The Downsides to Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is perhaps the easiest online business model that enables you to start earning passive income online due to its low-cost high-profit industry. The main challenges though is getting the right affiliate products to promote and the integrity of the vendors who in this case are the product/or software developers. However, all the challenges are on you and the performance relies on your determination, approach and the affiliate strategy you choose to follow. Affiliate marketing is an essentially a way for you to earn cash promoting or selling items or services without the responsibility to pack, ship or even deliver a digital product to the buyer as all you are just doing is driving traffic to your affiliate links and once a sale is made, you will get a commission.
As an affiliate marketer, you become an independent promoter of a chosen product or range of products from a selected niche on behalf of the vendors. Being an affiliate promoter means having the absolute freedom to build your online presence and you need to know the methods you will choose to reach potential customers and also optimise the whole marketing process.
In all the whole game is about earning a decent cut of sales, however, like everything under the sun, affiliate marketing has both advantages and disadvantages, and I will be discussing the downsides to affiliate marketing below.

Downsides to Affiliate Marketing

No control

Since you are not the owner of the product/service, you don’t own the affiliate marketing programs and thus you are solely dependent on the merchant’s rules and conditions. A program may look appealing at the beginning but later it can become less competitive and there is no guarantee that you will even make a sale to earn a commission.

You can lose your Commission

While affiliate marketing is easy to start with due to no need for heavy investment and earning revenue is easy, nevertheless, you can still lose the commission you have earned. This usually happens if the buyer or buyers request a refund within the stipulated money back guarantee period. If this happens, the merchant will debit your account to recoup the commission you have earned to give back to the buyer.
Competition
Competition is really high in affiliate marketing as thousands if not millions of people are promoting the same product that you are promoting and you won’t be able to control the competition the only thing you can do is to look for how to beat the competitors. Highly talented and hungry affiliate marketers usually invest in affiliate marketing courses to enable them to hedge out other competitors in the field of affiliate marketing. If you are keen on becoming an affiliate marketer this should not scare you as you need to do is to look for how to make a success with affiliate marketing and also remember that obligatory factors of success are hard work and persistence.

Customer Base

It is extremely difficult to establish a customer base when it comes to affiliate marketing when compared to other online businesses like e-commerce. The truth is once a referral is made, a repeating customer may never purchase from you again and in most cases, the vendor of the product will establish a direct relationship with the buyer and the only thing you enjoyed is the 1st commission that you made from such a customer. And to be honest, it is the product developer that enjoys most, since you are helping him to make sales and generate leads. This also comes to the fact that to succeed and even make the customer your loyal customer, you must build your email list. The only exception to this is if the type of product you are promoting is a recurring type, then you can be sure to earn commissions every month until the customer cancelled the recurring program.

No Guarantee of Revenue

Pay per performance (affiliate marketing) can be a tremendous opportunity to make real passive income online, however, no one promises that working as an affiliate marketer will be easy and that you are going to earn the expected revenue. This is a challenge you have to face and the need to put all your efforts at maximizing the opportunity. In all honesty, it is difficult to predict how much money you will make on promoting affiliate products in the long run.

Little/No Support from Vendors

Most often than not, there is no support or training on how to succeed with affiliate marketing from the vendors as all they are interested in is for you to make sales for them and earn your commission. Even for those that offer some sort of support, you might not get an answer to your request until after 5 days which is even shorter as some might take up to 3 weeks before responding. You can be sure that nothing concrete will be offered in terms of support for those vendors that even care to respond. The business of marketing other people’s products or services can be regarded as you are on your own (yoyo). It is therefore up to you to look for how to succeed with your affiliate marketing, otherwise, you will never make a dime from promoting offers.

You can read more about affiliate marketing on my blog