Is Affiliate Marketing Hard, Difficult, Or Easy? (Explained)

If you’re just looking into affiliate marketing, then you probably have quite a few questions when it comes to affiliate marketing and its level of difficulty.

I’ve got a lot of experience when it comes to affiliate marketing, so let’s talk about it.

Is Affiliate Marketing Hard/Difficult?

is affiliate marketing hard

Many would disagree with me, but I don’t see affiliate marketing as being a hard activity. Rather instead, I see as something that comes with many challenges.

To add more perspective to my statement above, I don’t look into anything as being ‘hard’ when I am first getting started, or heck, have been doing something for a long period of time.

From what I’ve seen, when people assume something to be too difficult or hard, it acts as a reason to more easily throw in the towel or just not take any action.

I also see affiliate marketing to be more like a video game.

There are always going to be challenges that come along with every level and scenario, but the more you play (or do affiliate marketing), the easier it becomes to solve those challenges.

After all, an activity like affiliate marketing that can make you rich, is bound to come with challenges.

You also get to leverage the internet, and there are plenty of people who have successfully solved the affiliate marketing challenges that you might have gone through.

So what are some of the challenges that you might come across with affiliate marketing? Here are a few:

  • Picking the right niche.
  • Picking the right offers to promote.
  • Sending traffic to those specific offers.
  • Being able to convert the offers that you promote.

Depending on what your budget is, another example of a challenge could be how you get started with your affiliate marketing business. Money can be tight, but there are always ways to make things work if that’s a big challenge for you.

So while I don’t believe that affiliate marketing is hard overall, there are going to be some more challenges that you need to keep in mind.

Is Affiliate Marketing Hard To Learn?

In the beginning, affiliate marketing can feel like a pain to learn, but once you get down the fundamentals, it’s not too bad.

So you can expect a learning curve when it comes to affiliate marketing, but once again, I wouldn’t say that affiliate marketing is overall hard to learn.

There are plenty of other activities that are harder to learn. For example:

  • Coding.
  • Creating software.

These are the types of activities that take a lot more learning, thought process, and brainpower, just to be able to do somewhat successfully. They can be very stressful too, as I know a few coders and people who work behind the scenes of software.

Either way, affiliate marketing comes down to mastering the fundamentals, which aren’t all that difficult (at least on paper):

  • Finding the right offer(s).
  • Picking a traffic source for those offers.
  • Optimizing, scaling, or even pivoting with that traffic source.

The devil is in the details, of course, but your life will get so much easier when you:

  • Pick an offer that people are already seeing success with.
  • Use a traffic source that you like and also works for your budget.

Narrowing your focus allows you to forget about many of the other distractions and learn from your mistakes.

All in all, you can expedite the learning process, and that’s a very big bonus.

So all in all, I wouldn’t say that learning affiliate marketing is all too difficult as well.

What about the process of actually making money? Let’s talk about that next.

Is It Hard To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Most people will find it hard to make money with affiliate marketing. I believe that there are challenges with it, but many of them can be easily overcome.

For example, I don’t believe that the big problem comes along with actually making a sale. After all, there are a ton of traffic sources as well as offers to promote online.

People think making money with affiliate marketing is hard most because (in my opinion):

  • They are promoting the wrong offers.
  • They aren’t properly promoting the offers that they have.
  • They get into a niche/traffic source that they shouldn’t be (that’s easily avoidable).

The biggest thing I’ve seen is that they just aren’t patient enough.

If you’re using no-cost and low-cost affiliate marketing strategies, then you’re going to need to be even more patient.

Related: The costs associated with affiliate marketing.

I can’t begin to tell you how many emails I’ve received when it comes to not being patient enough. Here is a random example to help give you a better idea:

I put hours into this and I haven’t seen a dime in return yet!

The entitlement of those types of emails is probably the worst part. The fact of the matter is that putting ‘some’ amount of hours into affiliate marketing isn’t going to do it.

This is why affiliate marketing appears to be so hard for many people.

That’s also why the average income of most affiliate marketers ends up being nothing, simply from not taking any action.

If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, you need to put in the time and effort to make things work.

So of course, affiliate marketing is going to be ‘hard’ when you don’t put in enough time to get any feedback or results.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

Despite the fact that affiliate marketing isn’t hard, I would also have to say that affiliate marketing also is not easy. It’s somewhere in between.

Now, there are going to be plenty of aspects that get easier for you over a longer period of time. After all, if you do something every day, you should expect that it gets easier for you.

For me, a lot of the affiliate marketing tasks and strategies seem pretty easy, but I know it’s just not going to be the same way for others. Especially if they are just getting started.

As an example, here are a few things that I can do that I find pretty easy:

  • Writing 5,000+ words.
  • Recording and editing 8+ videos in a day.
  • Getting 10+ articles done in a day (thanks to some help).
  • Heck, I’ve created entire marketing sales funnels in one day.

The fact of the matter is that the more action that you take, the easier things will be. The same goes with making commissions.

It doesn’t hurt that affiliate marketing is one of the best business models, too.

Just don’t think that it will be a walk in the park from the beginning. Many people tell you that as it is, and as you already know, affiliate marketing can come with quite a few challenges as it is.

So now you understand that affiliate marketing isn’t exactly hard, and it’s not exactly easy, but can it be fun?

Let’s talk about that question and wrap up this article.

Is Affiliate Marketing Fun? Final Words

All in all, affiliate marketing is most certainly when things start to click and the momentum from your hard work finally starts to show.

That’s when you truly realize that affiliate marketing is most definitely not a pipe dream, and what all of the other people were saying about affiliate marketing is true.

  • Being your own boss.
  • Not working for someone else.
  • Being able to make money while you sleep.
  • Having the freedom of time to do what you want, when you want.

So yeah, affiliate marketing is an absolute blast when things are going as they are planned. Just keep in mind that there can also be a lot of uncertainty when it comes to affiliate marketing.

As I talked about in the article about affiliate marketing being legit, there are plenty of pros and cons when it comes to being your boss.

At the end of the day, I still highly recommend that you take the leap when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Regardless of what anyone else has to say, there’s always a way to make things work. Even if it takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice.

James Canzanella
 

A former personal trainer who went from unemployment to online business success. He's been marketing since 2012 and (still) enjoys lifting weights, listening to rock music, and relentlessly quoting movie lines.

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