Pros and cons of starting your own affiliate marketing website

Affiliate marketing is a million dollar industry, but what are the pros and cons of setting up your own affiliate website?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn income but it takes a significant amount of dedication and commitment to start seeing real results. Affiliate websites/marketing are a type of self-employment, and it has its fair share of advantages and disadvantages.

We take a look at several pros and cons of starting your own affiliate website, preparing you for the challenges you may face but also the opportunities that come with affiliate marketing.

Pros

5. Lucrative industry

The affiliate marketing industry is worth over $12billion, globally. It’s a low risk and high reward type of industry since it involves low costs to start it up and the ongoing costs are also considered to be very low. The industry is set to be worth even more in the coming years as many publishers and advertisers are turning to affiliate marketing to leverage affiliate content to raise brand awareness. When you set up your affiliate website, know that you will be entering a serious marketing channel industry worth billions with a high reward potential.

4. Low Costs

Whether you’ve decided to start up an affiliate website or investment further into it, affiliate marketing requires a low cost. It’s easy to join the industry, with no barriers to entry.

Why is it so cheap to enter?

Once you create your own affiliate website (although this is also optional), you must then target your specific audience/market and then find products that are relevant to your audience. Once this is ready, choose your desired affiliate program and you’re all set to go! When it comes to investment costs, this is also incredibly low for someone planning to open their own affiliate website. The operating expenses are near to non-existent with only domain and web hosting expenses and other design costs. Otherwise, you could easily work from home so no office space is needed.

3. Self employment

Whether it’s your main source of income or something on the side, setting up your own affiliate website gives you the freedom to decide just how much you are willing to work. Due to it’s self employed nature, it is entirely up to the affiliate marketer to decide just how much they are willing to push their website. Setting up your own website does not require you to leave your current full-time job as it can easily be done as a side project for the first few months while you test out the waters. Therefore, the freedom and flexibility that comes with setting up an affiliate website is quite a huge advantage.

2. Endless strategies

The techniques and marketing strategies that one can choose from are endless. There are multiple ways on how one could market their affiliate program and since its a self-employed role – it is entirely your choice. You could create a blog, use affiliate emails or even choose to get creative and create your own little project such as a tech-review page. Social media platforms are also pivotal to your endless list of strategies. From plug-ins to product specific products – affiliate marketing offers an endless stream of different strategies which do not restrict your way of thinking.

1. Return on Investment (ROI)

Affiliate marketing is proven to have a higher return on investment than most marketing strategies. Why? You are directing your product to an audience that is in your “influence” sphere, therefore, the targeted audience are willing to listen to you and are highly receptive to what is on offer. With the low operational and investment costs, the return on investment of owning an affiliate website is clearly a major advantage, as there is huge potential for high earnings.

Cons

However, not all that glitters is gold and there are a few disadvantages that come with starting up an affiliate website.

5. Time and Effort

Since it is mostly a self employed role, affiliate marketing takes up a lot of time and effort especially if you are looking to make it your main source of income. Becoming an established affiliate marketer does not happen straight away and it may take time to see significant profits. Successful affiliates all plan long term as this industry is not a “get rich quick” scheme, as on average it takes up to half a year maybe even more than two years to start seeing a good income from the site.

4. Partnership Risk

Like in any industry, there is always the risk of bad business partnerships. Affiliate marketers may run into partners that are not willing to pay, discontinue their affiliate program or end up going out of business during the campaign. One must conduct a lot of research before entering an agreement as to avoid these types of partnerships.

3. Competition

Due to the industry having little to no barriers of entry, that means that there is a lot of competition. To become an affiliate marketer does not require any special training or startup capital as it mainly relies on self-discipline and work rate. It is said that approximately more than 100,000 new websites are created every day, which shows just how much competition you will be facing.

Therefore, when just starting out on your affiliate website, the most crucial step is identifying that market niche.

2. No Pricing Control

One of the other disadvantages when it comes to setting up your own affiliate website is that once you do confirm a partnership, you are usually unable to negotiate the product pricing. Certain affiliate programs will pay a certain percentage based on how many units are sold and that sum could be non-negotiable. This may be quite frustrating as no matter how many high quality customers you send to a site, there is rarely a negotiation opportunity for more money.

1. No Guaranteed revenue

Although there a hardly any costs to starting up an affiliate website, making it a low risk industry, affiliate marketers may experience high risk in terms of revenue. Affiliate marketing is performance based pay and although it may be a huge opportunity to generate high revenue, there is also the risk of not generating anything at all.

About AGS Dubai

The 3-day Affiliate Grand Slam event kicks off in one of the UAE’s most progressive emirates on the 24th of May, 2021 with a series of networking and registration events – before a content-rich conference and buzzing expo floor take over the city’s luxurious Intercontinental Dubai Festival City hotel on the 25th and 26th of May.  The unique event is geared towards bringing together thousands of like-minded delegates, such as content marketers,  lead generation specialists, media buyers, affiliates, SEO gurus, and influencers for an immersive conference experience. Visit our website to register your interest or for more information.