How Much Do Affiliate Marketers Make Online [Secrets Revealed]

Affiliate marketers can make anywhere from 1%, to potentially even 30% of the price of a product or SaaS subscription, depending upon the product of course and type of traffic...

But affiliate marketing, and understanding how much affiliate marketers make isn't as simple as calculating the percentage as a commission and then assuming they make thousands per day...

It doesn't work like that, so in this article, I'm going to reveal to you the truth behind how much affiliate marketers make, and predict how much you could make as well.

Let's dive right in.

What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?

If you've ever been recommended a product by someone, maybe a friend has introduced you to a new clothing brand, or type of shoe, and you've loved it so much that you've gone and purchased the same item...

Then you've just been exposed to affiliate marketing...

How?

You see, affiliate marketing is about introducing people to products and services that they might not have otherwise considered buying themselves, or at least, buying for some time.

If we're talking about affiliate marketing online, then if we take the same scenario where your friend or someone you know has introduced you to that type of clothing, then if you purchase it through their recommendation, they can earn a percentage from the cost of the product or service.

This is what's called a commission, and it goes back to what I initially said where you could earn as little as 1%, or even, up-to 30% with some products and/or services.

How Much Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?

The big question, the elephant in the room, is just exactly how much you can make from being an affiliate online and marketing products right?

Ask yourself this...

How much website traffic do I have?

If the answer is next to zero users per day, or barely any users per month, then the chances of you making anything fall quite low...

Unless of course you've got highly targeted website traffic coming onto your website, and this is also assuming that you're providing great, original content.

What do affiliate marketers make [Examples]

• The well known affiliate marketer, Pat Flynn over at the Smart Passive Income website grew his affiliate business from $8,000 a month to $100,000 per month
• Doug Cunnington made over $70k back in 2017 from one niche website
• Online Media Masters went from as little as $20k to over $150k within two years

These are big numbers, it's inspirational to see how these marketers can scale their businesses from (what seems like pennies) to the numbers where they're at now.

And that's what you need to consider when figuring out how much they make...

They're businesses.

I'm not suggesting that you go and quit your job and dive straight in, this isn't a one month or two month game, it's many months, if not a year or two of hard work.

How do you get paid?

To get paid that commission I was talking about, you're going to need to partner with some kind of affiliate network, and there's many to choose from.

Affiliate networks are responsible for giving you a platform where you can obtain marketing resources to promote, and there's primarily two types of marketing resources you could promote and add to your site:

1. Links - the most common, you could add affiliate links into your text or onto buttons
2. Banners - did you know that images can boost your website's conversion rate? So this might be an option to put some clickable affiliate banners on your site.

If you're starting out in affiliate marketing, then I'd recommend using the Amazon affiliates program, but make sure you follow all of their rules.

Some affiliate programs, like Amazon's will automatically turn off your affiliate account within a period of time if you make no sales, so again, ensuring you've got some website traffic first is essential.

How Much Traffic Do You Need?

All of the big affiliate marketers have spent some time growing their websites, obtaining website traffic and have enough to promote products.

But just how much do you need?

If you've got at least 10,000 page views per month then you're in a good, strong position to start earning some commission online.

Sure, you could start with less traffic, and you might get the odd sale or two, but this is a starting point.

And that's really it, it's a starting point, because other websites and blogs will suggest that you need more than this, others will suggest less.

The answer really comes down to, it depends.

How to drive more organic search traffic to your website with SEO

If you've just launched your website, or have a website that's been around for some time with hardly any traffic and want to boost it, then your website could do with some SEO optimisation.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a way of optimising your website to organically increase website traffic, it's completely free.

There's many different types of SEO, but to summarize, you're going to need to implement all of them in order to maximise your impact.

You won't see results overnight either...

I'm sorry to tell you that, but it's a long term game plan not a short term plan, and will take months to implement.

How?

By creating content, you see, affiliate marketing only really works when you've got the trust of your audience, of your website visitors, and building trust requires you to create valuable content for them.

You need to keep giving and giving more before trust is given to you, and it might take weeks or months before you start seeing results, only then, will people click on the affiliate links that you've got in your content.

Start A Blog On Your Website

One of the easiest ways of getting started with affiliate marketing, is to start a blog.

You might already have a website, in which case get yourself a blog set up, or, if you don't have any website, start one today.

The easiest way to start a blog is to use WordPress, and there's two types:

• WordPress.org
• WordPress.com

They both look familiar, but the difference is that the (dot) org version is hosted by you, and the (dot) com is hosted by WordPress themselves, which is not what you want.

You want to host the blog yourself, and even if you've got no experience with getting a blog set up, maybe you're not a very technical person, maybe you don't understand computers that well...

Here's an article that covers everything you need for starting a WordPress blog, and it's incredibly detailed and in depth!

How many articles should my blog have?

The issue with answering this, and telling you how many blog articles you need for your website...

There's no one complete answer that works for every site, it'll depend a lot on the niche you're in, and how far you're planning on diving into affiliate marketing.

As a general rule of thumb though, try to aim for around 55 - 70 blog posts, and this content should be high quality and adhere to a consistent publishing schedule.

Final thoughts

Whether you're new to affiliate marketing, or have some experience, there's no denying the fact that affiliate marketers have spent a lot of time working on their websites, producing content and growing their businesses to make money online.

Money doesn't just grow on trees, and it certainly doesn't fall into your pockets without putting the effort in!