The Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Pros and Cons

Affiliate marketing is honestly hit or miss for me. While there are plenty of perks to using affiliate links, there are also some dangers to the practice as well. If you are a newer creator and curious how affiliate marketing works, keep on reading for a behind the scenes look into the practice!

Affiliate Marketing Pros

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Let us begin with the positives! Affiliate marketing is a great way to make passive income and monetize your audience as a creator. I personally use affiliate marketing every day between my Instagram and TikTok posts. Each time I upload content, I link my garments and products on my store in shop.ltk. On this platform, I can post photos and videos and link up everything I personally purchase. Then, when someone buys something I recommend, I get some commission. In a sense, affiliate marketing is the online version of sales. Creators get a percentage of the earnings each time someone shops our links.

Along with the percentages, influencers can also use affiliate links for their websites, YouTube channels, and more. The more their audience shops their products, the more income they make. It’s also a great way for your favorite creators to leverage brand deals because they can use their statistics to work with their favorite businesses on a regular basis. Remember, creators should never have to work for free!!

Another great way to use affiliate marketing is through brand deals. Now, I would only recommend this as an add on to a paid collaboration but creators will get a percentage of income each time you buy from their link. For a recent campaign I did, I received a special 10% off code for the product I advertised and if someone buys I item I get 20% of the sale. While this is all great in theory, it can be difficult to actually get these said sales. Let’s dive a bit deeper now into the cons of affiliate marketing!

Affiliate Marketing Cons

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While there are several pros to affiliate marketing, I do want to bring up some of the cons to the practice. One con is that it can be rather difficult to actually get sales. While yes my audience is my customer base, I also hate selling to them constantly. My return on investment is rather poor to be honest with you; I post every single day and only make pennies on sales. I also don’t have a super shopping-friendly audience. Of course at the end of the day I don’t want people to feel like they need XYZ but it does help me continue sharing products each day!

Another negative to affiliate marketing is that brands will also just collaborate with you in exchange of commission compensation via affiliate links. I personally find these types of collaborations to be a scam, you should be paid fairly for your work and I believe what is most fair is a solid amount of income. When I do collaborations, I create a set fee that includes certain deliverables. It is far too dangerous of a risk to just get money through a link and placing all the trust in your audience. Remember, affiliate links are a great bonus but you shouldn’t rely on that money for steady income!

Affiliate Marketing in 2022

I hope this helped clear up some of the confusion regarding affiliate marketing! It’s a great tool and strategy to have in your blogger arsenal but again you want to be careful with it. In todays climate, there are so many ways to earn an income online so do be careful with which path you chose. If you have any further questions with affiliate links, do not hesitate to reach out! I love helping creators and discovering what methods work best for you and your audience.

Until next time,

Lauren