The decision whether to use paid vs organic marketing is one you should consider carefully as an affiliate marketer. If you have a regular income and not much time to spare, paid marketing might be more suitable. If you have a lot of time but little to invest in a marketing budget, content marketing might be more suitable. Of course you can do a little of both, but paid marketing is much faster and more scalable. Content marketing (organic) is very slow.
So if you want to build an online business quickly, you’re much better off using paid marketing strategies. Of course paid marketing platforms are expensive and depending on your particular products and niche, you may need a large budget to get off the ground. Ideally use high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products if you’re running paid ads. That way, you can recoup your marketing budget much more quickly.
One of the best ways to build an online business is to run paid marketing and send qualified leads to a sales funnel. Your first “entry level” product should recoup your marketing budget and therefore you’re effectively marketing for free while using paid marketing. If you have a few mote products in your sales funnel, including subscription products, you’ll make a profit on the up-sells.
Paid Vs Organic Marketing
Organic marketing is much slower by comparison. If you’re purely using organic marketing, expect a much longer journey. Organic marketers create a lot of content and promote it for free using social media platforms. Blogging and video blogging (v’logging) are examples of organic marketing strategies. But you can also promote affiliate products in other ways too, such as through using free social media strategies.
With blogging, it can take several months to gain traction and start getting traffic to your blog from the SERPS – search engine results pages. This will depend on your particular blog topic/niche. In a highly sought after niche, it will be much more difficult ranking due to the competition. In a less competitive niche, it will likely be easier to get traffic, but often it’s more difficult to monetise with affiliate products.
Whether you use paid marketing or organic marketing it’s well worth using email marketing to help you build a following and connect with them regularly. On a blog, an email list can be used to send subscribers back to your content and make sales. From a paid ad campaign, you can scale up more quickly and easily if you have an email follow up series in place.
Which Is Best For You?
Whatever you choose for your marketing tactic with affiliate marketing, it’s worth knowing which one you can sustain for a long period of time, particularly with content creation. If you enjoy writing and can sustain a blogging habit for several months, or years, choose blogging. If that sounds like a nightmare for you, choose something else. Video blogging can be quicker since YouTube is less competitive than Google; but it’s still competitive and building an organic following from YouTube will take some serious work.
If you don’t have that kind of stamina and creativity, you should probably choose paid marketing. Use a high ticket sales funnel ideally which will give you a greater return on investment for your marketing budget.
Access an online business system which gives you the tools and resources to learn how to do this here.
See also affiliate tools for tools and tactics for both content marketing and paid marketing strategies.
