. This could be any business; from a Fortune 500 company to a lone vendor making t-shirts and selling them online.

The Affiliate: The affiliate is the marketer to whom a promotional task has been outsourced. An affiliate can be a single marketer or a company doing it on a large scale, providing services to hundreds of clients. The affiliates usually promote the merchant’s products by creating online content such as blogs or videos, doing reviews, etc. in an attempt to sell the company’s products to their audience.

The Consumer: Consumers are simply the target market for the product. They are the ones whom all the marketing efforts are focused at; the merchant designs and creates the product or service for them and the affiliate marketer creates the content to promote the products to them. Some marketers tell their audience that they are associated with a particular, while others do not. Increasingly, however, most affiliates choose to be transparent and tell their audience upfront when they market a product or service to them.

Is Affiliate Marketing Real?

The second half of the question, “what is affiliate marketing and does it work?” cannot be answered without exploring all the myths or misconceptions that have come to be associated with affiliate marketing. The simple reality of affiliate marketing is that it can be as good or as real as you are willing to make it – but more on that later. Let’s first see how these misconceptions came to stick with affiliate marketing.

The Scams

There are many people today that would react to the term “affiliate marketing” as if it’s a dirty word. This shouldn’t come as a surprise when you think of some of the scams that people have fallen victim to. Let’s look at each of them.

The Get Rich Quick Schemes

Everyone who has used the internet for long enough has come across one of these at least once; that’s how rampant these types of schemes are in the online sphere. The primary attraction of modern affiliate marketing is obviously making money. So scammers play on this basic desire of thousands of naïve souls who have the wrong ideas about making money on the internet.

In a few cases, Affiliate marketing can be a huge success and can allow you to make thousands of dollars each month. However, it will only come after you’ve put in the necessary hard work, learned the tools that you need to drive more traffic, and a number of other things that must be done correctly. There is no magic wand here if you want to be successful at affiliate marketing.

Furthermore, it takes time. The effort and investment required cannot be put in overnight. The scammers, however, tell everyone otherwise. Naturally, most people do not like the harsh truth and became an easy target for the scammers. After all, who wouldn’t be intrigued by the promise of being able to earn thousands of dollars in a day without even putting in any effort? As a result of years of falling for these “get rich quick schemes,” affiliate marketing came to be known as a practice associated with scams.

Fake Training

Another one of these scams revolves around fake training programs. It targets people who are new to the business of affiliate marketing. A large number of people trying to enter the field of affiliate marketing, with no prior knowledge of it, naturally fall prey to such scams and they turn to the internet to know more about the craft of affiliate marketing.

Every day, a few hundred new entrants to the field lookup affiliate marketing training resources on the internet that can teach them more about the practice. Online scammers peddle their fake online courses, webinars, e-books and all kinds of fluff to this lot. This isn’t to say that all the training courses out there are fake or useless, but it is much better to get one-on-one training instead of going the online training route. Even legitimate online courses may not offer a lot of help at times as different affiliates cater to different markets and what works for one may not necessarily work for the other. However, if you are insistent on using an online training manual, then here is a helpful guide to affiliate marketing.

Phony Marketing

Scammers put in more effort and thought into their craft than most new affiliate marketers are willing to put into theirs. They use multiple channels, and with this one particular type of scheme, they use the good old telephone. To put this scam into action, they spot a potential novice affiliate in need of affiliate training and then call them to sell them a bunch of phony services and products.

They sell CDs, DVDs, webinars, etc., and even try to up sell by offering bundle discounts. If the victim buys into what they are selling, they transfer the money into the scammer’s account in advance and wait for a parcel that will never arrive, or in some cases, when it does, it is filled with material that is available online for free.

Pay to Join Programs

Affiliate programs, such as the one started by Amazon, are free of cost. It’s simply a business transaction being carried out; the business or the merchant has as much to gain from the affiliates as the other way around. So the question of paying to join an affiliate program with a company simply doesn’t add up. However, as unlikely as it may sound, many novice affiliates fall for this trap. To make sure that you don’t fall for this scam, just know that every legitimate business will offer an affiliate program that is free to join; there is no cost whatsoever!

The Misconceptions

Besides the scams themselves, there are a few other misconceptions that have given affiliate marketing a bad name and relegate it to being a scam or a model that simply doesn’t work.

Spreading Yourself Too Thin

We see this in play quite often. We see well-meaning novice affiliate marketers enthusiastically start out and willing to put in all the necessary hard work. They have multiple ideas and many different niches they think they can target. So they choose the 4-5 seemingly viable niches and create various websites to target them, all while they are still learning the rules of the game.

This is where they go wrong, and as a budding affiliate marketer, this is what needs to be avoided. The trick is to simply pick a single idea or niche for a start and stick to it with a singular focus for at least 6 months. Since there are many things that you must learn when you start off, it requires a singular focus, as in most cases, 6 different ideas will not generate a penny.

Once you have learned the nitty-gritty of the craft, you can step up your efforts from there. But till then, give it time and do not spread yourself too thin. This brings us to the second misconception that affiliate marketing often falls victim to.

Giving Up too early

It takes a number of months before you can really take off when it comes to affiliate marketing. Besides, the initial few months are the toughest, as you have to build everything up from scratch. An affiliate marketer also has to have a loyal audience to whom he can market the merchant’s or the company’s products. It consumes hours, at times days, as you sit in front of your computer trying to create

compelling content, drive traffic to your site, learn SEO, engage with your audience by answering their queries, etc. Even then, the site may only be earning you pennies, if anything at all.

Naturally, a lot of affiliate marketers give up at this point. It takes time to develop a loyal audience; it’s not something that happens overnight. Besides, search engines also take time to acknowledge a website as high quality.

All of the above scams and misconceptions combine to give affiliate marketing a bad name. Now, back to the burning question:

Does It Work?

Let’s see how the affiliate marketing of today works. There have been substantial developments in the field of online marketing, and there are now a number of tools that can greatly assist affiliate marketers today in their line of work. There have been substantial improvements in things such as campaign tracking tools and online sales tracking; an affiliate can now track referrals across multiple channels and get paid even for in-store purchases that resulted from their affiliate marketing efforts. However, this doesn’t change the ultimate truth of affiliate marketing.

The Undiluted Truth

Yes, it is not a scam, and it is very much a viable career choice, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is still like most other online businesses. It’s not as simple as some scammer makes it sound; you have to invest your time and undying effort for it to grow into a reliable stream of income. It will require you to learn all the necessary skills, strategies, techniques and also have the patience that it requires to allow it to grow.

You’ll have to put in the effort to get qualified traffic, persuade that traffic to convert them into customers, build and maintain relationships with them, do paid advertising or top-notch SEO, manage websites and more – just like most other businesses. All in all, it works if you have what it takes to make it work. After all of this, if you’re looking to get started as an affiliate marketer, here are a few useful tips to get you started.

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