How much money can you make from affiliate marketing? Top affiliates can make millions of dollars. Whereas new affiliates will make nothing until they learn how to make a sale. Affiliates are basically third party referrers of products and services online. As such they are paid by performance, not for the hours they put in but for the sales they generate.
This can be frustrating for beginners who put in a lot of hours without seeing any sales. This accounts for the low success rate of affiliates. But with patience and guidance, anyone can learn how to make affiliate sales online. Once you do, you can automate and scale the process.
The average salary for an affiliate, according to Glassdoor, is $59,060 per year in the US or £38,040 in the UK.
How Much Money Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?
There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too. You can use paid marketing platforms to advertise, or you can create content on a website for example, or through a video platform such as YouTube. Some affiliates use email marketing to sell affiliate products, whereas others send people directly to products. Some use social media and free strategies, and others use paid ads.
The diversity of options for affiliates makes it appealing for beginners and there’s a very low barrier to entry in affiliate marketing. Almost anyone can “give it a go” and this is another reason for the high failure rate among affiliates. Anyone can join an affiliate program such as Amazon’s, and promote products for free.
This also makes affiliate marketing incredibly competitive, and it’s not easy, especially if you go it alone. To make sales you need to get your audience to buy a product through your unique identifying link, or affiliate link. Once you learn how to do this, you can do it automatically using systems and technology, scaling up to reach a growing global audience.
But this interim period of learning can be frustrating, and it takes some time and patience to learn properly.
How Much Money Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing – Products & Marketing
Depending on the products you choose and the marketing methods you employ, affiliate marketing can be a small side income or a full time business. With a scalable strategy, you can quickly build a 6 figure business out of affiliate marketing, with the right products and services. But this doesn’t happen overnight and it takes a marketing budget to do. Alternatively, if you want to create content you can build an affiliate business more cheaply. But it typically takes much longer to do and progress will be slower.
Blogging, as a marketing strategy for example can take months or even years before you are making regular sales. Paid marketing on the other hand can quickly take off globally if you find an ad that works and turn up your budget.
Low value products will pay you less obviously than high cost ones. But there’s other factors at play in affiliate marketing too. Some products will pay only 1% commission for a sale, like some from Amazon, for example. Other products, such as digital products can pay much more.
The most profitable digital products are the ones which offer the most value; digital business tools, subscription products and high ticket products, for example. The least profitable ones are physical products which are low cost and pay low commissions. So by choosing the right products, you can give yourself a head start if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate.
Choosing Scalable Strategies Vs Content
The best way to do affiliate marketing is to start with a high ticket product offering and use scalable strategies. That way, once you find a profitable ad, you can scale up and reach a larger audience, making profit on the way. This of course requires some investment of time and capital. Start with a small ad budget and test various ads until you find one which works. Then scale up by increasing your marketing budget.
You can of course choose a cheaper method of marketing, such as blogging, which will take longer and is less scalable. Blogging though can have a tipping point where your traffic reaches a critical mass.
When this happens, you will get more traffic, leads and sales without paying for advertising, through the search engines. This typically will take several months to happen, or even years, depending on the competitiveness of the topic you choose. But ultimately content generation can give you passive sales and without spending on advertising.
How Much Can YOU Make?
The all important question is how much can you make with affiliate marketing? Since around 95% of affiliates quit, you can assume that it’s not an easy path to riches! So you’ll need to bring a lot of patience and tenacity with you if you want to become a successful affiliate. Affiliate marketing is very different from a job and you’ll need to learn some new skills and mindsets to become an effective affiliate.
Since pay is performance related, you won’t get paid until you start making sales. Getting a solid foundation to your affiliate career is an important first step, as those who rush into it will seldom stick. Sign up on this website for more information and some free resources. See also money mindset coach for information on how your mindset around money can affect your business.
You can become successful as an affiliate quite quickly, or it can take some time, depending on your marketing strategy and product choice. Ideally use high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate products which pay the most and recurring commissions respectively.