Affiliate marketing startup costs can be very low. Anyone can get started in affiliate marketing for very little. You can buy and domain name for less than $5 and hosting package for under $10 a month. With your own website you can start promoting affiliate products from anywhere; you just need to generate traffic to your site. You can even get traffic to your website free, if you work hard enough generating content.
You should also purchase an email autoresponder too, which you can do for around $10 a month to start. Get one here. An autoresponder collects emails and sends out email marketing messages automatically.
But a lot of affiliates don’t get the traction they really want, and give up before they get anywhere. Even if you create your own website to promote affiliate products from, and join a free affiliate program, you can get lost down the many rabbit holes there are in affiliate marketing.
You can of course do affiliate marketing completely for free too! Using a free blog platform (Hubpages.com), I made one of my first sales online after writing a product review. But I wouldn’t recommend this if you want to build a serious income, as it can be very difficult.
Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – Training & Support
It’s worth investing in your education if you’re going to take your affiliate business seriously. It can take much longer, and it can be more difficult, if you go it alone. Jumping from free video to free video, learning from many different strategies can be hard. Especially if you have no-one to turn to when things get tough.
Joining an online community and plugging yourself into a group of like minded people, can be the best money you will spend. You can access the Mentors All In program for $99 and $97 a month. This program gives you website hosting and a website builder, training and products to sell, a simple modular step by step process and basically everything you need to learn how to sell products online.
You can access a free video series here to learn more about this program.
Within this program you can access multiple training courses and also a product range from which you can earn up to 101% commissions on.
Here’s the commission structure on the digital product range you can access as an affiliate for the SFM Mentors. The more you invest, the higher levels of commission you can earn, and the more support you can access.
Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – Commission Structure
Many affiliate programs can be joined completely free. However, they don’t offer support and training. You’ll just have to figure out how to sell products by yourself. So it’s worth joining a program which helps you with this. Free to join programs also often have a criteria for joining, such as owning your own website or having a required number of subscribers on your list.
Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs which anyone can join for free. However, you will have to have your partner program approved and the terms and conditions for approval often change over time. Before you can get approved by Amazon’s affiliate program, you’ll need to have your own website with a number of quality articles on it. Have a look at this article for more on this.
But Amazon isn’t the best program to join either because it’s commission rate is so low. Promoting products from Amazon will only earn affiliates between 3% and 11% commissions. This is pretty low when you consider that many digital products will pay out 40% and above in commissions to affiliates.
High Value Digital Products
You can spend more on affiliate marketing startup costs if you want a better business model. Using high ticket affiliate programs can give you a massive advantage when starting out as an affiliate.
If you choose to sell physical products you can earn 3-11% commissions. Digital products will pay 40%+ commissions. But with high ticket products, you can earn 40% commissions on products valued up to $10,000 and above.
These kinds of products are those such as mentorships and coaching products – giving you more access to top affiliates who have spent years learning the best methods of building online businesses. 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring for affiliates is well worth the investment if you’re serious about building a full time income online, and can afford it.
To access the high ticket products as a re-seller affiliate, and qualify for the larger commissions, you’ll need to invest in the products themselves. You can choose your level of investment through the SFM Digital Business System which includes mentorship and coaching items worth up to $20, 000. Selling a product like this can earn you a very nice commission, according to your positioning in the business model.
Marketing Your Products
Affiliate marketing startup costs also involve marketing costs too. If you’re going to use paid advertising to sell your products, you’ll need to factor this in. Paid marketing is more suitable when you have a high ticket product range in your “digital store”. A good product range includes:
- One or many high ticket products
- Recurring commission products
- A product range
- A built in sales team
- Multi-tier sales
Without a range of products, and earning strategies like this, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing to sell affiliate products and still come out with a profit. Look again at Amazon products which typically pay between 3% and 11% commission.
To use paid marketing to sell these kinds of products will be very tricky! If you sell a book from Amazon at $10 and only make $3% commission, that’s only $0.30 cents commission! To sell this product using paid marketing (and come out with a profit) is near impossible! But if you have a sales funnel with multiple earning strategies, it’s much more realistic.
How Committed Are You?
There’s a variety of affiliate marketing startup costs, so you can choose a level of financial commitment which suits your budget. Generally speaking the more you invest, the more committed you will be and the more help you’ll get. If you just want to “give it a go”, you can do it for free.
But if you’re serious about turning affiliate marketing into a serious income, and becoming financially free, it will take a lot of commitment and sacrifice.
On a scale of 10, how badly do you need affiliate marketing to get you out of your current circumstances? It’s often your “why?” which will determine your success in affiliate marketing. Remember there’s a huge drop out rate for affiliates too. Most quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. Those with a big enough “why?” make it happen because they have to!
Summary
So if you’re wondering about affiliate marketing startup costs, as you can see, you can invest heavily for mentorship, training and support, and for high ticket sales funnels, or you can go it alone and join an affiliate program for free!
I started out doing everything for free and found it incredibly difficult. See how difficult is affiliate marketing. I created niche websites and used free blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger.com and Hubpages.com. Ideally, at least purchase your own website and hosting, since this is a better way of generating traffic. It also positions you as more of an authority, than by using free blogging platforms.
Some affiliates become bloggers and this is a cheap way to get started. Others upload videos to YouTube to get traffic. Getting traffic and knowing where to promote your affiliate link are the biggest challenges for affiliates, so it’s worth getting help and training before you start out, if you don’t know what you’re doing!
You can access a free video series to learn more about The SFM through this link.
