How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Introduction: 

Generally, it takes to about a few months to a year depending on how much effort a new affiliate marketer puts to learn affiliate marketing and apply the skills learned. 

According to Commission Academy 

“Quick Answer: Affiliate marketers typically make their first commissions after 3-6 months and start earning $1,000+ a month consistently at around the 12-18-month mark. How long it will take you depends on your niche, schedule, and work ethic and whether you’re following the right training.”

My First Sales Proof:

As far as I am concerned it took me nearly six months to see the following email from one of my affiliate marketing gurus Jim Daniels. Please find below the email image copy stating that I have made a sale. My first affiliate commission was $80 that I earned in 2008. 

😀

There are two scenarios related to this question as  I experienced during my early days as an affiliate marketer.

First Scenario:

This question stems from the fact that a person who obviously is looking to earn online legitimately reads a post on affiliate marketing that talks about generating tons of passive income and how you can do away easily with a 9 to 5 job. But it takes time due to several factors including free organic traffic, SEO ( Search Engine Optimization), social media presence, and other factors including selecting a profitable niche or not, getting regular leads for email marketing, sales funnels, landing pages so on. 

Second Scenario:

Another scenario is where a person who recently started working on affiliate marketing has a blog or a website with no visitors and no way to monetize the same, who vents out his frustration by asking himself the above question after starting out after looking at the sales report with $0 sales month on month. like most of us experienced the same thing after starting out.

This question is a really valid one, that lies at the bottom of every newcomer’s mind who is interested in making money online using affiliate marketing.

Drive Traffic To Your Blog or Website:

Affiliate marketing is like if I am setting up a shop at the center of a jungle or at the top of a mountain where no human enters or visits but has the best products or services available in the world. No one knows the best products are available in my shop as there are no visitors to my shop. No way I am identifiable in the middle of a jungle But I am expecting someone will come and buy the product.

On the other hand, an intelligent man who sets up his shop at the center of the busiest place in a market but has mediocre products or services will rake in tons. This is because he had placed his shop so strategically there is a lot of footfall in the shop.

I am so dumb that I had set up a shop somewhere in a desolate place where no one visits and hoping to sell some products. But the other person who has better strategies had placed his shop in front of the crowd who is looking to buy products and services.

Affiliate marketing has lots of competition and there are tons of similar products available in the market affiliate marketers are constantly working on driving traffic to their blogs or sites using different strategies. These strategies include free organic traffic, paid traffic, social media traffic, email marketing traffic, traffic using backlinks, etc.

So there is no time limit or time frame to make money online in affiliate marketing. But it really depends upon how you drive targeted traffic to your site or blog using various strategies is worth learning. There are two different ways to bring web traffic to your site or blog. They are

Free Organic Traffic:

Driving free organic traffic requires time, effort, SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) techniques, a user-friendly site or blog, great content, more backlinks, etc. to top the ranking on search engine result pages. You can also promote your affiliate products or services using social media marketing. So this method takes time to bring the results you expect. Once your blog or website ranks higher on SERPs then you get a lot of free traffic to your site and you have to tweak or update your blog or site to improve your ranking or stay there against a lot of competition. 

As you know there are different strategies to drive traffic to your blog or site. You can visit this page to learn more. 

Affiliate Products - How To Choose And Promote Affiliate Products Links

Paid Traffic:

If you have an ad budget then you can straightaway drive targeted traffic to your site or blog using paid advertising platforms like Google Ads, Bing ads, Facebook Ads, or other smaller ad platforms like Bidvertiser or Studads as they charge as low as $0.01 per click for unique visitors to your site. If you run out of funds then your traffic stops instantly.

I know few affiliate marketers earn thousands of dollars within 24 hours by setting up successful ad campaigns to reach the target audience and most of the other affiliate marketers earn a few hundred dollars in a week or month. Some affiliate marketers lose their hard-earned money in paid advertising without understanding the basic concept of setting up ad campaigns and ad sets.

Social Media Traffic:

If you are an influencer or you have a lot of followers on social media platforms you can drive more traffic to your profile or business page or group to promote products.

Email Marketing Traffic:

You have to collect leads using attractive landing pages or sales funnels to drive traffic to your products or services by sending email campaigns to your contact list. 

Build Backlinks To Get More Traffic:

Building backlinks to your site or blog can get more traffic to your site. Creating backlinks strategies include guest blogging, writing testimonials, build internal links. To know more on this please read this article

Free Traffic strategies to drive traffic to your blog or website, especially for beginners.

Conclusion:

Affiliate marketing is a growing market and billions of dollars are paid every year as affiliate commissions to affiliates all over the world. Most companies and brands are offering affiliate programs and many affiliate marketers are earning thousands of dollars every month. Earning is not uniform as it varies from niche to niche and from person to person who promotes it. Some marketers earn tons of money and others earn hundreds or a few thousands of dollars. Some people earn nothing as they have not put enough effort, time, and energy to drive traffic to their site or may adopt the wrong strategies.