Wondering how fast you can make money with affiliate marketing? For most successful affiliate marketers it will take several months before they see the fruits of their labour. This might mean they’ll make their first sale within a few months.
Some might even be able to quit a job in this time, although this is more difficult in the short term. For many affiliates the process is too frustrating to continue past the preliminary period of training and testing where nothing much happens. The large majority of affiliates quit (around 95%).
The speed at which you can build a successful and profitable affiliate business will depend on many factors such as your business model and advertising strategy. But ultimately an affiliate business can bring you a passive income which can surpass pretty much any job if you stick with it!
How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Business Models
There’s various different business models which affiliates can use and not all are alike. With certain products for instance, you can only earn 1% commission. Choosing to sell a low valued product can make it more difficult to make a good income from affiliate sales because you’ll need to sell a lot more products to make a profit. With high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can sell one item and earn the same as with hundreds or even thousands of sales of a low valued item.
Subscription affiliate programs also give affiliates a better chance of success. A single sale can give you a recurring commission which pays each month for the duration of the membership. With certain products, such as business tools, this can be for a lifetime. So a few hundred sales can mean a passive income can be built up quite quickly with recurring commission products.
So, to make greater headway with an affiliate marketing business you should choose high ticket and subscription items to sell. Even with fewer sales, commissions can easily add up to a larger income and subscription items give you a recurring revenue stream more quickly. See also how to increase online sales conversion rate.
How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Promotion Methods
There’s multiple strategies you can use to sell affiliate products online. The strategy you choose (and the products which allow it, or not) have a lot to say in terms of how fast you can build.
For example, if you have a high ticket sales funnel, it’s a lot more attainable to make a profit using paid marketing strategies. With low valued physical products there’s a much smaller margin for profit because commissions are much lower. Paid marketing strategies are very fast and scalable and although you’ll need to test advertising campaigns before you find a winning one, when you do you can simply leave it and scale up to a larger audience (simply increase your marketing budget).
A much slower method of marketing is blogging or creating a YouTube channel for organic traffic. This can take months of regular uploading of videos (and/or content) before you’ll create the same volume of traffic you can have instantly with paid advertising. The benefit of content creation though is that your content can bring in traffic for free! Once your content gets traction, you’re on to a winner. But this can take a lot of perseverance and in the interim, there’s very little evidence to show your strategy is working.
How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Email Marketing
It’s definitely worth doing email marketing whatever your traffic strategy is. With an email list you’ll definitely make faster progress as an affiliate. An email list puts you in charge of your traffic. Without one, you’re relying on your blogging/content or your paid marketing. Since most website visitors will leave without having bought anything, it make sense to capture your visitors details and follow up through an email marketing campaign.
On a website you’ve only a few minutes to “convert” a visitor into a buyer. But if they’re not ready to buy, you’ll lose them forever. By giving away some kind of freebie offer on your website, you can encourage them to join your email list. Once on your email list you have a much longer timeframe to build trust with your subscribers and offer your affiliate products to them.
More about email marketing for affiliates here.
Summary
There’s no hard and fast rule as to how long it takes to build a profitable affiliate business. For most it will take at least a few months before they see some positive results and then a couple of years before they can replace their income from their affiliate sales. But some can do it much quicker, given a high value sales funnel and a large marketing budget.
If you don’t have either of these two, you can expect a more difficult journey, especially if you’re using organic marketing methods such as blogging.
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