Can You Really Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?
The question gets asked all the time; Can you really make money from affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is not your road to easy money and I don’t have any tips that will miraculously make you rich overnight. But, the answer to that question is yes and no!
An income can be earned as an affiliate marketer. However, you will be one of the determining factors for earning income. One of the factors will be your sense of dedication. You must be committed to put in the hard work for however much time it takes to succeed.
As an affiliate marketer, you will not be required to create products. Therefore, affiliate marketing is probably the fastest and most economical ways to start an online business. Just hook the customers up with the sellers then make a commission on every sale that was referred by you, the affiliate marketer. There are many legitimate affiliate marketing programs that you can partner up with.
Financial Freedom – Be Your Own Boss!
Depending on the affiliate programs that the marketer partners with, there may be different payment agreements. The marketer doesn’t always have to sell other’s products to earn a commission. Some of the other legitimate ways of earning money online are listed.
- Pay per lead: Will receive payment when the customer (referral) provides their
contact information on the target (seller) site. - Pay per click: Payment is based on how many visitors the marketer sends to the seller’s
site from the affiliate marketer’s website. A sale doesn’t have to
be made. - Pay per sale: The seller will pay the affiliate marketer a certain percentage of the sale
price after the sale has been completed.
Advantage of an Affiliate Marketing Business
There are several advantages to making affiliate marketing your first attempt at beginning an online business.
- Worldwide Market: Having an online business gives you an opportunity to market to
others globally with immediate access. - No Fees: There is any cost to partner with affiliate programs.
- No customer support: The affiliate marketer can only advertise the seller’s products,
therefore is not responsible for dealing with any customer complaints or support. The seller
retains the responsibility for that area. - No Shipping/Storage: The seller is responsible for storage, packing and shipping of
their products. The affiliate marketer doesn’t incur this expense. - Low to No Overhead: Marketers do not require a brick and mortar location and require
no employees (unless they choose to pay assistants, ghost writers, etc.) and there is no product
development cost. It is the lowest start-up cost around. - Income Generating: On the front end, the affiliate marketer must put in a lot of hard
work getting the business up and running online. But, depending on your marketing skills, once you
gotten going you can generate a stable stream of income even when you aren’t even online. In a
regular 9 to 5 job, you actually have to go to work to get paid. - Work from Home: This is the best part for me! If you can build a steady income flow
you don’t have to think about going to work every day. You can work when you want , how you want and where you want!
Believe in your self. Believe in your success
No Rose Colored Glasses
Affiliate marketing is a great, cost effective way to earn an income with an online business, but there is a lot of competition out there and success will not happen overnight. Until you begin making a steady flow of income, you will need to work hard and stay on top of the game. You have to have a lot of determination, patience and stamina to stay in the race. If you are in it for the long haul, you will see the benefits of your efforts and the light at the end of the tunnel.
To be a good affiliate marketer you have to learn how to know the needs of the market, how to promote other people’s products and then figure out what is working and what isn’t. Be open to trying new methods.
Final Thoughts
Find A Legitimate Affiliate Marketing Training Platform
If you are really serious about starting an affiliate marketing business, I suggest that you find the tools that will help you get a good start. The first step is to find a legitimate affiliate marketing training program that can carry you from beginning to end. You need to have a plan in place. Affiliate marketing is a real business, not a hobby. Treat it with importance and your chance of success will be much better.
Good luck!
Please feel free to contact me if you need help with anything. Just make a comment below or you can always get in touch with me through wealthyaffiliate.com (here is a link to my profile).
Verna
Founder of Your Trusted Affiliate
This is a very inspiring article for those who are wondering if affiliate marketing is for them. I think there is great potential to learning how to promote products online. I think one of the hardest things for new affiliate marketers to learn is patience and perseverance. There is much distrust out there when it comes to this line of work due to the numerous scams and various pyramid schemes out there. But affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a living online if you are willing to work for it.
Thank you Stephanie. Having patience and perseverance is difficult because there is a lot of hard work. But, anything worth having is worth working for. It takes some time, but when new affiliates find a real, honest to goodness training platform they will begin to trust again and they will come to understand that their dreams of becoming an online business owner is within their reach.
Thanks again for your comments and support.
Thanks for this post – I’ve recently been looking into the possibilities of affiliate marketing, and would like to learn more about how much it’s possible to earn in this sector of online business… do you have any blogs, already published, outlining the potential earnings?
Thank you for sharing!!
Zoe
Hi Zoe,
I included a few ways within the article (pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sale) of some of the ways you can make money. I gather from your question though you are asking potentially just how much you can earn?
With affiliate marking you should always have several streams of income. Each of those streams will vary in the amount of potential earnings you can make. It would be too much to put all the information in this reply. However, you have a good point and you have just given me the idea for my very next article. In this article I will include various specific areas of affiliate marketing income streams and will provide the amount of potential income you can earn from each
Check back within the next week at the latest for the new article. Thanks for the article idea and thanks for taking the time to drop by and review my article. If you have any other questions just let me know as I am here to help.
Wishing you success in all your goals. Affiliate marketing is a good way to go for earning an income online.
Hi Zoe,
This is a follow up to your request about information regarding what kind of income affiliate marketers could make. I have recently added another article titled “Affiliate Marketing Income Potential” you may be interested in. You can find it in the navigation menu under “Affiliate Marketing”. I have some tweaking to do yet, but the information is there.
Just remember that affiliate marketing is not a “get rich overnight” thing. A lot of the income one can earn will depend upon them and many other variables. As affiliate marketers we must learn how to pull everything together and work the right way to generate a substantial passive income.
Let me know what you think.
Verna
What a nice site. I’m especially jealous of your posts. Writing something that long and keeping it interesting was/is no small feat. I liked the additional advertising links at the side, maybe because I don’t know how to do that yet. I like the way you don’t have 47 different companies there, just a focused list. I’m sure writing your posts, instead of having used a niche like quilts, you have given valuable thought to your affiliate efforts, how to go about it, and the work that will be required. From reading over your site, if I hadn’t found WA already, I’d probably be trying to contact you. You’re making your luck. All the best.
Thank you Martin for your kind comments.
Yes, I put a lot of effort in writing articles that I think will be helpful to beginners just starting out in the business. When I started out I had a lot of questions. When deciding on the topics for my articles I just thought about the questions I had when I started and set about answering them in my articles. If I had the questions, I figured other beginners would have those same questions.
I also choose the affiliate marketing niche because I didn’t know anything about it. Sounds crazy, right? I figured that if I didn’t know about it I would be forced to learn and the more I learned the better I would become as an affiliate marketer myself! I know though, that learning is an ongoing process and it never stops.
I took care to make my site easy on the eyes and not clutter it up so that it would turn people off. I think nice clear, informative sites are the best.
Your statement that you would be trying to contact me if you hadn’t found Wealthy Affiliate first means a lot to me. It solidifies that my website is doing what I want it to do; be helpful to others.
Martin, I am sure that you will meet all your goals at Wealthy Affiliate. Stay determined and have patience and your success will come.
Come back anytime and if I can help you in any way, just let me know.
Great article Verna on how to make money through affiliate marketing. I think it’s definitely one of the best ways to make money online, but you have to have the right knowledge and do the right things in order to be successful. The multitude of benefits involving less work than most other businesses is what makes it so attractive. Personally, I think it’s something that’s well worth the effort.
Hi Paul,
Thanks so much for checking out my article. You are absolutely correct about needing to have the right knowledge and so the right things to bring about success. In all honesty, I think that on the back end, it does involve less work than other businesses. However, initially when you are just starting out there is a lot of hard work involved. I was one of those people who knew nothing about affiliate marketing and i researched a lot of different areas to become as familiar with the ins and outs of the business as I could. Finding Wealthy Affiliate was a great benefit for me because it is the best affiliate marketing training platform I have come across. I don’t believe I would have gotten this far without that organization.
To do this business you have to be self-motivated, determined and have a lot of patience. You also need to be a fighter with a never give up attitude. Each one has to decide how important it is to succeed in this business and what that success will mean to their lives.
Thanks again Paul and let me know if there is anything l can help you with. I wish you much success in meeting your goals.
Great text. I think what differentiates a successful online marketer is the dedication indeed. So many people give up after the first month, a few in the second and some more in the third. Which means that, you do have a lot of competition out there, but if you keep going, from month 4 you are actually competing only against other successful marketers. That’s when you start making money (not millionaire money, but reasonable money)
Hi Gabriel,
I’m glad you enjoyed the article. I definitely agree with you about having to have a lot of dedication. I think many people don’t realize how much work they have to put into an online business. They think it’s going to be getting rich overnight. Affiliate marketing is a real honest to goodness business just like any other and there has to be a lot of effort and time put into making it a success. May people drop by the wayside because they are not willing to put in the work.
Thanks for stopping by. Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help you in any way.
Verna
Hi Verna
I am a newcomer to online business, looking for opportunities to start with, affiliate marketing looks great, you pointed out the advantages of affiliate marketing, there is a long list up there, but surely I agree with you that it needs a lot of continuous hard work for a reasonable time to start getting some money. I have tried some pay to click sites and found out that they are boring for me.
Thank you for sharing.
Regards.
Ehab, thanks for stopping by. Glad you found the article to be useful to you. I am not a fan of pay per click (PPC) sites myself. Check out my other article, “Affiliate Marketing Income Potential”. In this article I discuss the different streams of income an affiliate marketer can monetize with. Some of those may interest you more.
You said that affiliate marketing looks like a great opportunity to start with. If you are looking for an excellent affiliate marketing training platform take a look at my review of Wealthy Affiliate. This is where I got started. I looked for a long time and spent a lot of money before I found a place where I got real training and all the help I needed.
You can get started today for FREE! It’s an excellent resource for learning everything you need to know about how to become an affiliate marketer.
Let me know what you think. Feel free to contact me anytime if there are any questions or if I can help with anything.
Thanks for your time,
Verna
Hi Verna
Affiliate marketing is definitely a great way to make money online. What you just said about perseverance and hard work is the absolute truth. It took me 1 year to earn my first commission and it was only $38.
Most people don’t understand why I dedicate so much time for so little money. However, the work I am putting in now is building the traffic that I need to earn bigger in the future. And when I reach a certain level, it will pay me more than my actual minimum wage job. By that time, everyone that is making fun of my choice will want to learn how I did it… lol
All the best
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
You and I seemed to have traveled in the same boat! I wasn’t as fortunate as some others who seemed to get traffic and make their first sale early in the process, but I wasn’t as lucky. Like you have have stuck with it mainly because I know that money can be earned as an affiliate marketer. I put in a lot of hard hours each day, but I never have the desire to give up.
You are right, the time will come where when all the hard work and long hours will pay off and then it will be a time of jubilee!
Hang in there Stefan and remember you are not in it alone.
Let me know how things are doing for you.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you got something from the article. I appreciate you taking a moment to check it out.
Cheers,
Verna