How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

This post may contain affiliate links where I may make a commission on purchases made through those links. For full details please see disclosure page.

There are many ways to make money with Affiliate Marketing. Blogs and YouTube are two of the most popular ways. The most important thing – if you are wanting to make an income as opposed to a little cash here and there – is having a large audience who trust what you say.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing sounds complicated but the concept is actually very simple.

Affiliate Marketing is when you promote someone else’s product, and when someone buys that product through your unique link, you earn a commission. Simples. Maybe not as easy as it sounds, but the process is that simple.

Why would brands pay you to promote their products you may be asking. Well if you think how much they make on advertising or any other highly expensive way of promoting their products, paying someone a commission on a product that has been sold, actually makes a lot of sense. This is why so many companies do offer an affiliate program now.

Being able to make money with Affiliate Marketing is one of the most magical aspects of online business. Doesn’t matter the niche, your platform, audience size or how you promote it, if you have a way to reach people who trust you, you can make money.

Quick side note but please please please only ever promote products/services you actually use/have used and love/found useful. If you try and promote something because “everyone else is” or because they have a good commission rate, people will absolutely see through this and you will lose their trust – the one key thing you need to have for this to work!

What Sorts of Products Can You Promote?

Anything! Everything! Whatever your heart desires!

While that is true, some products will work a lot better than others for you, depending on how big your audience is, how well they know and trust you, what your content is about and your overall niche.

For example, if you have a blog about tropical fish and you’re trying to promote binoculars – no matter how much you love them – it will be hard going. On the other hand if your blog was about garden birds and you happen to have a pair of binoculars you absolutely love and they are from Amazon or a website that offers an affiliate program – bingo!

Nearly all companies have an affiliate program now, no matter the type of product. If you want to make money with Affiliate Marketing, there will be products and programs out there for you.

Examples of the types of products you could promote:

Physical products
E-Books
Online Courses
Services (online or in person service like tutoring)
Subscription websites
The list goes on…

The important thing is to find things you use/love, that are relevant and useful to your readers!

Do You Need a Blog or YouTube channel?

Not necessarily! What you do need is an audience of some form. Blogs (especially if you have an email list that you send newsletters and emails to on a regular basis), and YouTube are probably the most popular ways to grow an audience, but you don’t NEED to have either of these if you don’t want to.

It will be a lot tricker without at least one of these methods though! Not impossible, but a lot trickier.

Other ways you could have an audience could be on a Social Media platform (eg Facebook or Instagram), but from experience these take a lot longer, for a much smaller payoff. At least to begin with.

If you do choose to go down the blog/website route, the better social medias to use would be the likes of Pinterest and Tik Tok!

The reason Pinterest and Tik Tok are better than the likes of Facebook or Instagram (for most – there are always exceptions), is that the first two – while technically social media – are actually search engines.

How often do you click on someone’s blog or website while scrolling through Instagram? Most likely not very often…

Now think of Pinterest, you go onto Pinterest to search for things and (unless just pinning pictures or quotes), often do end up on the originating blog or website – this is what we want!

How to Make Money Through Your Email List

This is a concept that used to terrify and confuse me, but it’s really not as terrifying as it can sound!

I won’t go into landing pages and funnels in this post, but more just explain how your email list can work so well in terms of affiliate marketing.

Back to Basics – what is an email list?

You build your email list by having something to offer your readers for free, be it a printable, worksheet, video or any other information you feel is of value to your readers. When they see there is something of value being offered for free, on a topic that is of interest to them, they are likely to pop their email address in to get that freebie, but you then have their email address added to your email list. They get their freebie, you get their email – win win!

The wonderful thing about an email list is that you own it. You may have a large Instagram following but if Instagram disappeared, all those followers are gone. The email list is something you own yourself so will always have.

Email is such a good way to keep in touch with your readers. Not only have they trusted you enough to give you their email, but by doing so (to get that amazing freebie you created), you already know that they are interested in the kinds of things you have to say and the information you have to offer.

This makes your email readers your target audience. Not in the sense that you will push sales onto them of course, but if you think about the types of products your readers will be interested in if they already enjoy and are interested in the content you are producing… they may very well benefit from the amazing products you have found and are using!

You recommend products you already love, to people who you know are interested in the sorts of products you’re talking about. If they choose to buy them through your link, you get paid – Affiliate Marketing.

How Big of an Audience do you Need to Make Money?

This is a tricky question to answer.

How long is a piece of string?

You may have a smaller following but with readers more likely to buy the sorts of products you are promoting – this is more likely in a slightly more obscure or less common niche.

You may have 1000 people in your email list (for example), and find that an average of 10% clicks your links = 100 people.

On the flip side you may have 10,000 people in your list but only 1% click through – again, 100 people.

This is exactly the same amount of people clicking but with a following ten times smaller!

Obviously the larger the following you have the more likely people will click on those links and buy the things you are promoting.

If we take those same numbers in the above example but keep the percentage the same this time, say 2% click through on average.

2% of 1000 is 20 people.

2% of 10,000 is 200 people.

Suddenly now there’s a much larger amount of people clicking through those links to make purchases.

As a general rule for audience size, the larger the better, BUT it also comes down to quality over quantity, in the sense that 100 people who truly love the things you are talking about is so much better than 10,000 people that have just given you their email address/followed you just for the numbers.

This is often why you will find that you sometimes get emails through from people checking who is reading the emails. Professional bloggers will often remove email addresses of people who don’t read/open their emails, as this then narrows their list down to the people who are truly interested and keen to stay following that blog/person.

How Much Money Can You Make from Affiliate Marketing?

Another piece of string question!

To keep it real, the answer here is literally… as much as you want.

The sky’s the limit!

Honestly, when it comes to wanting to make money with affiliate marketing, you should put no limits on yourself or your earning potential. At all!

Each affiliate program is different, some offer as low as 1% commission, some offer up to 80% and all the ranges in between.

Some offer one off affiliate payments, others offer it on a monthly basis if your readers sign up to a subscription service and each month they stay subscribed, you get a commission.

Bear in mind that some affiliate marketing programs require you to have a certain amount of followers/page views a month to be considered – others (like Amazon), let you sign up straight away! If you have your eye on one that you need a certain number of monthly pageviews for, use this as a goal to work towards and you’ll be signing up with them in no time.

You aren’t limited to just one (or 3 or 10) affiliate marketing companies/programs. You can sign up for as many as you want. If there is another product you find you are loving and using a lot, why not share it too?

Never put all your eggs in one basket, if you want to really make money with Affiliate Marketing, definitely have a few different channels of income in terms of different programs.

Of course don’t go overboard with the promotion of products, and mix it up with recommendations of things you aren’t an affiliate of, but in the grand scheme of things, you can promote anything you like.

Whether you choose to promote 99p notebooks, £400 cameras or £3000 online courses – there is a commission to be made. You choose what’s right for you and your readers and what you’re comfortable with, and you can always work up as you go on!

Other Ways To Make Money Online Through Your Blog.

Affiliate Marketing is without a doubt one of the best ways to make money from your blog (or whichever platform you choose).

There are other ways to make money online though if you are looking for more income streams, don’t feel affiliate marketing is quite right for you or just to see some other options of avenues you can go down to make money.

If you would like to have a look into some other ways, have a read of this post here:

7 Ways to Make Money From Your Blog

Affiliate Marketing is single handedly one of the best ways to make an income online – use it to your advantage and everyone wins!

*Important note* – you must ALWAYS discolse when links are affiliate links. Each country is different so please do your own research and find out how is best to do this, but often you need a note on each post there is affiliate links in, advising of this.

Speak soon!