Open Source Affiliate

Article: Short term and long term affiliate marketing

Short term and long term affiliate marketing

What is the difference between a short term and long term affiliate strategy? While you are making money, are you building YOUR online assets or someone else’s? Let’s examine the difference between two different affiliate strategies.

Short term affiliate marketing

If you follow the traditional path of affiliate marketing and simply use article marketing or PPC, you may only be building up a short term path to profits. Each time your campaign dries up, you will have start over from scratch. This means you must perpetually write articles and promote PPC campaigns.

Who is benefiting the most from your work? Think about all of the articles you submitted to ezinearticles.com, or all the lenses you created at squidoo.com. These sites are benefiting from the content that you created for them. These large sites also benefit from the free traffic that you provide. They increase in Pagerank and authority. As you go on an article marketing campaign, you also provide them with more backlinks.

This is why when your campaign ends for some reason and you have to pick a new product or keyword, you need to start over. Meanwhile, these large sites can redirect traffic as they see fit and continue to profit.

Long term affiliate marketing

Although using fast or free methods to make money now is not a bad thing, you should also consider developing long term affiliate marketing goals. If you buy your own domain and hosting, you can start adding permanent backlinks and traffic to YOUR site. The process may be slow, but in the long run, you will have a stable source of traffic. You can then redirect it to whatever affiliate offer you wish to currently promote. Your hard work at creating quality content and backlinks will benefit YOU.

How to transition from short term to long term strategies

Making money is often faster with short term strategies. However, you should think about taking some of the profits from these temporary methods and investing them into your long term strategies. Take some of your PPC or Craigslist profits and devote them to building your own website or even your own products. This way, you can enjoy immediate profits, but you also build a long term money-making foundation. What you really want is a permanent online business that provides you with money 24/7 automatically. Think about the end goal while you continue on your affiliate journeys.