I discussed the pros/advantages of affiliate marketing in my previous post of this series. Now I’ll mention the disadvantages, or challenges of affiliate marketing.
1. No Sale, No Earnings: As I mentioned before, affiliate marketing usually requires something besides a click-through on an ad for you to earn. Generally speaking, you only earn when someone buys something. This may mean you go days (or longer, depending on your traffic) without earning any money. This may be a challenge for you if you are used to seeing money trickle in daily from cost-per-click (CPC) advertising.
2. More Work Required: Affiliate marketing will also require more work than other forms of advertising. Adsense, for example, automatically chooses ads based on the content of your blog. Affiliate marketing requires you to choose, research, and promote specific products.
These are the main two challenges I see with affiliate marketing. There may be others, but I think they would somehow fall under one of these two general categories. One issue, for example, would be your reputation as a blogger—it would be damaged if you promoted a product that turned out to be low quality. This falls under #2—the need to carefully research what you promote.