Is Affiliate marketing a waste of time or worth it in 2022

Hi, I’m Praneeth Kumar.

In this blog, you will learn whether affiliate marketing is a waste of time and effort or not.

As being an affiliate marketer myself, I will talk about all the reasons why affiliate marketing is not a waste of time and effort in detail and leave you to decide whether you should do Affiliate marketing or not with clear answers.

So without further ado let’s get started,

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Is affiliate marketing a waste of time?

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Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time, it is one of the beautiful Business models and a great opportunity to earn money online.

I will give you all the convincing reasons why Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time but before that let’s have a look at three main reasons why people have this question in their mind in the first place.

When does Affiliate marketing seem like it is a waste of time?

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Generally, there are three types of situations where people have this question in mind: whether is Affiliate marketing is a waste of time or not.

Let’s see the situation and try to address the issue with it and the solution to it.

  1. They don’t have an audience first.

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One of the main reasons why people feel that affiliate marketing is a waste of time is because this,

It happens like this,

People sign-up for popular affiliate programs like Amazon Associates,

They get the Affiliate link and they start posting the link on different places like forums and social media.

They eventually get tired and sick of it and give up and tell others that Affiliate marketing is a waste of time and effort.

Look, before you start affiliate marketing you must build an audience first whether it is on social media or on your website.

For instance, if you choose to promote your affiliate products on your website you must write blog posts consistently on a regular basis to get traffic from search engines.

You will do a lot of mistakes and fail a lot while building an audience and it is a hard, time-consuming process as well to build an audience online mainly through blogs. 

The same is true on social media you need to post content regularly and it takes time to build an audience before you start monetizing the audience through affiliate products.

You build an audience and a following first only when you add value to other people’s lives by helping them solve the problems through blogs or entertaining them on social media.

Affiliate marketing is all about solving problems in people’s lives by recommending a product or service as a solution.

People only take your recommendation and buy the product from you when they know you, they consume your value/content and they trust you.

For example, if a random person on the street asks you to buy an iPhone which he has for half the price would you buy that.

No of course not.

Why because You don’t know that person, you don’t trust him.

The same is true on affiliate marketing as well.

So don’t say that Affiliate marketing is a waste of time before you build an audience first and then do Affiliate marketing.

You can click here to learn how to do affiliate marketing on social media.

  1. They have an audience but don’t know how to promote the Affiliate products rightly.

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Another situation when Affiliate marketing seems waste of time is even if bloggers and people have built the right audience on Website and social media platforms they don’t see results through Affiliate marketing because they don’t know how to promote Affiliate products effectively.

Even when you have built an audience on your website and social media platforms you need to learn how to promote affiliate products effectively.

  • You need a plan and a strategy.
  • You need to produce the right type of content.
  • You need to promote the product to the right audience.

There is a lot of learning and experimentation required in this sense.

To get results faster and quicker in affiliate marketing, you can learn how to do affiliate Marketing effectively from some of the popular affiliate marketers in the world like Pat Flynn of smart passive income who makes more than 200k USD a month.

  1. They think it is a new online scam.

Is Affiliate marketing a waste of time

Many people either don’t know about Affiliate marketing or they think it is something like an MLM and pyramid scheme or some online scam strategy so they think it is a waste of time.

To be honest, Affiliate marketing is totally different from MLM and pyramid scheme sort of stuff or any other get-rich-quick scheme.

I have written a blog on the differences between Affiliate marketing and pyramid scheme here.

I agree with the fact that there have been many frauds that took place in the industry but that doesn’t make the industry a scam as a whole.

Affiliate Marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy that many people use to earn millions of dollars every year and it is not an online scam.

Now that you know when Affiliate marketing can seem a waste of time, let’s see why Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time at all.

7 reasons why Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time?

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Here are 7 main reasons why affiliate marketing is not a waste of time.

Let’s have a look at the reasons in detail.

  1. You can learn how to research and create content for your audience.

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Whenever you’re doing affiliate marketing, you need to learn how to do research for the product and create awesome content revolving around the product.

The content can be anything from,

  • Blog posts.
  • Videos.
  • Podcasts.
  • Infographics.

The content for Affiliate marketing can be anything as long as you can convert the people into customers by adding value to them.

When you are doing research and creating content for your target audience for Affiliate marketing.

You can develop traits like patience, hardworking and consistency.

Because it is not easy to create such amazing pieces of content consistently that helps users on the internet like creating blogs, videos, and podcasts.

For Example, if you are doing affiliate marketing on a website,

You need to consistently write and publish high-quality blog posts even when you are not seeing results initially because Blogging takes time due to SEO and to get traffic from search engines.

In the process of creating and publishing blog posts, you get to develop qualities like of be more critical thinking, hardworking, patience, and consistent in your work.

These are 4 important qualities which you can develop and can help you a lot in your life as a whole.

So, the number one reason why affiliate marketing is not a waste of time is that, 

Through affiliate marketing, you can learn some important qualities for lifelike being hardworking, patient, critical thinking, and consistent in your approach from researching and creating content for your website and social media.

  1. Affiliate marketing helps you build an audience and be an influencer.

Is Affiliate marketing a waste of time

Whether you are doing affiliate marketing on social media or on your website.

You can build an audience and be an influencer for a group of people.

The beautiful thing about building an audience is that, even if you fail in affiliate marketing, you can still make money as an influencer for your audience by promoting sponsored posts on your website or social media platform.

For example, if you become a social media influencer, small brands would like to collaborate with such influencers to promote their brand and product.

You can make a serious amount of money through it as well.

You can also sell your products and services relevant to your niche by building an audience around it and making money.

By building an audience on your website and social media platforms and when you become an influencer to a particular group of people, you can grow your self-confidence and self-esteem a lot.

This is a great reason why Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time.

  1. Affiliate marketing helps you learn so many skills.

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Earning money is only one side of Affiliate marketing, the other thing about Affiliate marketing is what skills you learn in the process.

One of the most important reasons why I feel Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time is because,

When you are doing affiliate marketing you can learn so many things and skills like,

If you are doing affiliate marketing on our website or blog you can learn various things like,

  • How do you SEO of your website?
  • How to write content like blog posts and visuals and bring traffic to your website?
  • You can build valuable connections and relationships with other bloggers in the industry through building backlinks and attending conferences and events.
  • How to set up and analyze your website performance in tools like Google Analytics and Google search console[This can alone help you grow analytical and critical thinking skills].
  • You can learn how domains and websites work on the internet.
  • You can learn how to do promotions of your website through search engines Marketing and paid ads.

If you like to start affiliate marketing on social media, you can also learn some amazing skills.

  • You can learn how social media marketing works.
  • You can learn how to use the Facebook page or YouTube channel to attract an audience effectively.
  • You can interact and engage with people online.
  • You can improve your communication and networking skills.
  • You can learn and create content on social media platforms like videos and images.

At the end of the day, you can learn how to sell products, and selling any product or service is the best skill you can learn to make money because every business wants to make sales at the end of the day,

The reason why Affiliate Marketing is so important for companies because they get lots of sales and customers to the business through Affiliate marketers even if they invest very little money in marketing and Advertising of the product themselves,

Affiliate marketers save tons of time, energy and money for companies in advertising the product themselves.

  1. Affiliate marketing can help you earn money without limitation.

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Now let’s talk about money.

Unlike other sources of earning money online like,

The beautiful thing about affiliate marketing is the money-making potential.

There are some popular affiliate marketers like Pat Flynn and Yaro stark who make more than $200k a month through affiliate marketing.

The thing I want to highlight here is,

Because you don’t have to deal with customer service or customer care in affiliate marketing.

If you start a blog for affiliate marketing you can literally make money while sleeping passively.

Because, when you write blog posts targeting different keywords in Google and other search engines and rank your blog for those keywords in search engines.

People will be searching for those blog posts in Google using keywords and reading and buy the products from blog posts.

And, unlike other online businesses like freelancing, there is no limit to how much money you can earn through affiliate marketing, only Sky is the limit.

You can also earn money through recurring revenue in affiliate marketing which means,

Any product or service you sell to your audience and you earn money as long as the customer keeps on using the product renewing the subscription every month like SEO tools like SEMrush.

Normally, The equation of earning money in affiliate marketing is very simple, the more sales You make consistently the more money You make.

Because there is no limit to how much you can make in affiliate marketing there are people who are making millions of dollars every year through this strategy.

Because you are not exchanging money with how much time you invest, unlike freelancing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the highly scalable Business models which makes it one of the best ways to make money online and not a waste of time.

  1. You don’t lose anything in Affiliate marketing.

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One of the beautiful things about affiliate marketing is that there is nothing to lose in affiliate marketing.

This means affiliate marketers are always getting and gaining stuff.

Because you are just promoting products of other companies, you have zero risks and no tensions of things like,

  • All the Affiliate programs in the world are free to join so you don’t have to invest money to get started in affiliate marketing.
  • Almost all the affiliate programs will provide you all the resources you need to do the marketing of the product like banners, discounts, and analytics, so you don’t need to spend money on extra resources for marketing purposes.
  • You don’t need a website to do affiliate Marketing, Many affiliate programs allow you to promote the product on social media as well, click here to learn how.
  • Because you are just sending customers and leads to other company’s you don’t have to deal with customer service or customer care for the product.
  • You don’t need a degree or education qualification to be qualified as an Affiliate marketer which means anybody can become an affiliate marketer if they are interested in it.
  • Many affiliate programs will increase your commission rate and give you more bonuses if you consistently get them more sales every month.
  • Affiliate marketing can be a great reason to start a website and build valuable connections and relationships with other bloggers, or on social media, and build a network with other mutual influencers in the industry.

Affiliate marketing is one of the risk-free business models for marketers and people who want to make money online.

  1. Affiliate marketing can help you live your dream life.

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With Affiliate marketing, you make money and learn some important skills but you also have the chance to live a life that most people only dream about having.

You can work from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection and a computer to do Affiliate marketing so it provides the flexibility of work.

You can travel to different places in the world without working on the project for a while because you don’t have to deal with customer service and Affiliate marketing is like a passive income source.

Affiliate marketing can literally help you live life exactly the way you want because you control your time and life yourself.

  1. Affiliate marketing can help you live a purposeful life.

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The last and final reason why I feel Affiliate Marketing is the best and not a waste of time is that,

You can live an absolutely purposeful and meaningful and successful life.

You can achieve success in all the ways possible through Affiliate marketing like,

  • You can make a lot of money.
  • You can live life the way you want.
  • You can help change the lives of people across the globe.

Think about it for a second, if you have a job that you hate and you think you can be a good Affiliate marketer, it is a great thing to start.

Affiliate marketing is all about recommending products to other people and why people buy products, it is mainly because of getting rid of a problem or getting some value out.

By recommending products to other people you are actually helping people by adding value to their life and changing their lives for the better.

Honestly speaking, success in life is largely dependent on how many lives You can impact and add value to other people and help others.

With Affiliate Marketing, you can impact a large community of people online across the globe.

When you think about it for a second, Affiliate marketing will no longer be a grind to you because your work directly helps solve problems in someone’s life unlike jobs and employment in this strategy you are not stuck in a rat race,

You are always learning and growing for the better every day in this industry.

You can live a life full of purpose and positive energy with Affiliate marketing.

Because of all these amazing reasons I feel, affiliate marketing is definitely worth it and not a waste of time as you might think.

Before ending the blog, introspect yourself and ask yourself the following questions and decide whether you should start Affiliate marketing or not.

These questions will help you decide whether Affiliate marketing is a waste of time or not for you because it is a very subjective thing, not everyone can be good at something and not everyone should start something just because it is good.

Self-introspection questions:

Is Affiliate marketing a waste of time

Ask yourself the following questions as a self-introspection before you get into the Affiliate marketing business.

  1. Are you an open-minded person and willing to learn from your mistakes and open to advise?
  2. Are you willing to invest time and effort in creating content consistently on your website or social media?
  3. Can you motivate yourself in tough situations and work when you feel you want to give up?
  4. Do you really want to take charge of your life, time, and money?
  5. Do you want to live a life free of a boss and rat race?

If you have yes to all of these questions, you should probably choose affiliate marketing as you won’t regret it in the future.

These are all the qualities needed to become an affiliate marketer.

By answering these questions to yourself you can decide whether Affiliate marketing is a waste of time or not for you.

With that being said let’s conclude the blog post.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered everything related to why Affiliate marketing is not a waste of time.

Do comment down what you think about Affiliate marketing.

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I will catch you next time till then,

Keep learning and keep growing.