Work from anywhere businesses allow you to work from your laptop, choose your own hours and even have the potential of unlimited earnings. But what’s the catch? The catch is that with unlimited earning potential you generally have a performance based pay scheme. Affiliate marketing, for example, pays you only when you make online sales; the same for drop shipping. But if you can make your business work, it has huge implications for flexible working and geographical and financial freedom.
Work from anywhere businesses such as drop shipping and affiliate marketing offer the opportunity to make sales of someone else’s products/services. With both models you are simply the “middleman”. Send website traffic to products, make sales and earn commissions based on those sales. You don’t need products of your own and you can work from anywhere.
Work From Anywhere Businesses – Drop Shipping Vs Affiliate Marketing
Both drop shipping and affiliate marketing offer business models where you can get paid for referring sale. With drop shipping you take customer orders from a website. Products are delivered directly from the manufacturer, so you don’t handle products personally. However you will deal with customers because you’re taking the orders on your website.
Affiliate marketing is a similar business model where you send website traffic directly to products through your unique affiliate link. It’s slightly simpler than drop shipping in that you don’t have to deal with customers or take orders. You only refer sales through your links. Your main task in both models is to drive targeted traffic towards your website or offer. This can be done in a number of ways:
- Blogging
- Video blogging
- Pay per click advertising
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Offline advertising
- SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
- etc.
Work From Anywhere Businesses – Organic Vs. Paid Marketing
Organic marketing is done through building content and attracting an audience for free. This is often done through ranking content on the search engines using Search Engine Optimisation. You can also post content online throughout your social media platforms. A YouTube channel or TikTok channel is another method of building an audience online for free. Many marketers will create a channel and offer help and advice in some topic with which they are familiar. By attracting traffic which relates to their niche, they can then sell products through referring that traffic to their offer/service.
Organic marketing requires a lot more work initially, and often for not much traction in the early stages. However, once you have built a healthy amount of content, that content can keep working for you generating traffic for free. Organic traffic is more difficult to obtain than paid traffic which is why many affiliates and drop shippers use paid marketing instead.
With paid marketing you can get instant traffic to a website. It’s like turning on a tap. Once your tap is giving you more in sales that you are paying for in advertising, you’re in a great position to scale up your online business. With paid marketing simply turn up your advertising budget. This can’t be done as quickly with organic marketing and it’s much harder to scale.
Benefits Of Paid & Organic Marketing
Both paid marketing and organic marketing have their benefits and drawbacks. Organic marketing can give you passive income from content you’ve created. But it’s difficult to scale up and you don’t control the flow of traffic.
Sales can therefore be sporadic when using organic marketing. Building content is laborious and can take a lot of time and effort, and there’s no guarantee of traffic after all your work either! But if you make it work you can have a free source of traffic and sales, and that means all your commission is profit, (minus the time and effort you have spent).
With paid marketing you can turn traffic on almost instantly. But traffic doesn’t necessarily convert instantly into sales so you need to experiment with different adverts and pitches until you find a winning campaign.
This can take some time and effort and all the while you’re spending money testing your advertising campaigns, which can get expensive. No one ad campaign is guaranteed to be profitable, so you’ll need to persevere until you find the winning advert which is profitable. Once you do you’ve got a scalable business which can be worth 6+ figures!
Getting Started
The business model you choose has a great deal to do with how you fair online. With the right business model, things can be considerably easier. With a high ticket sales funnel, for example, affiliate marketers can more easily use paid marketing and build a scalable business from scratch. If you’re using low value affiliate products, on the other hand, this is more difficult.
With a low value product to sell, you’ll need to deal in bulk. But if you have a subscription based product to sell which pays you recurring income, plus a high ticket product range, you can get into profit more quickly once you start making sales. For more information on building an online business from scratch visit affiliate marketing mentors.
Access a community of affiliate marketing coaches here.