Title: Digital Marketing Vs Affiliate marketing: Which is Better?

If you’re reading this article right now, you might be wondering what is the difference between affiliate marketing and digital marketing right?. 

So in this article, I’m going to tell you all about that and then you can  choose what makes more sense for you.

Affiliate marketing and Digital Marketing are two closely similar terms, And people can get confused while trying to figure out which one is better among the two.

So In this article, I will be detailing the differences between the two, so you can choose which one  best suites you to start in 2022 and make money.

With regards to digital marketing, a lot of people get confused with this terminology that all digital marketing means internet marketing.

So internet marketing is basically using different social media websites to market whatever you want with paid advertising.

Table Of Content:

• What is affiliate marketing

• What is digital marketing

• Pros and cons of starting a digital marketing business in comparison with Affiliate Marketing.

• Digital Marketing vs Affiliate marketing: which one is better?

• Conclusion

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is more specific to selling other people’s programs, other people’s courses or people’s products online and when you sell them you make a percentage of the commission.

In Affiliate Marketing, you don’t need to go into content creation. You only get involved in promoting someone else’s products and services and get some part of commission in return when a purchase is made.

People who promote other people’s products or services either physically or digitally are referred to as Affiliate Marketers.

Affiliate Marketers promote  brands by attracting traffic through paid ads on different websites like Facebook or Google or even organically, taking them to a website through affiliate programs. 

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is just internet marketing in general which  can be used to sell anything such as  brands or products (whether it is your own or not)

unlike Affiliate marketing , which is  specific to selling other people’s products,  usually digital products, where  you earn a part of the sales proceeds in form of commissions.  Usually the commissions range between 40% and 80%.

So if for example, the product costs $1000 and the commission is  80%  ,  when you sell it online then you will make $800 as commission.

Digital marketers in this regard, focus on many different areas, including SEO and social media marketing. 

Digital marketers usually work for the company  they own. While affiliate marketers work on behalf of other companies in exchange for commissions when a sale is made.

Digital marketing includes measuring the success of campaigns and analyzing data to  find out what needs to be improved. 

Digital marketers need to have a  knowledge of  content creation. So it may be difficult to get started without being an influencer  yourself.

Digital Marketing consists mainly of SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Digital Advertising. 

Digital Marketing Agency:

In digital marketing areas, there are people that create something called digital marketing agencies,

A digital marketing agency is basically a business where you start and you work with different businesses such as mom and pop shops, offline businesses and you help them  generate leads and sales to their businesses.

It is therefore a very popular business model and basically what you  do is to first  create this agency and then develop a very good knowledge on lead generation strategies like facebook ads strategies,  youtube ad strategies, google marketing strategies,  bing ad strategies and much more out there. That’s the aspect of Digital Marketing in general.

You will then  go into the market and make lots of cold calls to lots of businesses  in your city and it could be like any sort of retainer, it could be a salon, a donut shop, a sandwich shop,  a barber ,  a supermarket, and many other offline businesses.

 You would basically meet up with these people, sit with them, try to do a presentation to them and  convince them to get them to invest in your company .

For the payment aspect, a retainer usually pays you from a thousand dollars to three thousand dollars a month and your job is to drive more leads and traffic to their business.

For example if it was a hair salon on main street and they pay you a thousand dollars a month you would help them to drive traffic to their business from maybe facebook ads , youtube ads or google ads to get more people to know about their hair salon so that people would be interested in  checking them out.

So what are some of the pros and cons of starting a digital marketing agency compared to affiliate marketing?

Well the thing about the digital marketing agency is that there are three main pillars that you have to get good at which can be really tricky:

#1. So the first pillar is that you have to be really good at starting a digital marketing agency. In order words,  you need to learn digital marketing         itself in the first place. You need to be good at running facebook ads , youtube ads , and also you really need to be good at google ads or bing ads so that you can successfully  drive targeted traffic to a specific business.

#2. The second pillar isthat you have to go out there to find Businesses whom you will do the job for  which might be really difficult when starting a digital marketing agency. As a start up  ,the best way to do it is  offline which means you have to call people,  send out flyers or basically speak to the business owner about your services and in turn get an appointment where you will pitch your business plan.

Depending on their preference,  you will probably get on a zoom call with them ,  meet them face to face, have a physical meeting with them or pitch to them on the telephone. This is in an effort to convince them to sign a contract with you.

 You will need to prove to them that you are really good at Digital Marketing, as this will help them to trust you more and easily sign a contract with you.

So Pillar number two is actually a very difficult pillar that most people struggle with because you have to do face-to-face sales.

#3. Then the third pillar which might also be difficult for you is you have to be very good at delivering your service to your customer because now you’ve picked up a client. Let’s imagine that you just signed a contract with a hair salon Business that will pay you 1000 US dollars every month to get a certain amount of new customers to their business and you don’t deliver? This is pillar number three. 

Most likely, the company will cancel their contract with you and you will lose the retainer fee of a thousand dollars a month.

So there’s a lot of pressure when it comes to building a digital marketing agency because you are dealing with external clients and you’re delivering a service to these clients. You should not only be an expert at delivering people through online channels to these businesses, but you also have to pitch businesses, meet them, close them and then you have to deliver them and manage them on the back end.

Now don’t get me wrong,  you can potentially build a huge digital marketing agency as a lot of people do all over the world.

 But just understand that, this type of style of business requires a lot of income because there’s a lot of overheads: for instance:

• you have to hire staff,
• you have to rent office space,
• you have to pay rental ,
• you have to pay for the online advertising plus other expenses.

The good thing is that you can scale up and the bad thing is that it does require a lot of upfront capital and there’s a lot of different parts of the business that you have to master in order for you to get it into a lot of profit and that’s kind of the digital agency model.

However, you can potentially make a lot of money if you have like five or ten clients and they’re all paying you two thousand dollars a month. That’s about twenty thousand dollars right there!

But again there are a lot of different pillars that you have to master, the big difference is that, with affiliate marketing you only have to manage one pillar, you only have to master one Pillar which is the marketing of the product because you don’t have to get offline customers, you don’t have to service them after you sell the product, because you’re selling somebody else’s product.

All you’re doing is you’re taking a product on the internet and finding the  audience that wants that product. For example,  let’s say the product is a weight loss product. What you will focus on is  to find people that want to lose weight, And you must be good at marketing as well and bringing them together, That’s all you do.

So once you learn how to market on some of these platforms like facebook, youtube , instagram , linkedin and so many other ways such as display networks, influencer networks,  pay-per-click networks,  podcast networks and many more you can attract as many clients as possible depending on your budget.  Once you make a sale you don’t have to do anything again.

You also don’t have to deliver the product to the buyer, you don’t have to send the product , you don’t have to deal with customer service because you’re selling somebody else’s product so they will handle all the back-end stuff.

That’s why affiliate marketing is so awesome and it’s so simple. that’s why the cost is so low compared to the cost  of running a digital marketing agency. This is simply because you don’t have to:

• Hire teams, 
• have offices, 
• pay insurance, 
• pay construction fees and renovation fees,
•  do any of that stuffs.

In order for you  to scale, all you do is to crank up your ads that’s it!  you don’t have to really do anything else, you don’t have to hire staff, you don’t have to break down walls to build new offices, you don’t need to do any of the other stuff  so that’s the big difference between affiliate marketing and  digital marketing or starting a digital agency that’s more specific okay.

Both can make you a lot of money, however for  the digital marketing agency route , you need to put in a lot of  hard work, time and resources. In order words,  you need a lot more income and a lot more startup capital in order to get that type of business fully set up and running.

And there are a lot of pillars that you have to master. Remember you need to master the marketing pillar, the client Acquisition pillar and then the client management pillar deliverables on the back end which is very very challenging okay.

Personally, I belong to a number of affiliate programs and the one that I will recommend among others is Learnoflix. You can check them if you are ready to start your affiliate marketing journey. Apart from earning commissions, you will also learn various skills which can earn you extra income. Learnoflix affiliate program is great

Which business do you choose to start in this year? affiliate marketing business  or digital marketing agency style business?.

So let me know in the comment section if you got some value from this article today.