If you are considering a career in ‘sales’ there are one of two paths to consider.
Affiliate Marketing
or
Traditional Sales Job
Though both involve promoting products or services, they are significantly different in how both professionals earn their money, interact with customers, and navigate their daily tasks.
Whether you’re curious about how affiliate marketers earn money online or wondering what it’s like to work in direct sales, this post dives deep into the difference between affiliate marketing and traditional selling to help you pick the best path that suits your personality and your lifestyle.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based career where individuals promote products and services using digital content like blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media.
By adding links to promoted products and services to their produced content, affiliate marketers can re-direct visitors to those products and services.
When someone clicks their affiliate link and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer earns a commission.
Affiliate Marketing Without Talking to Customers
Affiliate marketers typically work remotely and enjoy flexible schedules. Their success depends heavily on their knowledge and execution of SEO strategies, engaging content creation, and understanding their audience’s needs.
Unlike traditional sales jobs, affiliate marketers often never interact directly with the customers, instead, they work on building trust through online content, videos, social media platforms, podcasts, and other online channels.
What is a Traditional Sales Job?
Salespeople are the direct link between companies and customers. They meet clients face-to-face or virtually, explain product benefits, answer questions, and close deals in-person or over the phone.
Sales People most often utilize and engage in cold calling, networking, and attending institutional meetings, social gatherings, and social events.
How Sales Reps Close Deals With Clients
Traditional Sales People develop relationships and try to create a bond between potential customers or clients by using their in-person communication skills.
As the old saying goes, ‘People do business with people that they like’, and this is critical to be aware of when performing as a sales person, because if the potential client does not feel comfortable with you, chances are, they won’t buy from you.
Affiliate Marketing vs Sales Job: Earnings and Flexibility
While both careers offer commission-based income, affiliate marketers have to produce a lot of targeted content that may not attract any attention right away, and worse, may not earn any money right away, or maybe never at all.
However, though the grind to produce voluminous content for a variety of online channels may seem difficult in the beginning, affiliate marketers have the potential to earn passive income from evergreen content.
For example, a blog post or a video that was written and produced months ago, or even years ago, may potentially still generate revenue today without the affiliate marketer having to do anything more.
In contrast, traditional salespeople may typically earn a weekly base salary with the potential to earn additional commissions based on their performance through their direct sales efforts.
Traditional sales may require having to consistently meet quotas and company targets to maintain a steady income, and the potential to produce future income from the same client highly depends on their client staying in business or establishing repeat customers.
Though there is less room for automation, the immediate financial rewards can certainly be higher.
Traditional sales is ideal for people who thrive on interaction, persuasion, and fast-paced environments.
Choosing Between Affiliate Marketing and Traditional Sales
If you are tech-savvy, creative, and enjoy writing articles or producing videos and consistently posting on social media and want to build a following that can build passive income from home, affiliate marketing might be a good fit for you.
If you’re charismatic, enjoy meeting and talking to people and developing long term relationships and networking, along with setting goals, meeting quotas, and competing with other sales people within the organization, then a traditional sales job could be your calling.
However, There is a Third Option
Why not do both?
Affiliate Marketing is a Sales Job… ONLINE.
Both the affiliate marketer and the sales person, though the techniques and the tactics may be quite different, are after the same goal:
‘to persuade people into buying a product or a service’
However, I will say that a traditional sales person may have an easier time transitioning into affiliate marketing, rather than the other way around, both positions offer great rewards, if done professionally.
Thank You and Good Luck!
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