What Is An Affiliate Income?
An affiliate income is an income generated by a sales commission or profit sharing from an affiliate's product or service. You might work for an employer and earn a salary, but you might also have other sources of income such as rent, dividends, and investments.
For some people out there, their main source of income is through their affiliate profits. And it's not just your average blogger with a lot of traffic who can make money from affiliates - there are plenty of online companies who will pay you to promote their products!
Basically the idea behind it is that they'll give you a percentage (the amount varies) if someone buys something after clicking on your link.
That is an affiliate income.
I've seen a lot of people who made it their business to find out how to generate affiliate income, so they would be able to quit their day jobs and do what they love - blog full-time! (which is pretty awesome in my opinion...). Talking about making money online through blogs this case is not uncommon, especially when they've got some sales potential. So let's talk more about Affiliate Income.
What is Affiliate Income?
The main difference between an affiliate income and a salary is that an affiliate income is generated from external sources of revenue. It's akin to someone who creates their own product and then sell it on their site. They are able to keep the profit for themselves because they did all the work themselves.
In other words, if you are one of those folks who have a product or service that you want to promote, Affiliate Income is a channel that you can use to create an income stream. Basically you find a company who is willing to give you a commission if someone buys something from them after being directed from your site.
Affiliate income is not limited to online products and services, by the way. If you have a product that can be sold offline, you can create an online sales channel for it! Did I just blow your mind?
Another way that Affiliate Income is different from your typical salary is that it is more self-sustaining. It doesn't rely on a single source of revenue like an employer's business or funding source. It's basically a stream of revenue that one has total control over. You can basically do whatever you want with it - earn money, invest it, donate it to charity, or pay for specific goals.
Now before we go any further and discuss how to earn affiliate income there are a couple of things you need to take into consideration. First of all, how much will you earn? I'll give you some estimates based on data from Google Adsense as well as other stats that I've collected over the years.
As an affiliate income creator – Depending on your product or service (e.g., a blog, web app) – you could make anywhere between $10 - $500 per month each.
When you're first starting out, you might be able to generate an affiliate income at a higher rate than this. It's all about finding a product or service that has a high conversion rate so that your percentage is high. As more people visit your site, your average position in the search page should start to drop off as it becomes harder for people to find what they need. This will lead to the average monthly pay per click (PPC) rate dropping as well.
How Much Does it Cost You?
To get started with affiliate income, you'll need a couple of things on hand. If you don't have any software yet, we'll go through some options for choosing one. First off, you'll need a website.
As an affiliate income creator – If you are going to be creating an affiliate income out of your own brand site (e.g., a blog), it can cost anywhere from $10 to $100 to set up the site depending on the customizations you want to work into it. If you already have a website that's not related to your product or service, there is no cost for this part.
As a content creator –You probably already have something in place as far as hosting or domains are concerned. If you don't, it will cost about $7/mo for a domain and about $3-$5/month for hosting depending on what you choose.
As an affiliate income creator – You'll also need an affiliate management software for your site. Adsense will give you a portion (or all depending on the option you choose) of the amount that you earn from Adsense ads, so it's important that you keep track of what ads are running and the amount of money that is being earned in which. Here are some different options to choose from.
Paid Membership Sites – The first choice would be to build your own affiliate tracking software as well as other components needed for your online business. This means that you can put it up on your own domain name. If you have a built-in audience, this could be the way to go. However, it can be time consuming and costly to build each application on your own.
SEO Affiliate Programs – There are many affiliate programs that can give you a portion of what you earn out of paid search traffic. Some of these programs have very strict guidelines and requirements to fulfill before they consider approving your website for their program. You also need to make sure that the program allows you to earn the maximum amount from their traffic sources.
Third Party Affiliate Programs – These affiliate programs are set up by companies in order for them to generate revenue from online sales made by affiliates [example: Clickbank]. It's not as strict as the first option, but there are still restrictions to adhere to. You also need to make sure that you're getting the maximum amount of revenue out of their traffic sources (e.g., click through rate, conversion rate).
Programs for Affiliate Income Generators – There are affiliate programs created specifically for affiliate income creators (not content creators). These types of programs have more flexible requirements, but you won't generate as much money from them as you would from the ones listed above. However, it's still an option to consider if you're just starting out. I personally started with this one [Link: Aweber].
Finally, you'll also need a domain name, hosting plan, and a few other things like an SSL certificate. Let's go through these now:
Domain Name – The easiest way to get a "real" domain name that's not related to anything else is to get it from GoDaddy (an online Registrar) It costs about 6 bucks/yr for the first domain and even less for additional domains after the first one. GoDaddy will let you use it on multiple websites plus you get access to their technical support team as well as their WhoIs database.
Conclusion: If you're looking for a way to create an affiliate income at home or online, you'll need to be able to host it on your own domain name. In order to get a domain name, I recommend going through Namecheap – they are experts at making it all happen for you.
Hosting – You can choose between shared hosting and VPS hosting. You can find more details about these in my in-depth tutorial on WordPress Hosting . This is just one option that I've used and am happy with.
Conclusion: If you're going to be creating an affiliate income out of your own brand site (e.g.