One of the biggest leaps that an affiliate marketer can make is to leave a steady day job for full-time affiliate work (read my story here). The move can be stress-inducing as it requires you to give up the steady, predictable pay, benefits, and bonuses of a standard job to spend all of your time trying to make it big in affiliate marketing. The decision-making process that surrounds the move to full-time affiliate marketing involves a complex analysis of personal finances, debt, current and projected affiliate income, and much more. There is no magic formula for deciding when to make the switch, but once you do, you can count on the following perks that only full-time affiliate marketers are able to enjoy.
Affiliate Marketing Means Freedom
Freedom is a double-edged sword and one that most people with steady jobs and no prospects for an entrepreneurial life never need to consider. Affiliate marketers, however, need to think about what freedom means to them and what sacrifices they are willing to make to gain their freedom. Freedom always requires sacrifice, but what you get is often worth far more than what you pay.
Freedom for affiliate marketers means the ability to work from anywhere and at any time of day. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean working fewer hours than before, especially in the beginning, but it does mean working from home, working from the library, working from the coffee shop, or working from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. if that’s what suits you. The only real catch is that you have to work. You can work when and how you like, but you have to put in the hours, especially in the beginning, if you want to be successful.
Customer Acquisition Is Much Different
Perhaps the hardest part of affiliate marketing is getting customers to your sites to interact with your affiliate deals. When you jump into full-time affiliate marketing a lot of your time can and will be spent acquiring customers. This goes beyond just SEO techniques and into things like promoting yourself at local events, promoting yourself on the radio, participating in speaking engagements, and much more. Simply put, you’ll finally have the time you’ve always wanted to take your business to the next level.
Perhaps the most important thing that you’ll have time to do is build your email list. Every good affiliate marketer knows that having a list of customers who have purchased from them in the past is a great way to ensure repeat business, up-selling, and other lucrative activity. If you haven’t already started building an email list, then it should be your first priority when you launch into full-time affiliate marketing.
Continued Growth Is Foreseeable
If you are currently making enough money to think about quitting your job to become a full-time affiliate marketer, then chances are good that your business will continue to expand. There are two reasons that this “near guarantee” can be made. First of all, there is an inflection point in affiliate marketing where you start to reach enough people that word-of-mouth and “random” references to your content generate a lot of leads. In other words, you’ve reached a tipping point after which the business, as long as you attend to it, starts to propel itself.
The second reason that you can expect to make more money is simply that you now have more time to invest into your business. Provided you don’t spend too much time watching Days of Our Lives or playing Call of Duty, you’ll have more time than ever before to chase down leads, write content, explore new affiliate programs, and so forth.
In simple terms, businesses of a certain size are statistically more likely to succeed than they are to fail. If you have the drive and the smarts to grow your affiliate work to the point where you can quit your full-time job, then you have the qualities necessary to carry the business to the next level.
Successful Affiliate Marketers Get To Lead A Team
If you are making enough money to step into affiliate marketing full-time, then you are probably also in the position that your business is ready to expand beyond the capabilities of a single individual. Brining on a new hire can relieve you of some of the more mundane tasks associated with the business and thus free you up to get more creative and try new ideas. Additionally, having a second person around who knows the business well can allow for ideas to build and flourish as you bounce them off of each other. Building a team takes time and dedication, particularly the hiring process, so it’s something you can only do when you are free from the constraints of your day job.
Outsourcing Is Extremely Valuable
Outsourcing can save you a great deal of time and money, but it often requires an investment of time and research up front. Even if you’ve wanted to outsource in the past, chances are good that you didn’t have the time to invest into finding a good way to do it. There are a number of great outsourcing and content-production websites out there, but you have to have the time to assess their offerings, their costs, and their reliability. The initial investment of time is large, but it pays huge dividends down the road.
Affiliate Meetings Equals More Revenue
Some affiliate programs offer yearly meetings where there marketers get together to discuss strategy, learn from one another, and simply share fun or scary stories about their experiences. There are also independent conferences and events that offer everything from workshops to meet-and-greet dinners to help you expand your business. These events can really boost your status in the industry and put you into contact with people who ca help you, but they require more time than most people have unless affiliate marketing is their full-time job.
Successful Affiliate Marketer Take The Leap of Faith
Jumping into affiliate marketing full time should not be done on a whim. The decision has to be carefully considered and all of the costs and benefits need to be weighed against one another. If you can afford to make the jump, it can be the greatest decision you’ve ever made. That said, don’t make the jump before you are ready because it almost guarantees failure.
