How to Earn on Affiliate Marketing
The entry barrier in the affiliate market is low, so newcomers can still do well earning thousands of dollars.
The basic principle of affiliate marketing
Your income depends on how many products and services you sell from other companies through your channels. Every time someone buys from your website, social media profile, or another channel, you receive a commission from the company — and this is your affiliate income.
This means that to earn $10, $100, $1,000, or $10,000 a month on affiliate programs, you need to decide what products or services you’ll sell, which platforms you’ll promote them on, and who your target audience is. These three factors are extremely important in affiliate businesses and affect your overall income. Let’s break them down below.
Choosing your niche
If you are lucky enough to have a media platform, whether it’s a blog, social media presence, or newsletter, you can identify your audience’s needs and suggest what’s best to sell.
Let’s say you have a successful account with 15,000 followers on Instagram. You understand that your audience enjoys traveling. Thus, you can offer flights, recommended hotels, and other tourist attractions to start earning from each booking through affiliate marketing.
If you are starting from scratch, it’s better to pick a niche relevant to your professional skills or one that you are passionate about. Think about the market and whether you can find enough paying customers.
For example, if you run a website with mostly kids in your audience, there’s a good chance advertisers won’t pay enough for this niche. Try to search for alternative options — target to the solvent audience in such niches as tech, travel, luxury goods, or others.
At the same time, be aware of highly competitive niches, such as e-commerce, dating, and health care, especially if you are a newcomer. The market size may seem attractive; however, highly competitive niches for freshmen are the most challenging field of play. Due to the abundance of affiliates, a massive volume of established projects, high rates in contextual advertising, and other difficulties, running an affiliate business in such niches is akin to being a small fish in a big pound.
Most attractive niches with popular demand and a potentially high source of income are highly competitive. Travel, education and software are some markets that are still less competitive, yet can bring substantial income. You can back this with the numbers: the Travel market in the U.S. is estimated at $160 billion; the e-commerce market is $360 billion, where the average revenue in travel is 3.5 times higher than in e-commerce — $350 vs $90.
Learning from others’ experiences will also help you find the best niche and product. Browse topics on the STM Forum or ask for advice from experienced marketers.
Focus on traffic and audience
In affiliate marketing, you only earn when you have traffic since advertisers are paying for transactions. The next thing you need to decide on after you had picked your niche is how you are going to gain an audience on your platform.
If you have a budget, you can buy an existing website or media platform on Flippa.com or a similar resource to give yourself a headstart.
Another option is to launch your own platform:
- Travel blog
- Page on Facebook
- YouTube Channel
- Mobile App
- And others
Now, you can create any kind of platform by yourself without learning to code. However, you will still have to invest your time in learning new tools or hiring a professional developer. Check out platforms such as Fiverr, Toptal, or UpWork for freelancers to get an idea of average pricing.
Earn your first $1,000
Earning $1000 in the first month is possible in some cases:
- Buying an existing affiliate business — In general, a good project is worth 18 months of revenue or more.
- Buying advertising — This can be an effective method of driving traffic, but you have to be careful. There are plenty of examples of people spending money on ads only for a negative return. Be careful when setting up your user acquisition model.
- Luck — Maybe you did something exciting or news-worthy that went viral and users just started landing on your website.
To start earning $1,000 a month steadily in affiliate marketing, you may need at least half a year. The path to it isn’t completely fraught with pitfalls, but it will require you to do the research and work hard, as well as exercise a bit of patience.
- Market analysis — to choose the best niche
- Media platform launch — blog, social media page, or other. It may be several platforms at the same time
- Place the affiliate tools
- Drive the traffic — depending on your strategy, it may take several months, for example, if you focus on organic traffic from search earnings
- Develop media platform — this is a round-the-clock process. For instance, you will have to create content, improve the design, tune the server settings, etc.
Remember, you earn money by placing affiliate tools and links on your website. Your audience has to not only land on your website but be interested in reading it, clicking on the affiliate tools, and buying the advertisers’ services or products. Your revenue will depend on many factors — your niche, partners, quality of traffic and content, and even season (especially when talking about travel).
Delegate content production to freelance copywriters and designers so that you can focus on the growth of your project.
Summary
Earning 1000$ a month on affiliate marketing is possible if keep in mind these factors:
- Pick the right niche — The one which has a large enough paying audience and one that makes you happy (otherwise, it’s hard to create great content and make people read it!)
- Be patient — If you are starting from scratch, it’s hard to gain decent revenue in the first six months. Yet, once you figure out what works best for you, you are going to have a steady income.
- Start as a side gig — Affiliate marketing is one of the rare markets where you can do well without large investments. You can work full-time and still work on your project, only dedicating a few hours a day.
- Keep learning — There are many resources for affiliate marketers. Read blogs such as ours at blog.travelpayouts.com, niche websites in your field, and attend relevant conferences.
