Why Affiliate Marketing Does Not Work

I am sure you are excited about affiliate marketing for one reason or another. You might have also heard that affiliate marketing does not work. and the answer is that affiliate marketing can work and work very well if you are ready to do some hard work.

Affiliate marketing is where someone sets out to sell other companies products or services via their own means of marketing.  The company they are selling the products for does not help them market. 

Most affiliates are usually on their own trying to make money.  
Some terms you can hear associated with affiliate marketing are: 

  • Affiliate program – the program where people join to sell affiliate products
  • Affiliate manager – An person who manages affiliates
  • CTR (Click through rate) – The amount at which an ad or links gets clicked
  • Commission – The actual money affiliates make for selling products or services
  • Conversion rate – The rate at which someone buys a product or service
  • Cookies – A tracking code set on someones computer

Content driven affiliate marketing is usually done on a website where the webmaster will write and post content that is helpful to people looking for answers to certain questions. 

The better they answer the question and the more content they include, the better anyone can do with content driven affiliate marketing.  

The best way to do affiliate based SEO is to find low competition keywords and write articles around those keywords.  It’s best to first write an outline for the article and make sure it’s helpful to others who read it.  Thinking of search engines is important but helping actual people is the most important thing.  


Once a decent amount of content is written, then the promotion should begin. 

One of the safest and best ways is to build social profiles on the major social networks.  Then, try and get actually targeted followers and promote your content through them.  This takes time but when done properly and in a mass way it can have a lasting impact on any affiliate business.

Why Affiliate Marketing Does Not Work For Some.

A big huge reason affiliate marketing does not work for most is they lack the understanding of what it takes to make money online and or get traffic.

You see, there are two ways to get traffic and those are either you pay for it or you work your butt off and get free traffic from search engines, which really isn’t free.

You have to figure out if you are going to buy traffic or if you are going to try and start a blog.

And you will need to give things time as there is a learning curve as in anything you might attempt to do.

Starting Out As An Affiliate Buying Traffic

You can start out buying traffic to make money as an affiliate but there are rules. For one most places who let you advertise have their one set of rules you will need to follow or risk getting your ad account shut down.

Take for instance Facebook. When trying to make money as an affiliate on Facebook you will need a website or some sort of landing page software. You cannot just blindly place links on Facebook back to your affiliate offer.

What we suggest you do is set aside some money you know you can waste. Set aside $100 or whatever you can afford and then try and buy some traffic or ads. Realize, you are most likely going to just blow this money. But at the same time you will be learning.

You could also take some courses from sites like Digital Marketer to learn about paid traffic.

Getting Free Traffic As An Affiliate

Ahh yes, free traffic. It’s what everyone wants and thinks about all the time. But free traffic is really not free at all.

When it comes to free traffic you will either have to write a ton of articles yourself or you will have to pay someone else to write them for you. And, make no mistake, you will need a huge amount of content to get any traction with your business.

The internet is really just content and nothing more and the more content you have the more chances you have of being found by someone on a search engine like Google.

Free traffic does work but what you need to understand why most people fail is they give up way too early and never make it past a few articles.

Many Go After High Competition Keywords

When trying to get free traffic, many new webmasters start out and use the Google keyword tool. They see a keyword that gets a huge amount of searches a month and they start writing.

Well, it really does not work that way. First, when doing that many of those keywords are high competition keywords meaning the first page of Google is filled with high authority websites that already have a ton of trust in Google.

You need to find low competition keywords that are not searched a ton and do not have a lot of competition. It will be combining these articles that will get you a good amount of traffic to your website.

Take the time to learn proper keyword research from a reputable place online. It can make all the difference to yoru busienss later on.

Then and only then, when you gain some traction, you can start writing about higher competition keywords.

Not Taking The Time To Write High Quality Content

This is a big one. You cannot just write a ton of junk articles and expect to get tons of traffic to your site.

Google knows the difference between good content and bad content. You have to be helpful when it comes to writing content. Google knows when content is crap because people do not stick around long for bad content.

So invest some times into learning how to write properly and it will pay off. if you want to make money as an affiliate getting free traffic then you need to treat this as a real business.

All in all affiliate marketing does not work because most people lack a true understanding of what it takes to succeed with it.

It takes determination, dedication and perseverance to really make it, especially when trying to make it with free traffic.

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