So how much do affiliate marketers make? This is a difficult question to answer. Some affiliates earn nothing and some affiliates earn tens of thousands every month. The top affiliates are millionaires and often have their own affiliate programs. Newer affiliates might make considerably less or nothing at all. While it’s important to know how much affilaites make in order to make a decision whether or not to become one, most affiliates don’t disclose thier income.
How Much Do Affiliate Marketers Make?
The affiliates who do disclose their income usually do so to entice other affiliates to join their program. Even though an affiliate marketer might disclose their monthly earnings, you also need to account for their monthly expenditure. Many spend thousands on their advertising budget in order to continue to make sales month after month.
If you can spend $3 and make $6 by selling affiliate products, it makes sense to ‘scale up’ this budget into the tens of thousands. If this spend to earn relationship holds, spending $20,000 on advertising means you would make $40,000.
To the extent you have managed to find a successful advertising campaign, it’s simply a case of scaling up to generate more sales. Finding an advertising campaign which pays out like this takes time and a certain amount of experimentation. But it’s worth the time and effort if you can find a profitable one. However, scaling up an advertising campaign isn’t the only consideration for affiliate marketers. You also need a good business model in place before you start a paid advertising campaign.
How Much Do Affiliate Marketers Make – Different Strategies
Affiliate marketing is a legitimate online business model which pays affiliates for referring sales of products both on and offline. However. there are various different strategies which they use to generate these sales. Top paid affiliates tend to give more value than low paid affiliates. For example, Martin Lewis created the affiliate website moneysavingexpert.com which provides tonnes of value helping people find discounts and cheaper energy providers, for example.
Leaders in the field of affiliate marketing build a massive following. They can hold one seminar or send out a single email to their subscribers and make over $10,000 in affiliate sales. This doesn’t happen overnight of course and is the result of years of building content and delivering value to their subscribers. You also need to build trust and this is done by consistently offering value to your email subscribers.
Strategies used to build a successful internet business include:
- Building websites,
- Creating content with blogging
- Creating content by video creation
- Giving seminars
- Writing ebooks and giving away/selling
- Building a list of subscribers
- Answering questions of your target audience
- Paid advertising
But how much do affiliate marketers make?
How Much Do Affiliate Marketers Make?
How much do affiliate marketers make? Because of the ease of entry into affiliate marketing, there are many affiliate marketers who don’t stay the course. If you stick at this business for long enough, and don’t give up, you can make a legitimate business out of it. However, you need to learn the best methods and the best business models to use, in order for it to be a success.
How much would it take for you to be interested in affilaite marketing? While it’s certainly true that many affiliates are doing very well and can earn tens of thousands each month it’s also true that many give up and don’t make any money at all. The claim of large earnings from affilaite marketing may very well be true, but remember that these top affiliates might also have failed many times over in order to get where there are today. They might have worked in the industry for many years before they ‘cracked it’.
How Do Affiliates Earn Such High Income?
Top affiliates earn continuously because of the work they have done previously. Many affiliates have been working for years creating content and delivering value. Look at Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert website. It’s now TV advertised but didn’t start out that way. Over the years it has grown and delivered more and more value. Older articles on the site still deliver value and help people find discounts and bargains. While doing so they also get directed through affiiliate links to products.
This gives the website a continuous income from multiple sources. One of the reasons why affiliates can earn so much is because they don’t have to trade time for money. In many jobs you  only get paid when you work. If you stop, you stop getting paid. With affilaite marketing you can use the internet to leverage your time and efforts. You can use content and paid traffic to sell other people’s products over and over through the same website. This can be automated and scaled up.
As affilaites start to see income coming in, they can use this to send more traffic to their offers. Once they have a business model which pays back more than they spend, they can increase their budget to make more sales.
Different Affiliate Business Models
It’s worth mentioning too that not all affiliate products will be as easily scalable as others. If a single product is only worth $40 in profit to an affiliate, this severely limits their advertising budget. They need to spend less than this in order to make a profit. However, if they have a product range in their sales funnel, they can earn much more from a single sale. Even months later one of their initial sales can lead to a larger item being sold. By having a product suite to sell, you can dramatically increase your return on investment from an advertising campaign. This is how many top paid affilaites can afford to spend so much on advertising. They make this money back later on as their members purchase higher valued items later down the sales funnel.
Affiliate products which offer high commissions $500+ can also make paid advertising much more viable. Plus if you choose a product suite with memberships (recurring commissions), you can earn commissions every month from a single sale. This is how many top affilaites can earn such high incomes. They sell these kinds of products using paid advertising to a global audience. If each sale results in monthly commissions, they earn an income from every sale, not just a single commission.
Access a digital business system and learn how to build your own online business here.
See also how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.