How much does it cost to start affiliate marketing? The beauty of affiliate marketing is that it’s a super low cost business which can be started from anywhere globally. All you really need is a laptop and internet connection. You can join a number of affiliate programs absolutely free and promote through content marketing on a number of free platforms. Hubpages.com was where I started doing affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s and I made my first sale from a product review.
I had spent nothing on advertising at this point. However, there are a few downsides to trying to make money with affiliate marketing completely for free.
How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing?
There’s a lot of directions you can take with affiliate marketing and without a “roadmap” it’s easy to get lost en-route. For that reason I would say the best investment you can make is in your education, which you should consider as ongoing. Join a course and get some information and support. Cost of courses ranges and there’s many trainings which will teach you something of affiliate marketing. You can join this one for $37.
A course can give you some ideas about products and marketing strategies you might want to use. But unless you implement some kind of marketing strategy, you won’t move forwards. One of the best pieces of software you can invest in is an email autoresponder. You can access one for free here. This gives you free access to up to 500 subscribers and after that you will need to pay a monthly fee. This begins at $14.99 a month (at the time of writing).
500 subscribers is enough to get you started though and this is free! Affiliates use email autoresponders to send out automated messages to a growing list of their subscribers. It’s one of the best investments you can make because it puts you in greater control over your traffic. Traffic is one of the main hurdles which affiliate marketers face. Without any traffic (or visitors) to your affiliate products/website, you won’t make any sales. There’s several ways to obtain traffic and the cost of them varies.
How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing – Getting Traffic To Your Products/Website
To get traffic to your affiliate offers you can do several different things:
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Paid advertising
- Video blogging
- Social media marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Niche websites
- etc.
Paid marketing is going to cost you more but you can still use it at a daily budget decided by you. Spend more and get more traffic. You can also build traffic through creating content (such as this blog post).
Content creation can give you free traffic but it takes a lot longer to generate and you can’t easily control that traffic. With paid marketing you can easily scale up by increasing your budget. But creating content takes time and effort and it’s a slow process building traffic for free.
Whichever strategy you decide on it’s worth building an email list because traffic either costs you time or money, or both. By building an email list of subscribers, you can communicate with and sell products to your list over a longer timespan than is possible from a website.
How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing – Buying A Domain Name/Hosting
The next best piece of advice I can give you is to buy a domain name which you own and host it with a hosting service. You can upload videos for free to YouTube, and write content on Hubpages.com and other free blog sites to get traffic to your affiliate links. But ultimately you don’t own the platforms and if they decided your content breached their terms they can cancel you anytime. Plus, free blog sites don’t rank very well on the search engines and you can struggle getting people to see your content.
With your own domain name and hosting, you have a digital piece of property which you own. This also gives you more authority than when using a free website or blog platform. Google is more likely to rank your content and it can be easier to get organic traffic if you’re going to become a content creator.
Some affiliate programs too don’t like you pointing directly to affiliate products. So having your own digital “real estate” puts you in a better position with many affiliate programs you might like to choose from.
A domain name costs around $12.00 a year and a hosting can be bought from as little as a $3.75 a month. Checkout this link for deals. I buy my domain names from namecheap.com.
Summary
So how much does it cost to start affiliate marketing? You can “start” affiliate marketing for nothing. Join an affiliate program and learn how to promote your affiliate link. However, many programs want you to at least own your own website and you’ll need to learn a promotion method. So your best affiliate marketing “toolkit” comprises of at least these purchases if you’re taking it seriously:
- Training and education course – here’s one at $37
- Buy your own domain name and hosting – $12 a year (domain) ($3.75 a month hosting)
- Get an email autoresponder – (free up to 500 subscribers here, then $14.99 a month)
If you’re going to create content that offers the cheapest way to drive traffic. But if you want to build faster, you’re going to need to spend some marketing budget getting people to your offers. You can start with a daily budget which suits your needs, but the more you pay the more traffic you can obtain. (Start small and build up as you grow in confidence and get better at marketing).
As businesses go, affiliate marketing is definitely one of the most affordable. However, you get paid only when you sell something and it’s a performance based business model. Remember that a lot of affiliates quit when they don’t have the success they expect straight away. Success belongs to those who stick with it and keep going when everyone else quits!
To join a community of online business owners and get help and support, visit affiliate marketing mentors online and sign up for the free video series to learn more.
You can also find a number of affiliate marketing coaches here.
