Affiliate Marketing (how much can you make?)

If you want to take a shot at affiliate marketing, you can try your hand at online advertising. Successful affiliate marketers can earn anywhere up to $3000 a day or more, but it largely depends on where you focus your efforts and how many people you can reach. Achieving success in this field takes skill, dedication, and most important: patience.

But if you have the drive and patience, then how much can you make with affiliate marketing? The sky is the limit.

There are few things that are more exciting than the opportunity to make money with your own real business. In the modern age of online businesses, many entrepreneurs have been able to generate an income through Affiliate Marketing by leveraging their marketing skills and creating successful, long-term campaigns. And it doesn’t take a big investment to get started!

In fact, a domain name and hosting account are all you really need. Don’t bother with free blog hosting services out there, trust me you’ll kick yourself for it if you do. You want a domain name and website that you fully own and control, this is your business, after all, treat it as such. *See a list of my favorite tools and services at the bottom of this posting.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a way for people with a product or service to sell their product by partnering with other companies who have their own products and can sell them through an affiliate program. The partner company usually places advertising on the affiliate’s website and the affiliate earns a commission on every sale.

Also known as Partner Marketing, Joint Venture, Commission-Based Marketing.

Making money is possible for those who know what they are doing and have a plan. You can make a decent income through affiliate marketing.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is selling, with the advantages of not having to carry any inventory or handling the actual sales processing and shipping, because you’re selling another company’s product or service.

What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do?

Affiliate marketers promote a company’s product or service on the internet. They receive a commission for each purchase made by customers who came through their affiliate links.

The commissions range from 1-10% on average, though some are higher and depend on the company they’re working with. Affiliate marketers are often people that already have their own business or website and want to make more money, so it’s a great opportunity for entrepreneurs.

How Does An Affiliate Marketer Get Paid?

An affiliate marketer gets paid when a visitor makes a purchase on the affiliate’s recommendation. The amount they make per transaction varies from affiliate to affiliate.

It is common for affiliate programs to require a 30-day locking time on affiliate payouts to account for any cancellations or refunds. This means if you refer a sale in mid-September the commission earned for it may not lock in until mid-October and then be issued to you as the affiliate in your November payout.

Can You Make Good Money with Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing programs are often seen as good ways to make money online because they are relatively easy and inexpensive to set up.

Many affiliate marketers, in contrast to other online entrepreneurs, work with smaller budgets, which can be a disadvantage because they are competing with big-name companies.

On the other hand, having minimal expenses to get started and operating with allows the affiliate marketer to focus on creating content to attract visitors, and the more visitors their website(s) gets the more affiliate commissions they should earn.

How Much Money Can You Make as an Affiliate Marketer?

This is really an open-ended answer because the only limit to earnings potential is your own creativity and hustle.

Some of the top websites on the web use affiliate marketing to earn enough revenues to employ a full-time staff, and many of these began as one or two-person blogs.

In my own experience, reaching the level of $1,000 to $3,000 in monthly earnings with a blog using a combination of affiliate marketing and PPC advertising (programs like Google AdSense or Ezoic) after about 8 to 12 months of publishing constant content is fairly easy to do.

Growing that site to earnings in the $7,000 to $10,000 monthly earnings range generally takes between 24 to 36 months as long as you continue to publish quality content.

What is the Success Rate of Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a numbers game. The average affiliate marketer will see about a 1% conversion rate of site traffic to sales referred. This number isn’t set in stone and varies a good deal based on numerous factors such as the market your website serves, the products you’re promoting, and how your website and content perform, still, 1% is a fair average.

So, let’s use a hypothetical example of a site promoting a product that pays a $1 commission per sale. This means on average you should earn $1 for every 100 visitors your site gets. $10 for every 1,000 visitors, $100 for every 10,000 visitors, and so on.

Of course, you can also display PPC ads on your site which will increase your earnings with that same traffic, and once your site is receiving steady traffic in the tens-of-thousands each month you will find yourself eligible for better, higher-paying affiliate offers to promote, so the $1 per 100 visitors can quickly become $2 or more.

Is it Hard to Make Money Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a way to make money from promoting other people’s products. It’s not hard to make money from affiliate marketing, but it does take a lot of work. It’s difficult to know how much you can make with affiliate marketing because there are so many variables.

There is no limit to the ways affiliate marketers can promote products, but the easiest and simplest method is by just publishing content on a website or blog that features the products or activities related to the products, and then including their affiliate link(s) within that content.

For some, this career of blogging full-time is a dream, for others the idea of writing all the time makes them groan in despair. Ultimately it’s up to you and your own drive, that’s what will determine how hard or easy affiliate marketing is.

Is Affiliate Marketing Hard to Learn?

Some people say that affiliate marketing is hard to learn. Some say it’s not. Who do you believe?

There are definitely some aspects of affiliate marketing that can be confusing. But don’t let this discourage you. All you need to do is a little research and make the commitment to learn.

Don’t let the complexity of the subject get you down. Affiliate marketing is a money-making opportunity that’s just waiting for you to take advantage of it.

Like most things, the deeper in you go the more nuanced and hard it becomes, but the great thing about affiliate marketing is the minimal barrier to entry, and being able to earn as you learn.

I’ve written a post of tips for beginners that you can read for some great help starting out.

How Long Does it Take to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to start a career in Internet marketing. There are many ways to get started with affiliate marketing, such as publishing reviews about products on blogs and social media. You can also create your own blog or website where you talk about things that are related to your passions. Once your site becomes popular, you can sign up for an affiliate program and make money by recommending a product, and then the company will pay you a commission each time someone buys that product.

In my experience new marketers (or new sites used for affiliate marketing) generally don’t start seeing the first trickles of earnings for about 6 to 8 months, and even then the earnings will be wildly sporadic.

This isn’t to do with affiliate marketing itself, however, but rather with how search engines work and the time it takes for content to begin showing up in the rankings, which is where your traffic comes from.

A typical goal I use is to reach my first $1,000 earnings for a month by the 12th month of the site. Then I aim for doubling that to $2,000 within 6 months from there and reaching $3,000 in 6 months after that. In other words, my goals are earning $1,000 per month by the one-year mark, and $3,000 per month by the two-year date.

The hardest part is that first year where month after month you’re publishing lots of content, at least 25 to 30 postings per month, and seeing nothing, or just pennies, in returns for most of the time.

However, once you get over that hump of $1,000 per month in earnings, your need to produce content drops, typically to 8 to 12 postings per month, while your earnings continue to grow at a steady rate.

Affiliate marketing is a front-loaded journey. You put in a ton of work on the front side of it for unlimited earnings potential down the road, where the earnings become much more passive for you.

Will Affiliate Marketing Still Be Worth Doing in 2022?

At the time of writing this, the best information I’ve found on the affiliate marketing industry says that over 80% of advertisers and publishers online are using at least some form of affiliate marketing in their business models.

Spending in the industry is well over $6 billion dollars for 2021, and projections are that it will hit $8 billion in 2022.

Sure, there’s naysayers and the always prevalent “the sky is falling” crowd out there who will say that affiliate marketing is dead or dying, but it’s not at all, and in my experience, these are usually folks who can’t adapt to the changes that are inevitable online, or with any business.

A lot of people who were making big money with affiliate marketing in the early 2000s find themselves struggling to earn money today, not because affiliate marketing is dead or dying, but because the Internet has changed, advertising has changed, search engines have changed, and society has changed.

The days of spamming affiliate links all over the place and earning easy dollars were great for some but made the Internet a slimy playground in a seedy neighborhood.

Today quality matters. The quality of your content. Value matters. Give good value and it earns you trust. When someone clicks your affiliate link it’s because they’re trusting your recommendation. If they don’t trust you based on the content of your page, they won’t trust your recommendation to click that link, period.

So, will it still be worth it in 2022 and beyond? Absolutely, but you have to give to get. It isn’t an “Easy button” scheme, there’s no instant riches path. It takes hard work and patience to build, and once you do it pays off.