How much can a beginner make in affiliate marketing? A beginner in affiliate marketing typically will make less than $1000 per month.
All beginners start from zero of course and since affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, it can take some time to generate traction. How fast you start making sales will depend on a number of things:
- Your marketing tactics – will you use paid advertising, or content generation?
- Choice of product – some products pay more in commissions than others. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
- Your niche – if you’re building content in a niche, or running ads in a niche, a top niche will be more competitive than a quieter one.
- Your work ethic and how productive you are
- Focus – do you know what to do and how to do it?
How Much Can A Beginner Make In Affiliate Marketing?
There’s no reason why you can’t make an income from affiliate marketing if you’re focused and persistent. However, everyone wants results quickly for a couple of reasons –
- the money
- to prove it can be done!
When you’re starting out, you could join an affiliate program and within the first day post your link online somewhere and make a sale – in theory! Depending on the product, this could give you a commission of $1 or $1000 depending on the product you choose to promote. High ticket affiliate products will pay much more than low value physical products too. So if you’re promoting products off Amazon valued less than $100, expect very small commissions when you do make those sales. So, you’ll need a lot of them to make even a small income.
Subscription products should be considered too if you’re a beginner. With the right subscription product you can start earning a regular income much more quickly because they pay recurring commissions.
How Much Can A Beginner Make In Affiliate Marketing? Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy too has a lot to do with how much you can make and over what timespan. With paid marketing and a high ticket offering, you can make larger commissions much more quickly than if you were to use blogging, for example. Blogging is notoriously slow, but if you were to choose a good niche, and focus on it every day, you could be making a regular income of $1000-$3000 within a year if you are persistent.
Longer term bloggers make much more of course. With blogging you need to attract an audience and this will compound over time with more and more content. So initially it can feel as though nothing is happening from a blog and then suddenly you’re making more and more sales without doing very much. Again your success will depend on your ability to stay the course when nothing much is happening and the niche you choose.
In a popular niche, such as money making, you’re going to need to work for much longer to see gains. In a less competitive niche, you can more easily attract traffic and therefore make more sales more quickly, if you have something good to offer your visitors. See also the fastest way to earn from affiliate marketing.
Build An Email List
Whatever you do as an affiliate you should definitely build an email list. A list allows you to collect email subscribers and sell your products to them. However, most affiliates will quit before they even reach 1000 subscribers. That’s a shame because when your list starts growing so does your income.
The larger your list is the more products you can sell. Some affiliates will grow their lists to over 100,000 subscribers. They automate the sending of emails to their list and sell products on complete autopilot.
With a large list and some high ticket affiliate products to sell, your income can go up quite quickly as an affiliate. But of course it takes time to build such a list. If you’re using paid marketing to build it, this can happen quite quickly – within a few months. But if you’re using content marketing and organic traffic sources (such as blogging), it can take much longer to build a substantial list.
Consistency And Focus
As a beginner affiliate it can be easy to focus on what isn’t working in your affiliate business. You look at your lack of sales and exclaim “this doesn’t work”! But what you miss is the bigger picture when you do this. You might have only just started and therefore you have no traffic, no email list and no audience. Only when you start to generate traffic and leads can you generate sales, and this can take some time and patience.
When you understand where you are going, and stay focused and consistent in your activities, you’ll make progress. Wanting results too early is likely to at least dampen your spirits which can lead to inactivity. The faster you can understand your journey, whether using paid ads or content, the better you can accept the timeframe of it and just knuckle down.
Without consistent daily effort in an affiliate business, you’re likely to have very slow progress.
Summary
How much can a beginner make in affiliate marketing? This depends on so many factors that it’s impossible to say definitively. You need a lot of drive and focus to succeed as an affiliate and around 95% of new affiliates will quit. With only a 5% success rate in affiliate marketing, you can see that it’s not an easy path. However, if you’re persistent and determined, you can make good money with affiliate marketing.
With a strong focus and good plan you should be able to make $1000 – $3000 a month within your first year, depending on your marketing strategy and product choice. With a large marketing budget and high ticket sales funnel this can be considerably more. If you’re using content creation as your marketing strategy, it can take much longer.
Through getting the proper training and support, this can be considerably increased and hastened. However, do remember that there’s no guarantees with affiliate marketing as it is a performance based business model. No sales equals no commissions! The flip side of this also means there’s no upper limit to what you can earn from it.
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