Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Best Business Model

Written by Tyler Day

CPA Marketing Training Video

Right now, there are a lot of different ways to make money online. You could do SEO, drop shipping, print on demand, Amazon, and so on. But I think that affiliate marketing is the best option for anybody who’s looking to get started in 2019-2020.

1: Low-cost entry point

First and foremost, you can start doing affiliate marketing with virtually no money. I know this because I did it myself. When I got started in 2012, I had roughly $300 to my name. I needed to make that work as far as starting a business, and I didn’t really have a lot of options.

When I was looking at different businesses that I could start with a $300 budget, there weren’t many options. I did have a landscaping business at the time, but even that couldn’t really grow with $300.

So, to me, affiliate marketing seemed like a great choice, and it turned out to be a very good choice. You can definitely start it on a shoestring budget — if you have just a couple of thousand dollars, you can get up and running without a massive, hefty investment.

Other, traditional businesses, like if you wanted to start your own brand/franchise/restaurant, require tens of thousands of dollars to start, whether you’re sourcing products or doing manufacturing. It’s usually not cheap, and you definitely can’t do it with $300.

2: One-man show

Another reason why affiliate marketing is great is that you can do it with absolutely no team. Peter and I, the two of us did it for years, and it wasn’t until after we started making multiple six figures in profit that we started to invest into building out our internal media buying team and bringing more people on board to help. For years we did everything ourselves; we ran all the ads, and we managed all the backend parts of the business.

We just didn’t need a team until we did. Obviously, you can only do so much as one person, right? Eventually, you’re going to hit a wall. Can you do six figures in profit as a solo affiliate? Yes, absolutely. Can you do seven figures in profit as a solo affiliate? That might be pushing it.

After you get to a certain point in your affiliate marketing career, you’re definitely going to want to start to think about building a team. I think the best time to start building a team is once you are profitable and once you’ve hit a limit as far as what you can personally manage in your business.

3: No inventory hassle

You don’t have to deal with any inventory.

This is a key element that makes affiliate marketing great. If you were to start your own brand or make your own product, or even do something like drop shipping, you still need to deal with inventory and find a supplier for your products.

You still need to deal with buying those products from manufacturers and getting them shipped to either you or a warehouse.

Yet, with affiliate marketing, you don’t need to deal with any of that stuff. All you need to do is focus on driving traffic and making sure your marketing is really good.

4: Piggyback!

The fourth reason why I love affiliate marketing is that you really get to leverage other peoples’ hard work. When you’re promoting an affiliate offer, especially if it’s a proven one that’s been around, there’s usually a lot of legwork that has been put in behind the scenes before you even start running traffic.

For example, if you’re running a Clickbank product or something on MaxBounty, you can generally see what products or offers are performing better than others. What you can do when you’re testing different offers is piggyback on the ones that are already proven.

The advertisers that have put the work in optimizing their landing pages and the entire flow that a user sees when they go to your affiliate link, there has obviously been a lot of work put into those affiliate offers.

If you are just starting out and need to build all that from scratch, it would cost a lot of money in testing, sending traffic, optimizing the page, doing A/B testing, and multivariate testing on the offer page itself.

When you’re promoting a proven affiliate offer that works, usually there has been a lot of work done before you even start sending traffic, which is great.

5: Scale quickly

The fifth reason why I love affiliate marketing is because of how fast you can scale once you become profitable. This is crucial. Once you get profitable on a campaign, especially if you’re doing paid traffic.

In order to make more money, all you need to do is send more traffic. Of course, it might not always be so easy; you have to deal with ad networks, and Facebook, etc.

At the end of the day, if you can send $100-$200 in traffic, then you can do $1,000 a day in traffic. If you have the right profitability and good enough margins, and if your campaigns are dialed in, there’s no reason why you can’t do that.

We’ve seen campaigns scale overnight from no traffic to well over five figures a day. If you start up a traditional business from scratch and spend $100 a day just testing out your offer, your product, whatever you’re selling, and let’s say that you become profitable, then it’s not like all of a sudden, overnight, you could just open the tap and start doing five figures a day in revenue.

You would have to deal with increasing your customer service infrastructure, getting more merchant accounts, doing merchant load balancing, inventory, lead times to get that inventory shipped from China — from the manufacturer over to your warehouse. There’s a lot you need to do that isn’t sending traffic.

This is why affiliate marketing is such a superior business model when you’re just getting started. You don’t have to deal with any of those headaches.

For a lot of the affiliate offers that we promote, if our traffic goes from 0 to $10,000 a day, they don’t even blink an eye, because they’re used to that amount of volume and have the infrastructure in place to deal with the fulfillment of whatever the offer is.

Once you start scaling, all you need to worry about is sending more traffic and managing the cash flow within your own business, paying attention to things like; are you profitable enough? Do you have enough cash flow on hand at scale? Do you have enough Line of Credit? Do you need to go get some more credit cards?

But if you were running a traditional business or any other business model online, you wouldn’t be able to scale that hard and that fast, right out the gate. There would be a lot more hoops for you to jump through and a lot more challenges, obstacles that you would need to figure out.

6. You can pivot very, very fast if something doesn’t work out. (forgot this point in the video)

7: Few moving pieces

The seventh reason why I think affiliate marketing is so superior is the lack of so many moving pieces. There’s a lot of moving pieces that are attached to the traffic side of the business, but that’s all you need to worry about.

There are so many other challenges and obstacles that you would need to figure out with a different business model, like if you own your own e-commerce brand, etc.

With affiliate marketing, all you need to do is focus on traffic, build good landing pages, and find affiliate offers. It’s not going to be hard for you to have exponential success in this space. A lot of people get into business and start weighing all their options, but they get overwhelmed because they don’t know the challenges associated with starting your own e-commerce brand or doing print on demand.

They may not realize that starting another business really isn’t as challenging as being an affiliate marketer.

Conclusion

So, guys, to conclude, I’ll summarize the seven points here.

1: You can start with very little money affiliate marketing.

2: You can start without a team.

3: You don’t need to deal with inventory.

4: You get to leverage other peoples’ hard work.

5: You can scale very quickly once you find a profitable campaign.

6: You can pivot very, very fast if something doesn’t work out.

7: There are not very many moving pieces compared to other business models.

I hope this was helpful. Comment below and let me know what other topics you want to hear from for me. You can also find me on Youtube, and I’ll see you in the next one!