Yes, affiliate marketing can make you rich, assuming that you already have or are willing to develop the required skills. There are tons of affiliate marketers currently earning anywhere between five to seven figures per year. According to statistics, the average affiliate earns over $8,000 per month.
However, always keep in mind that achieving affiliate success isn’t guaranteed and won’t happen overnight. The process of building a lucrative affiliate venture involves a steep learning curve, tons of trial and error, a lot of hard work, unwavering dedication, and massive amounts of patience.
It usually takes 3-5 years of consistent high-quality work for an affiliate to reach a six-figure income level.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing
Best Affiliate Marketing Courses
Best Affiliate Courses
1. Pick a Niche
The first step to starting affiliate marketing is picking a niche. This refers to the main subject of your business.
Examples of affiliate niches include health, gaming, personal finance, skincare, technology gadgets, parenting, camping, cars, and practically any other subject you could think of.
Picking the right niche could, to a large extent, impact your ability to achieve success as an affiliate marketer.
To ensure that this impact is positive, you should focus on niches that check the following boxes:
- Profitable
- No stifling competition
- Evergreen
Moreover, consider going after niches you’re interested in or, even better, passionate about. Achieving affiliate success involves putting in a lot of hard and consistent effort over a significant timeframe. Picking something you don’t care about could significantly increase your chances of giving up halfway there.
On the contrary, pursuing something you love can help you persevere through challenges, stay committed in the long run, and boost the likelihood of reaching your financial goals.
2. Build an Audience
Affiliate marketers earn commissions for each sale they refer, and to generate sales, you’ll need an audience willing to purchase the affiliate products you promote.
Building an audience is primarily accomplished by leveraging paid ads, content marketing, or a combination of the two.
2.1 Paid Ads
This approach involves paying money for placing ads on third-party digital platforms.
Paid ads can be broken down into multiple different categories, such as:
- Display Ads: Banners, texts, or images placed on other websites
- Paid Search Ads: Displayed on search engines like Google & Yahoo
- Social Media Ads: Served on websites like Facebook & Instagram
- Instream Ads: Video promotions shown before or during video streaming
- Solo Ads: Email campaigns delivered to the email subscribers of other marketers
Running paid ads is one of the fastest methods to start getting your affiliate promotions in front of the right audiences. However, the downside is that there’s no guarantee that the ads you pay for will generate any actual affiliate sales.
Newcomers to affiliate marketing may initially experience financial losses until they’ve gathered enough experience to start putting together profitable paid ads campaigns.
2.2 Content Marketing
The second way to build an audience as an affiliate marketer is by using content marketing on one or more platforms, including, but not limited to:
- Website/Blog
- Social Media
- Youtube
- Forums
- Content Publishing Platforms
- etc.
Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing content relevant to your chosen marketing channel(s), such as:
- Tutorials
- How-to guides
- Product reviews
- Compilations
- Video Reactions
- Case studies
- Pictures
- Stories
- & more
Most of the digital content you consume daily, including this post, has been created to attract an audience that can later be monetized via affiliate marketing or some other monetization method such as ads, sponsorships, and so on.
3. Promote Affiliate Products
The last step to making money with affiliate marketing is monetizing your audience by promoting affiliate products.
The term “affiliate product” refers to any product that can be promoted via a merchant’s affiliate program in exchange for commissions.
Common examples of affiliate products are:
- physical goods (e.g., clothing, electronics)
- digital products (e.g., e-books, online courses)
- services (e.g., web hosting, software subscriptions)
Some of the most notable companies that have been running affiliate programs for years include Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Booking, etc.
To ensure the highest possible conversions, make sure that the affiliate products you promote are:
- Relevant to Your Chosen Niche: If the products you promote align with the theme of your business, your audience will be more likely to purchase them.
- Valuable to Your Audience: Promoting products that deliver value to your target audience will further boost your credibility, reputation, and conversion rates.
- High-Quality and Reputable: If you encourage your audience to waste money on low-quality products, they’re extremely unlikely to trust your recommendations in the future.
Read More:
- How to Find Affiliate Programs in Your Niche [6 Best Ways]
- How to Choose Affiliate Products to Promote [11 Superb Tips]
Tips to Become Rich With Affiliate Marketing
Embarking on an affiliate marketing journey is one thing, but becoming rich with affiliate marketing is a whole other story.
Here are five tips to maximize your chances of achieving affiliate success.
1. Invest in High-Quality Training
According to this report, 66% of affiliate marketers who earn over $10,000 per month have taken at least one affiliate marketing course. On top of that, beginners who follow affiliate courses generate 57.7% more affiliate revenue than those who don’t.
It’s pretty safe to say that having proper guidance throughout your affiliate journey goes a long way.
That being said if you’re serious about becoming a successful affiliate marketer, you should seriously consider investing in a high-quality affiliate marketing course.
Read More:
2. Provide as Much Value as Possible
Achieving affiliate success is closely tied to your ability to deliver value.
Throughout the internet’s 30-year existence, people have developed the ability to identify and steer clear of desperate affiliates who care about nothing but making a sale. If you’re one of them, you’ll probably face significant challenges in generating consistent sales, if any.
Nowadays, the only way to build a profitable and long-lasting affiliate business is by shifting your mindset from “How can I make a sale?” to “How can I deliver value?”.
For the most part, delivering value refers to educating about a subject, solving a problem, offering entertainment, facilitating social interaction, providing inspiration, and fostering innovation. To give you an example, a funny skit can provide entertainment and social interactions while a video tutorial can help solve a specific issue.
Prioritizing value will increase your credibility, set you apart from competitors, boost customer loyalty, generate more repeat business, and ultimately, skyrocket your affiliate sales.
3. Track Important Metrics
Tracking important metrics is crucial for ensuring the optimal growth of an affiliate business for several reasons, such as:
- Evaluating Performance: Tracking key metrics can help you assess the performance of your efforts and identify areas that may need improvement.
- Making Data-Driven Decisions: Guiding your actions according to insights drawn from actual metrics will save you tons of time, effort, and money you could otherwise waste on practices implemented based on inaccurate, ill-advised, and counterproductive guesswork.
- Improving ROI: Monitoring the balance between revenue and costs enables you to make informed decisions toward minimizing expenses and maximizing profitability.
- Identifying Successful Strategies: Measuring the performance of your strategies can help you identify and prioritize those that yield the best results.
- Gathering Audience Insights: Analyzing audience-related data such as click-through rates, demographics, etc., can help you draw valuable insights into your audience’s preferences and tailor your marketing efforts to better meet their needs.
- Optimizing Conversion Paths: Tracking metrics related to conversions can help you uncover bottlenecks or exit points throughout your sales funnels that might need optimization.
Some of the most important metrics to track as an affiliate marketer include:
- new users
- returning users
- revenue per page
- earnings per click
- conversion rates
- & click-through rates
4. Leverage Email Marketing
“The money is in the email list…”
This is a common saying in the world of online marketing – and for good reason.
Despite its old origins, email marketing is still considered the Holy Grail of conversions driving an average ROI of 3600% (source).
That’s because, unlike other marketing channels, email marketing enables you to conveniently deliver content directly into your audience’s inbox whenever you want. On top of that, people who’ve willingly subscribed to your email list are more likely to have a genuine interest in your offerings, engage with your content, and convert into customers.
Here’s a brief overview of how email marketing works:
- Join an email marketing platform
- Create lead magnet (e.g., report, guide, ebook, etc.)
- Build a squeeze page
- Offer free access to the lead magnet in exchange for users’ emails
- Set up automated email sequences
- Launch promotional email campaigns
Ultimately, email marketing can be an invaluable asset to the success of your affiliate business, especially if you develop the ability to create well-crafted email campaigns.
Read More:
- 9 Affiliate Marketing Tips by Experts for Beginners [2022]
- Affiliate Marketing SEO: 7 Tips for Higher SERP Rankings
Affiliate marketing FAQs
Affiliate marketing is an online business model that involves promoting products or services created and distributed by third-party online merchants in exchange for getting paid a commission for each sale you refer.
In layman’s terms, affiliate marketing is the process of being compensated for helping businesses sell to more customers.
Here’s a bird’s eye view of how affiliate marketing works.
- You join a merchant’s affiliate program
- The merchant gives you a unique affiliate link that points to their e-shop
- You promote your unique affiliate link online (blog, forums, social media, paid ads, etc.)
- Every time someone clicks on your unique affiliate link and makes a purchase on the merchant’s e-shop, the merchant pays you a commission
There are thousands of successful affiliate marketers all around the world. Some of the most well-known ones are:
- Pat Flynn
- Matt Diggity
- Matthew Woodward
- Doug Cunnington
- & more
You can check out a roundup of my 17 favorite examples of affiliate success and their backstories right here.
- Billion-dollar industry
- Very low startup & operational expenses
- Huge income potential
- Flexible & versatile
- Passive income
- Simple to implement
- No technical background
- No customer support
- No physical setup
Affiliate marketers can be divided into five main income groups:
- Total beginners: $0 – $20,000 per year
- Low-level affiliates: $20,000 – $50,000 per year
- Intermediate affiliates: $50,000 – $100,000 per year
- High-level affiliates: $100,000 – $500,000 per year
- Super affiliates: $500,000+ per year
According to PayScale, the average annual income for affiliate marketers in the US is over $54,000 per year. Statistics reveal that 13% of affiliates earn more than $75,000 per year.
Some of the factors that influence how much you earn as an affiliate marketer include:
- seniority
- target niche
- available resources
- previous experience
- marketing efforts
- & overall mindset
Here’s a rough income growth timeline of a typical affiliate marketing business:
- months (0-3): no earnings
- months (3-6): first affiliate sale
- months (6-12): $100-$500 monthly
- months (12-18): $1000 monthly
- months (18-24): $3000+ monthly
This timeline isn’t a guarantee of future performance but rather a mere approximation of the income growth of an average affiliate business. Your own timeline could be shorter or longer than projected.
Over the years, I’ve seen aspiring affiliates striking a gold vein just a few months into the industry. On the other hand, I personally know people who’ve been struggling to grow their affiliate revenue to $1000 per month for several years.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most affordable money-making models out there.
Here’s a breakdown of everything you need to get started as an affiliate marketer along with their associated costs:
- web hosting & domain name: $2.95/month (Bluehost)
- keyword research tool: $49/month (Jaaxy)
- expert guidance: $49/month (Wealthy Affiliate)
- email autoresponder: Free for up to 1000 subs (MailerLite)
Please note that on top of expert guidance, Wealthy Affiliate also provides free access to hosting and a keyword research tool so you don’t have to purchase them separately.
Yes, you can do affiliate marketing without a website by promoting your affiliate links on other marketing channels, such as:
- Social Media
- Paid Ads
- YouTube
- Podcast
- etc.
The process of getting started with affiliate marketing can be broken down into the following four simple steps:
- Pick a niche
- Launch a blog
- Build an audience
- Promote affiliate products
No, you don’t.
Affiliate marketing is very simple to get started with by virtually anyone regardless of age, education, background, available capital, tech-savviness, professional network, etc.
In fact, most 6-figure affiliate marketers were no more experienced than you currently are when they first ventured into the affiliate marketing industry.
Nonetheless, being knowledgeable in fields like marketing, sales, content production, business management, etc., could help you reach your financial goals somewhat faster.
Conclusion (TL;DR)
Affiliate marketing can make you rich. There are thousands of affiliate marketers currently earning five to seven figures annually. However, affiliate success requires a lot of time, effort, dedication, and patience.
You can start making money with affiliate marketing by following the three-step process below:
- Pick a Niche: Choose a profitable, non-competitive, and evergreen niche aligned with your interests.
- Build an Audience: You can do that by leveraging paid ads or content marketing on the platform(s) of your choice.
- Promote Affiliate Products: Monetize your audience by promoting relevant, valuable, and reputable affiliate products.
Tips to maximize affiliate profits:
- Invest in Training: High-quality guidance can help you reach your financial goals a lot faster.
- Provide Value: Focusing on delivering value rather than just making sales will surprisingly enough result in making more sales.
- Track Metrics: Monitoring key metrics can help you make data-driven decisions toward optimizing your approaches.
- Leverage Email Marketing: Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs among all marketing channels.
Do you have any questions or need further help getting started with affiliate marketing?
Leave a comment below or drop me a line and I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.
Kind regards,
Harry – Founder & Jack of All Trades at dearboss-iquit.com
