What are the affiliate marketing fees needed to start an affiliate business? While you can start affiliate marketing for free, it’s worth paying for at least a couple of tools to help you get the most from your time. The more you invest in your training and education, the better chance you have of succeeding. But if you’re on a tight budget the best use of your money is to build your own website and get an autoresponder.

• Domain name = $10
• Hosting = $5 a month
• Autoresponder = free limited use (then $20 a month) See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a performance based business in which third parties refer online sales of other people’s products. If you don’t make any sales, you don’t get paid! Because of this, it’s well worth investing in some training and support. Joining an online community was the best thing I did for my affiliate business. You can find one through opting in to my email list on this website, or accessing the free webinar.

Training fees can vary from around $100 to several thousands of dollars depending on the package you choose. The more you spend, the less you have to do yourself. “Done for you” packages will offer considerably more value than “do it yourself” ones. Still, even a “done for you” package doesn’t guarantee you success online, it only helps you by way of more in-depth and personal training and ready made sales systems etc.

Affiliate Marketing Fees – The “Free” Route

You can of course do affiliate marketing completely for free. When I began with affiliate marketing several years ago, I went this route. My first sale came from a free blogging platform (Hubpages.com). Free blogging platforms let you create written content and promote affiliate products.

However there are some downsides to free platforms in that you have less control over what you can promote from them. Google doesn’t credit free blog sites with as much authority as it would a website which you own. So if your aim is to build a blog website and get free traffic, you’re still better off getting your own website.

YouTube too is a good place where you can start doing affiliate marketing for free. Simply upload videos on a regular basis to the site and link to affiliate products which you want to promote. However, YouTube is super competitive and it can take months or years to generate any traction with this method. Content marketing is a very slow method of generating sales online and with the huge volume of competing websites and content, it can be difficult.

Affiliate programs are largely free to join and a favourite for affiliate beginners is Amazon or eBay. However, these affiliate programs pay very small commissions and with a slow strategy such as blogging, it can take a lot of time and effort to make it pay. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

Affiliate Marketing Fees – Paid Marketing

Marketing is the number one concern of affiliate marketers. Without marketing you won’t sell anything or make any money! There’s two main strategies you can use to attract people to your affiliate products: paid marketing and free/content marketing. Content marketing takes much longer and is much less scalable than paid marketing. But paid marketing of course costs more money. If you choose to go the paid marketing route, you can end up spending a lot of money just testing your ads. That’s even before you have made any sales!

The cheaper route of blogging and content creation can take a while to work. You’ll need to spend a considerable amount of time building content if you go this route, before you even make any commissions.

Paid marketing is the fastest route and the more you spend the faster you can build your affiliate business. Some affiliates will spend thousands of dollars every month just on their marketing campaigns. However, they will also test and measure their campaigns (with a small daily budget) before they increase their budgets, so they know they will be profitable.

Generally speaking, if you are busy in a full time job, use paid marketing. If you have the time but not the budget, hustle and build content. If you’re somewhere in between, you can do a combination of the two.

Subscription And High Ticket Products

The types of products you choose to promote as an affiliate can have a dramatic impact on what you can potentially earn. Low value physical products typically pay the smallest levels of commission. High ticket and recurring commission products are the best ones to use for greater earning power. With a high ticket affiliate marketing product, you can earn the same as you would by selling hundreds or even thousands of a small, physical product.

High ticket programs will typically charge you a fee if you want to access the highest commission structures. The higher the commission, the more you will pay. High ticket products range in cost from $500 up to $10,000 and above. For more on this see high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Subscription affiliate programs are another useful tool for affiliates. With a subscription product you can earn ongoing commissions from each sale you make. This makes it much easier to build a reliable income from your affiliate business so it’s well worth considering.

See also best products to sell as an affiliate and affiliate marketing startup costs.