Two of the most coveted ways to make money online are freelancing and affiliate marketing. There are many successful people who have made a living through both methods and if you’re someone who has looked into both, you may be wondering which one is better. So, what’s the answer?
Affiliate marketing as a business model is much better than freelancing for many reasons. Affiliate marketing is something that is extremely scalable, and eventually you could make a whole lot of money without using too much of your time. However, that isn’t the only reason affiliate marketing is better.
Below we will go over the following:
- Freelancing Isn’t Always Consistent
- Freelancing Puts a Cap On Your Income
- Affiliate Marketing Allows For You To Work On Other Side Hustles
- There Are Not Deadlines When It Comes To Affiliate Marketing
Freelancing Isn’t Always Consistent
The first thing is that freelancing isn’t always consistent. You could lose a client in the blink of an eye, leaving you scrambling to find another one. On the other hand, with affiliate marketing, you learn a system, follow it to a T, and continue to make progress no matter what.
Freelancing Puts a Cap On Your Income
The thing with freelancing is you need to use a lot of your time. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can only work with so many clients at a time. This puts a cap on your income and limits the amount of money you can make in a day, week, or even month.
On the other hand affiliate marketing could be scaled infinitely. You can start a second affiliate niche site, another affiliate YouTube channel, or even expand your current affiliate efforts. This allows for more potential income and growth.
You can actually scale freelancing if the skill is in high demand, but it still requires a lot of time and effort on your part. Let’s take freelance writing for instance (this is what I do).
If you want to scale, you need to find someone that charges a lower price than you and outsource the work to them. This can be hard to find, and takes a lot of effort on your part to manage them and make sure they are producing quality work.
You’re still going to spend plenty of time proof reading their work, which can be time consuming and not worth it in the end.
Affiliate Marketing Allows You To Expand Your Side Hustles
Eventually, once your affiliate business is bringing in income (which doesn’t take up a lot of your time). You can begin expanding and start other side hustles. This is something that can be difficult with freelancing because you are limited to the amount of time and energy you have to dedicate to another project or business.
There Is No Deadlines For Affiliate Marketing
When you’re working on freelancing jobs, things could get extremely stressful. This is because you have deadlines to hit, and if you have multiple clients this could get extremely overwhelming.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, you get to set the content schedule for yourself allowing you to steadily work on the business without too much added stress.
Just be sure to stay disciplined, because if you’re working for yourself, it could be easy to not post on a specific day because you’ll get no backlash for doing so.
Is There Anything Better About Freelancing?
In terms of business strategies, affiliate marketing is the better of the two. However, there are actually a couple of things about freelancing that could be better than affiliate marketing.
Networking and Forming Relationships
If you’re a freelancer for a long time, chances are you will meet plenty of different people. You never know who these connections could lead to in the future, whether it be for business opportunities or just personal acquaintances.
When it comes to affiliate marketing on the other hand, it’s a lot of putting your head down and doing the work. You can form relationships to a certain extent, however you’ll have to go out of your way to do so.
If you Need Money Fast
Whether you’re producing video content or blog content, it will take a lot of time to produce enough content to get constant organic traffic to the level where you can start making a lot of money every day from affiliate marketing.
Freelancing on the other hand, allows you to make money now, as long as you can find clients and provide them with the services they need.
Can Freelancing And Affiliate Marketing Be Done Together?
Last but not least, you may be wondering if freelancing and affiliate marketing can be done together.
The answer is yes. You just have to make sure that you have a very disciplined schedule and are able to manage both businesses efficiently.
I personally started as a blogger, and once I was able to get traffic to my websites (including this one), I went out and showed my results to potential clients on Upwork and other freelancing platforms. This allowed me to get a couple of writing clients and now I make a good amount of extra money via freelancing.
So finding something within your freelancing skill set that relates to affiliate marketing could really help increase your income even more. It also keeps you get completely aligned with your interests and passions, which is always a plus.
In What Ways Can Freelancing and Affiliate Marketing Work Together?
When you have an affiliate marketing business, content is king. It’s important to learn the in’s and outs of affiliate marketing by doing the work yourself at first. However, once you get good money coming in, you can hire freelancers to do the content creation for you while you focus on scaling your business and finding new affiliate programs to promote.
As a freelancers, you could help affiliate marketers by editing videos, writing content, and other tasks that the affiliate marketer may not have time for or may not be as skilled in.
Conclusion
So when it comes to freelancing and affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing is the better of the two in terms of having a long term business. If you need money now, freelancing is the better of the two. Lastly, you could use the two together to make even more income, as long as you have a solid schedule and can make it work.
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