No business ever is all rainbows and unicorns. Neither is the affiliate marketing business.
When it comes to bite-sized affiliate marketing, on top of the ordinary pros and cons, there are several others to take into consideration before you start.
If you are aware of them beforehand, you can better deal with them.
Most people, both those who start now and those who started 20 years ago, begin with affiliate marketing.
It is an illusion to think it is easy. At first, it looks that way, but being a good affiliate marketer is a skill and like all skills worth mastering, it can take time to learn.
The reason why it looks easy is that you hardly need any knowledge to begin.
You can start from scratch and promote other people’s products. You do not need to create them, write sales pages or take care of customer service.
Depending on what you choose to promote, even a beginner can get paid anything from one percent (on Amazon) up to 100 percent (digital informational products, often just called info products).
It is normal to make between 40 and 50 percent just for promoting an info product.
This means that even a beginner can make $500 in a day by promoting a $1,000 product with a 50 percent commission rate.
It can be hard, as a beginner, to get access to such a product, though. And this is where the cons come into play.
As a beginner, it can be difficult to be accepted by vendors.
A lot of platforms, like WarriorPlus and JVZoo, want you to make a request directly to the vendor. And when you do not have a reputation and no sales in your statistics, a lot will automatically turn your request down.
Focus on growing your audience and your reputation and keep requesting.
There are places where you just need to get accepted by the platform, and you can promote almost any product. These are among others ClickBank and Amazon.
But the best of these are hybrids so you can get around this disadvantage.
One such is called Gumroad (your affiliate link) and as soon as you are signed up for an account there, you can make 10 percent commissions if you sell one of the products in the marketplace.
As a bonus, you can make a request directly to the marketer to ask if you can become an official affiliate. This can make your commission a lot higher. Once again, 50 percent is often seen.
The biggest con of affiliate marketing in general is that the products do not reflect your skills.
The audience you build will not know what you are capable of until you create your own products. But it is a con most people can live with. Some stay with affiliate marketing only for life.
Others go on to create their own info products or other digital products later.
When they have the audience, this will bring in a lot more money.
Now let us talk about the pros and cons that are specific for bite-sized affiliate marketing.
It is a lot easier to spend time on affiliate marketing, when you can do it every time you have 5 to 25 minutes free.
Some parts of it can even be done while you commute. If you are not driving, you can read, listen or watch and get to know the product you plan on promoting.
Or you can simply sit and brainstorm different angles to use in your promotions.
What will interest your audience? Is it how much time they will save or how much money they can make or save if they have the product? Or does it solve another problem for them?
One well-known email marketer, Mark J. Thompson, walks to his favorite cafe each morning, and when he reaches it, he has the whole email in his head, ready to write down.
When you only spend bites of time on affiliate marketing, it gives you time to do other things.
It can be a full-time job, taking care of kids or elderly parents, or even another online marketing method that also brings in a money-stream.
Doing affiliate marketing this way has its limits.
If you got your eyes on a video course with 47 hours of videos included with homework… you need quite a few time-bites to finish that task.
Especially with longer videos, it can be difficult to cut them into shorter slices.
Luckily, a lot of info product creators make short videos, which means you can watch one or three, depending on their length, but you will also see three-hour long videos.
The best solution is to write down the timestamp for where you stopped so you know where to continue the next time.
Keep that note in the same place every time. It is tempting to just grab the nearest piece of paper and write 15m46s. But where is that lap of paper the next time you want to watch the video?
Keep it with the notes you take from the course.
Going through longer courses is impossible if you only have a few time-bites per day. It would take too long to be profitable. Especially if you plan to promote something new once or twice a week.
Will bite-sized affiliate marketing work for you?
Will the ups outweigh the downs? Or can you get around them for example by skipping the long video courses and focusing on other kinds of info products. Or maybe software or physical products.
There is a world of opportunities out there.
Even for new affiliates. And even if you only have a little spare time daily. Just grab them.
Focus on the solution you want, not the problem.
If the solution you want is a successful affiliate marketing business, and you only have 15-60 minutes per day, then do what you can with that time.
You can succeed when you put your mind to it.