Is affiliate marketing a good side hustle For 2022?

The affiliate marketing industry has an estimated value of $12 billion globally. Additionally, spending in the US on affiliate marketing is projected to reach $8.2 billion by this year. These stats show how big the affiliate marketing industry is. The question that remains is how you can get a piece of the pie too.

If you are considering starting an affiliate marketing business, it’s common to ask yourself: Is affiliate marketing a good side hustle?

The answer is YES! Affiliate marketing is a great side hustle. The business model is extremely simple, your only job is to drive traffic to the offer, as you don’t need to develop a product, ship the product, and deal with customer service. It’s also very flexible, you can work how many hours you want during your weekly schedule.

If you’re the type of person who wants to build a side hustle that generates passive income, so you can lay on the beach, drinking piña colada, while you take a look at your phone and just see the money coming in, affiliate marketing can help you with that. 

But not everything is rainbows and unicorns though. Affiliate marketing has a lot of downsides as well. In this article, I’m going to show you everything you need to know about affiliate marketing, so you can decide if it is a good side hustle for you.

Let’s get started!

Upsides of Affiliate Marketing

First I’m going to start off by showing you the upsides of affiliate marketing.

1 – Beginner Friendly

Affiliate marketing is a very beginner-friendly business model. As a beginner, you’ll need to face a learning curve when starting a new business, and the more aspects of the business you need to learn, the more difficult it will be.

In a typical business, you’d need to learn product development, lead generation, traffic generation, sales, customer service, customer support, employee management, and a lot of other activities. With affiliate marketing, you only need to learn one part of the business and one part only: how to generate traffic.

By focusing on just one thing your probability of succeeding will be much higher, as you’ll master the activity way faster. 

2 – Don’t Need to Worry About Logistics

Your only job as an affiliate marketer is to include your affiliate links inside your content and one. No need to do anything else. When someone hits the buy button, you make a commission. No need to worry about keeping an inventory and shipping the products.

3 – You Can Easily Monetize Your Audience

If you already have a business or an audience, affiliate marketing is a great way for you to apply some leverage. You just need to think about who your audience is, what are their problems, and what kind of solutions they are looking for. Then, you just need to look for other brands that provide these solutions, so you can recommend them to your audience.

Whenever you see some Youtuber making a recommendation, saying that they use some tool or product and that they will include a link in the description, they are doing just that. They are leveraging their audience and their existing business to make more money.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that the product you’re promoting has high quality and will deliver results to your audience. Don’t promote bad products. Otherwise, you’ll ruin the trust you worked so hard to build.

If you already have a business, a great way to find products to promote to your existing customers is to think about what they need to do before, and after they buy your product. For example, if you sell a digital course about gardening, you can recommend all the tools they are going to need and sell it via affiliate links.

4 – Flexible

You can have a very flexible routine. You don’t have a boss and you’re free to work as many hours per week as you want. Of course, the more you put in, the more you get out, but it’s up to you.

It’s possible to work as little as 5 hours per week and achieve results. It will just take a little bit more time.

5 – Passive Income

Affiliate marketing can be a great source of passive income. In the beginning, you’ll need to put a lot of work in, but just like interest rates, all the effort you put into it compounds over time. If you publish an article on your blog today or a video on your Youtube channel, you can be making money on this same piece of content years from now.

After you develop your channels, the work you need to put in is just to maintain the results. Which isn’t nearly as close to the work of building a channel from scratch

6 – Unlimited Potential

As you’re working in a commission-based model, you have unlimited potential. If you sell more, you get paid more. This gives you no limit on how much you can grow.

7 – Very Little Costs

When getting started you have very little costs. If you’re doing affiliate marketing via social media, you don’t pay anything and you only need your phone. With Youtube, you can also use your phone to record videos in the beginning.

If you want to build a website, you’ll have some costs, but it’s very minimal. You’ll only need to pay for a domain name and hosting, which costs around $35 dollars for one year of hosting, and you get the domain name for free.

8 – Super Scalable

Affiliate marketing is very scalable. Scalability means that you can get new customers without having to do more work. It’s super scalable because you only need to produce the content, and after that, your content works as a 24/7 salesman, and you can earn money from this same content years after you have published it.

Downsides of Affiliate Marketing

Now that you know the upsides of affiliate marketing, it’s important to take a look at the not-so-good aspects of it. As I said in the beginning, not everything is rainbows and butterflies haha

1 – It Can Take Time

Depending on the channel you are building, it can take time. Building a big following on social media and Youtube can take years. The same is true for Google and SEO. If you’re planning on driving traffic to your website from Google, you’ll practically not see any results for the first 6-8 months.

If you choose to do affiliate marketing via paid advertising, you can achieve results faster. But this means that you’d need to invest money in it upfront.

2 – Pressure to Make Sales

As you work based on commission you’ll have some pressure on yourself. You only are paid when you perform and make sales. No sales, no money. If you have problems with anxiety, this can be a negative point to consider.

3 – Little Control

One of the biggest downsides of affiliate marketing is that you have little control. The business owner has total control, and every decision he makes affects you. If they decide to cut off the affiliate program, PUFF… You’re out of business.

They can also cut down the commission rate, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Amazon Associates is famous for doing that and causing the rage of many affiliates.

If the business owner also makes bad decisions that get them out of business, you’re out of business together with him.

One way to mitigate this downside is by not building your whole business around just one affiliate program, and promoting more than one program. In this way, you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket.

4 – Hard Work In The Beginning

If you’re building organic channels to promote your offers, it will be a lot of hard work in the beginning. This means that you’ll work hard for 6-12 months without seeing any results. This can be very discouraging, and you’ll need a lot of patience. If you’re bad at delaying gratification, this can be an important downside to consider.

When Affiliate Marketing Isn’t a Good Side Hustle

Affiliate marketing is one of my favorite business models, but depending on some factors, it will not be a good choice. 

The first thing to keep in mind is that if you’re expecting to see overnight success, probably you should start an affiliate marketing business. It will take time and hard work to become successful. It can take anything from months to years.

To start an affiliate marketing side hustle you need to have patience, dedication, and be willing to work for a period of time without seeing results.

The second important factor to keep in mind is that it will not be a good side hustle if you promote poor-quality affiliate products. It can be better in the short term to promote the product that pays more, but it can ruin your trust with your audience. So, affiliate marketing is only a good side hustle if you focus on promoting high-quality products.

Conclusion: Is Affiliate Marketing a Good Side Hustle For You?

The answer is up to you. How do you feel after reading all the upsides and downsides of affiliate marketing? If the upsides speak to you and make you excited, you’d say that it’s a good side hustle for you. So, by all means, get out there and do it.

If you decide to start an affiliate marketing business, make sure to check out my full affiliate marketing guide. 

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