Most people tend to worry about how much money they need initially to start with affiliate marketing. The good news is that you don’t really need a bag of cash to step inside this lucrative business and become successful.
In this post, I break down all of the potential expenses of starting an affiliate marketing business so that you have a clear concept of just how much money you should set aside.
Right off the bat, I can tell you that the main costs of your affiliate marketing startup can range from $0 to $500, depending upon the type of traffic and online tools you use to get your affiliate links in front of your target audience.
To get a much better concept of how much it might cost to start as an affiliate online marketer, I am going to walk you through all the expenses associated with your new online venture.
How Much Money Do You Need To Become an Affiliate Marketer?
There is no set amount of money you need to start with affiliate marketing. The average expense at the beginning is about $500 a month if you choose to not purchase traffic.
For instance, you have to invest in some essential tools.
The expense of tools ranges from free to very expensive. And the more advanced you end up being, the more cash you’ll need for additional tools, which will help you earn more money.
The most significant cost though is traffic, but just how much you will invest in it totally depends upon your budget plan. You can even choose to go with free traffic as well.
Furthermore, the spending plan that you’ll need depends on the offer or affiliate marketing program that you select.
As a newbie, you should stay away from high payout offers, which might appear tempting due to their earning possibilities. However, they are, in reality, extremely hard to optimize for success.
The high payment requires experience and big budgets so do leave them for later.
If you choose to invest in traffic, the optimal daily budget for testing the offer is $100, with the advised testing period length being 3-5 days. That sort of marketing spending plan ought to work for most low-payout deals.
Remember that investing $100 in traffic and then quitting because you lost the majority of it is a surefire method to miss out on a wonderful business opportunity. So don’t be afraid to test some more if you believe in your offer.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to squander your money on paid traffic, you can start a blog or a YouTube channel and concentrate on producing free traffic. This way, you will keep your expenditures at a minimum.
However, in this case, you will have to work for traffic and wait for results for about 3-6 months.
But when you have actually put in enough time and effort in the testing stage, you’ll discover that results do appear, and you’ll gradually work your method to approximately bigger profits!
So when you put all these expenses together, the average spend to start an affiliate marketing business is about $500.
Now, let’s break them down, even more, to see what exactly you need to purchase…
Essential Expenses
While it is possible to become an affiliate at essentially no cost, if you want to succeed in the industry and make some cash, you must be prepared to invest some money first.
Think of it as a required business investment. After all, you can’t open a coffee shop without investing in the espresso machine, coffee beans, grinders, etc… Same goes for affiliate marketing.
Here are the costs you’ll be looking at if you desire to establish your own service.
Web Hosting
You can do affiliate marketing without a website, for sure. But if you are serious about beginning a career in this business you must buy your own site and web hosting.
There are many options in this classification and their cost range from very inexpensive to obscenely pricey.
But fundamental hosting can be purchased for as low as $6-7 monthly. Take a look at Kinsta for the best hosting quality and costs available on the marketplace today.
Domain Name
Before you can really develop your website, you will require a domain. A domain is the name of your website. You can register a domain with Namecheap for just $4 per year.
Make sure to select something brandable, related to your niche, and something that individuals will remember quickly. Also, keep it short, and simple.
Landing Page Builder
There are lots of landing page sites and tools. Their features vary from extremely basic to highly advanced. Many of them let you develop your lander from pre-existing elements which makes them available even to newbie affiliates.
And because they are so easy to use, and let you start fast without any effort, affiliate marketing is booming as we speak.
Their prices range from up to $25 per month for the most standard strategies to $600 for the most advanced plans.
The more costly plans usually have the most advanced functions and limitless hosting, landing pages, and customized domains.
This makes them most appealing to companies and super-affiliates, rather than to prospective affiliates who are only starting.
Traffic
To run your online campaigns and make money, affiliate marketers must buy traffic. The rate you pay and the platform you utilize will help define the quality of the traffic.
Generally, $300 is enough to run a couple of tests and make some profit.
Done sensibly, paid advertising can offer you a terrific return on your investment. You set the amount you want to pay for each click your ad receives. And each time a click turns into a customer, you earn a commission.
However, you’ll likewise be contending with other advertisers who are bidding on your keywords too. So it can be all too easy to get carried away and invest beyond your means.
So do NOT attempt PPC unless you understand what you are doing initially, otherwise, you’ll be tossing cash down the drain.
Link Tracking Tools
Tracking software is the most essential of the extra tools, but it is also something you can live without for some time. You can start affiliate marketing without a tracker … but you certainly can not enhance your campaigns without it.
So eventually, you will have to invest in one. They usually start at $29 monthly.
Affiliate tracking software allows you to access granular data regarding your projects. It is useful because it’s difficult to scale your campaigns and optimize them properly without that data.
Trackers offer the widest range of plans appropriate for different sorts of stages of your business. There are complimentary plans offered and they are certainly sufficient for newbie affiliates.
Nevertheless, the totally free plans tend to have constraints that become too limiting once you start scaling or broadening. The more advanced the tracking strategy, the more pricey it ends up being.
Competition and Keyword Research Tools
Efficient keyword research is important. You’ll need this for your SEO (and pay-per-click) efforts.
There are free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner. But premium tools are well worth the money you need to pay for them.
You can start with SEMRush, from $69.95 per month. It serves you basic as well as granular data.
These tools can assist you to determine high-performing rivals, so you know what kind of ad you’ll require to develop. You can utilize a spy tool to take or copy what your competitors use as well.
However, this is not the best concept. You must use it to check out what works and draw motivation. Don’t copy!
Optional Expenses
The tools above are more or less a must! You can’t make money in this business if you don’t invest some money first. But there are some things that you can avoid too.
Here are some optional things that you could invest in eventually.
Outsourcing
You can’t anticipate understanding everything about affiliate marketing, and realistically, you can’t expect to do everything you have to do yourself.
So rather than trying to do all of it, at some point, you might desire to get some assistance by outsourcing some work.
Enter the freelancer. You can pay someone who has better affiliate marketing skills and understands what you are missing out on. This could be anything from enhancing your website design to producing content for it.
Check out Fiverr for freelancers specialising in abilities that you don’t have yet. Expect to pay at least $15 per hour/job to far more, depending on the individual freelancer and their experience.
Training
Investing in training isn’t strictly necessary to start as an affiliate marketer. You can learn most of it for free by watching YouTube videos or reading blog posts.
On the other hand, appropriate guidance can reduce your learning curve, lower experimentation, conserve you a lot of aggravation and dissatisfaction, accelerate your progress, and considerably increase your opportunities for success.
Nowadays, getting premium affiliate marketing education can cost anywhere from $50 per month to $997 each year.
Tips For Keeping Your Affiliate Expenses Low
If you really want to start with Affiliate Marketing in a great way and really want to earn money from it in the future for a long period of time, then you need to be ready to invest.
However, you don’t need to spend all your savings on it. Here are some suggestions on how to keep your affiliate marketing expenses as low as possible:
Don’t Spend Money On Tool If You Don’t Need It
Most people will take any recommendation to buy this tool or that tool because they are under the impression that they need it. You don’t have to spend money on every single tool to start with affiliate marketing.
For example, you do need a website, but you don’t really need a keyword research tool right away. There are good ways to find keywords using free tools like Google Keyword Planner or Keyword Surfer.
So my recommendation is to invest only in essentials like website and domain, maybe even traffic. You can ignore the rest until you start earning from your campaigns.
Go With Free Traffic Over Paid Traffic
I always recommend newbies start a blog or a YouTube channel first. Those are the two best ways to generate free traffic to your affiliate links. This means that you don’t have to pay for traffic right away.
The downside of free traffic is that you will have to work for it and wait for a few months for results to kick in. But ultimately, it is worth it because it is a low-cost option that basically gets the same if not even better results than paid traffic.
If you are an inexperienced affiliate, and you start running PPC campaigns on Google, or even Facebook, you are more likely to spend $500 only to earn $100 back, which is not a good ROI.
Choose Hosting Wisely
Lots of hosting companies will try to convince you to take a recommended package and forget about the cheapest one. But if you are just getting started, go with the cheapest one on offer.
You only need one website at the beginning, so a cheap package where you get one website and a few thousand views per month will be more than enough to start on the right foot.
So, Is Affiliate Marketing Expensive?
Not really. It’s quite a cost-effective way to start an online business. It’s a versatile and amazing method to earn money and be your own boss.
Whether you are a student or a senior citizen, it frequently starts as a side hustle, but it could quickly become your main income and a full-time work-from-home.
But unlike some ways to make money online like survey sites, this business needs your own financial investment. After all, it is not a job or a task.
It’s a full-fledged business. And it is a hard business as well.
Therefore, when starting this business you have to invest both money and effort in finding out and testing the offered resources … but just how much money do you need to start with affiliate marketing?
Once again, I would state that you will require anywhere between $300 and $800 to begin. A $500 would be ideal.
Remember, keep your expenses low at the start and concentrate on earning money, not spending it. And if you have an interest in an affordable training program that doesn’t need a huge budget, keep reading this post.
How I Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
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If you need any help or you have a question, feel free to contact me.
And feel free to share this article with your friends and family!
All the best, Ivan. Founder, and CEO @freeaffiliatemarketingbusiness.com