In this article, we will discuss about Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing. In today’s world, affiliate marketing business is so popular that there are chances that someone in your neighborhood doing this business. This is not just popular among the business peoples but also among other professionals like Engineers, teachers, traders, bankers or sometimes among doctors and other medicine professionals.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a marketing process to earn commissions by selling or promoting different person’s or organizations product and services through affiliate link. The affiliates increase the sales of product by promoting it through blogs, social media platforms, Ads and through other means. More on wikipedia.

What are the Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing ?

It is quite a common notion that affiliate marketing is always a profit making business with no negative outcomes but obviously that is not always correct. Like any other business risks, this one also has its own pros and cons. Here we are broadly going to discuss few of the pros and cons related to this business.

Pros

• Great way to generate Passive Income : If you are a full time working professionals and looking for some passive income source then affiliate marketing is one good option to choose. You need to apply minimum effort to generate maximum income.
• Simple to Start : If you compare affiliate marketing with any other businesses then you will always find that it is comparatively easy to start than the others. Here you don’t have to deal with complex business scenarios and there are lot of contents available on Internet that can guide you the entire process free of cost.
• Minimal to no input cost : To start any business, the most worrisome part is the Input cost. If you are planning to start affiliate marketing digitally then ideally you just need a smart mobile device to start the business.
• No experience required : The best thing of this business is that you don’t need any prior business skills to start this business. However if you have SEO and other marketing skills then that will of great help here to grow your business.
• No fix working hours : Here you don’t have to work on any fix timings. You can schedule your work according to your flexibility and availability which gives lot of convenience.

Cons

• No Control over Products and Services : This is one part where affiliate marketers do not have any control. You need to sell the products and services as they are by telling its pros and cons and generally do not have any control on the product itself. Every you sell a product you have to follow merchant rules and conditions. Sometimes it goes against you if any of the rules does not comply with the countries law where you are selling the products.
• Vulnerable to Scammers : The scope of affiliate marketing has increased so much that sometimes scammers takes advantage of that and exploit customers by selling fake products and services. Many times customers won’t be able to decide if they are clicking the right affiliate link and hence end up getting scammed through fake links. Unfortunately this has become one of the major cons of affiliate marketing in today’s digital world.
• Intense Competition : Due to the very opportunity this business provides, there is an intense amount of competition you will see in market where everyone is trying to sell the products through its affiliate links. You have to compete with some of the experienced affiliates in the market who has decades and decades of experience in selling the products.
• Risk of Failure : Generally you will see we all talking about the successful persons in this field but you will never heard of all those person’s who put in lot of effort but still did not found any success in this field. It is very easy to start affiliate marketing but strategy is all that will decide your future in this business. So following the right strategy is always important to sustain in this field.
• No Guaranteed Income : This is one of the major cons of affiliate marketing where you will not have any guaranteed income. Sometimes you will earn more sometimes may be nothing. So this is not something in which you will always rely on. You have to treat this as passive income only and be ready for any changed circumstances.