Is affiliate marketing good for students? Affiliate marketing can be the best option for students for a number of reasons:
- It’s super flexible – one of the best reasons for students to learn affiliate marketing is the ability to choose your own working hours around studies
- It’s cheap – affiliate marketing is one of the easiest businesses to access. All you need is a laptop and internet connection; something most students already have
- You can work from anywhere – no matter where you are in the world, affiliate marketing lets you sell to anyone in the world
- There’s choice – whatever your budget you can fit affiliate marketing to suit you. If you’ve not got a large advertising budget you can build content to generate traffic or use other free marketing strategies.
Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Students? Part Time Job vs Affiliate Marketing
Despite all these good points there are affiliate marketing cons too. The biggest one being that affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. So if you don’t make any sales, you don’t earn any money. That’s not great if you’re needing money immediately as a student.
It can take some time to learn affiliate marketing and you don’t get paid straight away. It can take weeks, months or even longer to make affiliate marketing work for you, so you can’t rely on your income from it straight away. At best, in the early stages your affiliate income is likely to be sporadic while you’re learning.
So if that doesn’t suit you, you might be better off with a part time job which actually pays you for your time. The up-side to this coin though is that over the longer term you can generate a passive income from your affiliate efforts. This just doesn’t happen with regular employment.
See also how much can we earn from digital marketing.
Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Students? Paid Marketing Vs. Content Marketing
Depending on your situation you may be able to run paid advertising. This definitely makes an affiliate business move faster. With paid advertising you can test and measure and get feedback almost immediately. If you go the route of creating content to drive traffic, you will find it takes much longer to get a handle on making sales.
While content marketing is cheap, it’s also competitive. So you’ll need to stick with it for some time before it will work at all. Paid marketing is also much more scalable. With content marketing, it can take you months before you’re getting regular traffic for all your work.
The upside of content marketing is that you can find you’re making a passive income from all the content you’ve created. With paid advertising, you need to keep running those ads to keep making sales. So if you don’t figure out a profitable campaign with paid ads, it can get frustrating spending money without making any commissions!
Best Practices For Newbie Affiliates
If you’re going to get into affiliate marketing here’s a couple of tips I wished I’d known earlier in my affiliate journey:
- Get help
- Use a list
- Choose high ticket and subscription products
Getting help and support is vital since around 95% of affiliates drop out when nothing happens for them. You’re much more likely to stay the course when you have a cheering section and someone to ask for help. Join an online community here.
Using an email list was the best thing I ever did as an affiliate. Before I figured this out I was wasting so much time and effort trying to sell from a website which had hardly any traffic. A list puts you in charge of your traffic and makes more out of your efforts. Get free autoresponder for affiliate marketing here.
High ticket and subscription products can make a huge difference too. When I started with affiliate marketing I used low paying products and made peanuts. When I switched to high ticket, my commissions took a large leap upwards. Subscription products pay you a recurring commission which makes a massive difference, especially if you’re new and looking for results. When you make a sale of a recurring income product, you get an income, not just a “one-off” commission.
