I think the question that people ask themselves, can I make money with affiliate marketing is probably the one we all have on our minds when we first get started.
Even if you’ve been doing it for a while, and have not seen any money coming in, you may begin to question whether you can actually make money even when you know other people are!
You can start today where I started and learn all the skills to begin making money by setting your goals on how much would you like to make and let me help you reach your goals. Start here.
Of course, the short answer is yes you can make money with affiliate marketing, but there’s a lot that goes into it.
What I want to do in this article is to go beyond whether you can make money with affiliate marketing. Let’s get more specific in looking at other aspects of this question.
How you can make money with affiliate marketing! What are the best affiliate programs to make money with?
How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money For Beginners?
One of the many things I like about affiliate marketing is how beginner-friendly it is as a business model. We all start exactly in the same place.
The first step is to join an affiliate program. Affiliate marketing is a business model you can use to make money online.
What’s really great about this business model is there are people that make money on their very first day.
How do they do that?
Sell Something. This is a good place for a beginner to start.
Beyond selling something other ways people make money as affiliate marketers are to get leads and to get clicks. These are known as pay-per-lead and pay-per-click, business models.
Pay-per-click is best done with Google AdSense. However, you’re not going to make money the first day because Google won’t even approve you for their affiliate program until you get a little more advanced with your own website or blog.
Pay Per Lead
The pay-per-lead business model is good because all you have to do is get someone to fill out a lead form. There’s a lot of training online for this. You can just Google search cost per action training or here’s a short video to learn more about that.
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Cost Per Action Affiliate Marketing Explained
Pay Per Click
The pay-per-click, also known as PPC, is an affiliate business model where you are paid when people click on ads. These are known as display ads and there are multiple ways you can get those on your website or blog.
One of the largest affiliate programs in the world, and it pays billions of dollars in commissions to its affiliates every year is Google AdSense. You create content on your website or blog and Google sells advertising and uses an algorithm to match advertisers with the theme of your content.
The ads show up, somebody comes to your blog to visit, they see the ad, they click on it, and you earn a commission.
How much will you earn?
Google pays you 68% of the click that they bill to the advertiser. So, if the cost of the click the advertiser is billed is $1 dollar Google will pay you $.68 cents. If the click cost $10, they’ll pay you $6.80.
This is the simplest form of affiliate marketing because all you do is focus on getting content and traffic, Google sells the ads, and you make money when people click on them. You’re not selling anything, and you’re not asking them to fill out a lead form like you would with the cost-per-action or cost-per-sale program.
Ok, let’s move on. We have talked about Google AdSense which is in the pay-per-click affiliate model.
What else can you do to earn money in affiliate marketing?
How Much Can I Earn As An Amazon Affiliate?
One of the real pioneers in affiliate marketing was the Amazon Associate Program. The name associate was used in the early days of affiliate marketing and now it’s just more commonly known as affiliate marketing programs.
In the early days, Amazon approved affiliates to sell books. That was all they had, but it worked extremely well and they built their whole company from that original concept.
Basically, it works like this.
You sign up as an affiliate with Amazon on their site. They give you an associate ID number.
This ID number is then inserted into website URLs for literally millions of physical and digital products. For sure Amazon is the leader in physical affiliate products sold online!
When somebody comes to Amazon looking for something, your webpage may show up, somebody clicks on it, and if they purchase it you earn a commission. These commission rates are lower than they might be for other affiliate products, but you can make up for that volume.
For example, if you’re only earning 5% of the sales price that may not sound like much unless you’re selling a big-ticket item. However, because of the massive amount of traffic that Amazon gets, you could end up selling hundreds of products every month and make a lot of money in the process.
There are people earning six, seven, and even eight-figure incomes a year with the Amazon affiliate program. Bottom line if you want to make money in affiliate marketing with physical products Amazon should be a program you join.
Ok, we have talked about Google AdSense and Amazon. What’s next?
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Can You Really Make Money With Clickbank?
Click bank is an affiliate network. They bring affiliate merchants and affiliate marketers together to use their platform to sell digital products online.
These products come in the form of membership sites, e-books, videos, music, and so on. In my view, Clickbank is one of the truly great affiliate programs to join.
This is so simple that you create an account and choose your own hop link ID name. This name is then inserted into the URL for every product on the Clickbank platform. You literally have access to millions of products you can start selling right away with just that ID name.
On the Internet, Clickbank is a Top 100 online retailer with over 200 million customers. People in over 190 countries have bought products off of a Clickbank website.
You can make literally earn unlimited amounts of income in any niche you choose to get into. It’s all free to join and get started with! If you really want to know if you can make money online or not, Clickbank is the place to be especially if you’re going to promote digital products.
Related Video: How Long Does It Take To Start Making Money On Affiliate Marketing?
Need Proof? Affiliate Marketing Average Income 2018
According to Zip Recruiter, the average annual salary of an affiliate marketer is $66,905 as of July 27, 2019. They are reporting this as a salary for a job.
This just means there are companies hiring people to do affiliate marketing for them. This is probably not something most of us have ever thought about.
I would say this…
If you have the skill of an affiliate marketer, but don’t want to be in business for yourself, maybe you should take a look at going to work for somebody else. Getting skills is key to earning a full-time income online from home.
How much money do you think somebody makes as an affiliate marketer if they’re working for themselves? I imagine this would be almost impossible to calculate because of the variables involved.
Here’s one thing that I know. I am involved with Wealthy Affiliate which is a training program for affiliate marketers. They have an affiliate program, but the people that make the most money with Wealthy Affiliate are not that involved in the affiliate program.
Niche Affiliate Sites
What they are doing is building niche affiliate websites and monetizing those in some of the ways that we’ve talked about already.
I know of one affiliate marketer, Jon Dykstra, who focuses on the display advertising model. He is earning over $47,000 a month when people click on ads that companies like Google to sell and he places a little piece of code on his website.
I understand that there are going to be a lot of people who get into affiliate marketing and they’re never going to make any money. That is not the fault of the affiliate business model or even the affiliate programs they join.
This has been true going back to the beginning of the home business network business model and MLM or multi-level marketing. Millions of people join programs and never make any money and then they blame it on the program.
I’ve often wondered why somebody is successful where most other people aren’t. This is where you really get into understanding what’s going to be involved as an affiliate marketer if you want to make money. For that consider a handful of these pros and cons.
The Pros & Cons of Affiliate Marketing
There are pros and cons of affiliate marketing like anything else in life and on the Internet. Here are the ones that come to mind for me without doing any research. This is based on personal experience.
Pros:
- 1. It is easy to get started. All you do is join an affiliate program and you are ready to make money.
- 2. It is cheap to get into. Many affiliate programs are free to join.
- 3. Products. There are millions of things to sell or promote.
- 4. You can do it anywhere. All you need is Internet access.
- 5. There is no income ceiling. You control how much you earn and are never capped.
Cons:
- 1. You do not know where to start. Affiliate marketing is not difficult, but you do have to start somewhere.
- 2. What niche should I be in? A niche is a targeted segment of the market.
- 3. What do you sell? This is the age-old question that many people do not get beyond.
- 4. How do I make money? Until you are actually getting paid most never figure out how to earn it.
- 5. How do I get traffic? This is true for any business online. You will not make any money until you have people coming to your website. This is the #1 reason people fail in affiliate marketing.
What is my solution to these pros and cons? Read below.
final thoughts
Here is the bottom line. Yes, you can make money with affiliate marketing, but you’re going to have to learn how to do it. You’re going to need a handful of affiliate marketing skills.
You can click around on Google, or go to YouTube and watch videos, and try to figure it out on your own. A better way in my viewpoint is to join Wealthy Affiliate for free and start getting some basic training.
Then if you choose you can upgrade to a premium member and access all of the many benefits that come from this. Some of the most successful affiliate marketers on the Internet today are members of Wealthy Affiliate and this includes me.
If you need help choosing the right Affiliate Program, check out my #1 recommendation on building a successful Affiliate business online. You can get access to hundreds of training videos, 24/7 support, professional consultations, private access to training guides, tools, personal private assistance, my personal help, and much more.
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Related Article: How Long Does It Take To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer?
See the 4 steps to working online from home & earn residual income
Thank you very much for your post. It is a dose of encouragement to me since I just started my online business and am not sure if I could make money through the affiliate market.
There are so many ways to make money using affiliate market. I like your suggestion on Clickbank, which is the top 100 online retailer, has more than 200 million customers worldwide, and sounds a lot of business opportunities. I will definitely try to work with Clickbank and make some incomes from there.
It is kind of you sharing such many ways of making money through affiliate marketing. Your information will help a lot of people to succeed in online business.
Hi Anthony, the common mistake that I see a lot of people are making is that they are not willing to take the time to learn Affiliate Marketing. If they get a job working for someone they have to go through the daily procedures of that company in order for them to get a paycheck, but they would not do it for their own benefits.
That is the main reason for failure and success with becoming an Affiliate Marketer with these programs. I started to see results within 9 months of starting my online website. What if I had decided to quit at month eight? I truly would like to help a lot of people to understand that this business model does work if they put in the effort and work it.
Please feel free to contact me if you need a hand with your business, I do take this business seriously and I will do whatever it takes to see others have the same results. Talk to you soon and thank you for stopping by.
Thank you for writing this article. I was trying to explain about affiliate marketing to my cousin, a real newbie in making money online. It’s a bit hard for me to explain the process of affiliate marketing to someone who never touched online business, so this article is beneficial.
I also became an affiliate marketer a while ago and still struggle to get traffic. With that condition, do you think it is better to use digital ads for capturing leads? I heard it can tremendously help you to get leads and traffic at the same time. Thanks for the answer
You are not alone, many people find it difficult to explain affiliate Marketing because there are so many ways to approach this business, hence the reason for writing this article and embedded videos for a better understanding.
Get traffic do takes time, that is the reason why some get involved in paid advertising until their website gain popularity with the search engines. It is better to focus on content marketing on a consistent basis because, in the long run, this is what will turn into your number traffic source that would last longer.
You should also consider email marketing as well as you start to get some traffic from your website, building a list is always the best approach, as your list begin to like and trust you, they will be able to purchase whatever you recommend.
Yes, you can try to use display ads, is a good way to build your list and increase your traffic as well. My advice is to read up on it and understand the right way to go about it. Thank you for the feedback.
Wow I am really surprised that the average salary of an affiliate marketer is 66 to $67,000. I wonder if they count people who are just starting an affiliate marketing career or if they are only counting more established people.
I am doing wealthy affiliate now and I think I am on my second week. It gives me a lot of purposeful activities to do and I feel like I could make money with it eventually. I like their website building platform because it comes with a lot of good features and it’s all included in the membership.
I’ve heard of people making like thousands of dollars a month from a website with ads. Sometimes I wonder where the advertising company is getting all that money! I guess there is like billions of dollars fully around out there in all the different Industries. Affiliate marketing is a good opportunity because there are like 8 billion people on the internet that is what I have heard. Thanks for this article and it will help me with my affiliate marketing career. I will probably be back to read more in the future.
As mention online, ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $130,500 and as low as $20,500, the majority of Affiliate Marketing salaries currently range between $41,000 (25th percentile) to $80,000 (75th percentile) across the United States. The average pay range for an Affiliate Marketing varies modestly (up to $39,000), which suggests there may be fewer opportunities for advancement based on skill level, but increased pay based on location and years of experience is still possible.
Happy to know that you have started with Wealthy Affiliate and you begin to develop your website, monetize it to eventually make sales. It is one of the best platforms on the internet and the training surpasses all that I ever come across.
Actually, there are 4.39 billion internet users in 2019, an increase of 366 million (9 percent) versus January 2018, and daily users are constantly increasing. companies do pay big money for advertising and will pay affiliates huge commissions for sharing their business online. Happy that you were able to get some value here and looking forward to seeing you again.
I think we can make money from affiliate marketing but the process to get there is not an easy one. Especially me that I juggle between my full-time job and writing my post at least 2 times a week. (I have to be honest, now it is once a week) I am currently making some income from Adsense.
As for amazon associate it gets tricky for me since they declined my application once already because I did not make enough sales within the first 180 days. I guess we all should start with a blog and start doing product reviews and take it from there. When you have traffic you can use more strategies.
I totally agree with you, and building a business should be long term cause nothing that is lasting will happen overnight, if that was the case, then more people would be successful. Most of the time we do not find the time to stay consistent for a long time. I realize when I write 12 articles a month, I get more results than when I write eight or less. the momentum is there and search engines do notice.
Sorry about your Amazon application, but keep in mind you can always reapply. I lost my privilege as well cause I was not consistent cause I change my niche. Will go back to them in the near future cause Amazon growth is consistent and more people are buying their products. Hope you decide to do the same.
Cheers!
This is a great way to show just where one can go for joining affiliate marketing programs to start with and get up and running on one’s website for beginners. Clickbank really is an easy one as they have so many products in their marketplace.
You just pick your niche then get a hop link and add it to your website. Amazon too is remarkable at providing help with creating links, and have so many things you can promote for your niche. It still takes time for one to make money online through these companies, but it’s good to know where to start, thanks for sharing this valuable info.
Hi Kat, thank you for sharing your thoughts. You are right that it takes time to make money online, but you do not want to do anything, and then 2 – 3 years down the road you sorry that you did not start.
This is the reason I always advise my audience to find a passion in that way they would not be bored as they build their website. times fly when you are doing something that you love, and before you know it success begins to knock on your door. Thank you for the feedback.
As I am new in online business I found it fascinating that all these time there are many ways to monetize internet activities especially internet marketing. Additional sources of income are freelance writing and blogging. In this article, I have read some of the nitty-gritty of the business online.
I am grateful and excited to pursue making a decision, I am now a member of the Wealthy Affiliate, the home of internet marketing. I would definitely recommend this site to some of my friends who are into online business as well.
Happy I was able to show you different ways that one can make money online and the best process for this is to find a platform that teaches you exactly how to go about doing that.
The good thing that happens for me with Wealthy Affiliate, I wanted to learn all the necessary ways to build my website and monetize and get it ready for traffic and sales. and during my training, the money started coming in. that blew me away and give me the drive to continue and learn all the necessary strategies to grow my online business.
Being a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you are definitely on the right path. please feel free to reach out to me if you need a hand with your business. All the best.
This is amazing. This article is very encouraging to read and there’s a sense of trust emanating throughout the entire article. It was very engaging.
The approach you have taken in introducing the reader to the different aspects of making money as an Affiliate Marketer is very important and it leaves no doubt in the mind as to what is to be expected. Thank you very much for this informative article.
Thank you for taking the time and leaving a comment on this post. Affiliate Marketing is my passion, My goal is to help my audience see how easy it is to get started once they willing to put in the work on a platform that is user-friendly and a place where they can get all the support they would need to grow a successful business online.
Affiliate Marketing has a number of approach to it, that is the reason I wanted to share that with my audience for them to decide what angle they should take when starting out. For me, the best way is to stick with one approach and then move on to others at a later time in their business. Hope this Helps!!