In short, yes, you can make three digits a day online with affiliate marketing. There is nothing to stop you earning enough online to support yourself with a high standard of living, with enough left over to save each month.
However, it is a little more complicated than that. Like any way of making money online, it takes time, and energy to earn good money from affiliate marketing. To earn money online you need a plan, the right know-how, and bucket-loads of patience.
How Does It Work?
At its core, affiliate marketing is where businesses pay you to promote their products or services. There are no upfront costs, anyone can become an affiliate marketer, it doesn’t require an inventory, and you have no involvement in customer service or the running of the business.
You just need a platform which generates traffic from which you can market products to potential consumers. For every purchase your viewers make, you receive a commission. This means you have the potential to earn 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can even earn money on old content from years ago. As long as you have traffic, you have the potential to make money.
Types of Affiliate Programs
You don’t always have to sell products to earn money with affiliate marketing. The pay-per-sale is the most common program, but there are also pay-per-click programs and pay-per-lead programs.
Pay-per-click programs reward you for the volume of traffic you bring to the seller’s website. Pay-per-lead programs pay you every time one of your viewers provides their contact information by filling out a form on the seller’s page.
How to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer
Firstly, focus on your platform. Before you even consider becoming an affiliate marketer, you need to ensure you have a strong following and are generating content that attracts viewers. Monetarizing a blog takes time and patience, and you need a strong foundation before you try to dive into affiliate marketing.
Jeff Proctor, owner of BreakingTheOnePercent.com and affiliate marketer, now earns around $7,000 per month. He recommends waiting until you have 10,000 monthly page views before you try to monetarize your audience.
Do Your Research
Once you have the following, research affiliate marketing programs. Find programs that align with your niche, find out how you are paid, and when, and work out how their affiliate ad will work on your page. Some affiliate ads are images, some are in-content affiliate links, decide what you think aligns well with your page. You may want to try out a number of different affiliate programs to decide what works for you, but the golden rule for affiliate marketing is that you should always choose high paying affiliate marketing programs that are in-line with your niche.
When you’ve found some affiliate programs that work with your blog, and you are up and running, make sure you monitor their success. You want to keep driving your traffic upwards. Having too many affiliate ads can dilute the integrity of the site and put people off. The key is finding the perfect balance of enough ads to generate substantial income, without reducing traffic.
Getting this balance involves monitoring your affiliate programs, and carefully monitoring your traffic. If the traffic begins to suffer, you need to modify your approach quickly, before you drive too many readers away.
Earning money through affiliate marketing is often seen as a passive enterprise. You publish the content, then wait for the purchases and the cash to start flowing your way. However, at its highest level, it is anything but passive. The very best marketers are constant monitoring, evaluating, tweaking, and exploring new ways to add revenue.
As with anything, the amount of money you make depends on your time and effort. If you are willing to invest both, there is no ceiling when it comes to how much you can make from affiliate marketing.
