You have built the first version of your hiking site.
If you’re joining us here, the hiking site is the example business we started in the previous article. You don’t need to read it first to follow along.
There are a few articles on it. You understand how affiliate links work. You have even found a couple of products you would feel comfortable recommending.
Then you look at the traffic.
Not much.
You check your affiliate dashboard.
Still not much.
And a perfectly reasonable question starts working its way into your head:
Is this actually worth doing?
I think this question tends to show up at exactly the wrong time.
We compare the first few weeks of work with the income we hoped to be making six months from now. The two don’t look anything alike, so we start wondering whether the whole thing was a bad idea.
It is a little like planting a garden on Saturday and digging it up on Tuesday because nothing has grown.
The question isn’t really whether affiliate marketing can make money.
It can.
The better question is:
Is the work, waiting and learning it takes to get there worth it for you?
The First Thing You Spend Is Time
You can start affiliate marketing without spending a lot of money upfront.
That doesn’t mean you get to start for free.
If you’re building with content instead of buying traffic, the thing you spend first is usually time.
You need to choose a useful niche. Figure out what people are looking for. Create something worth finding. Find products that make sense. Join affiliate programs. Add links. Learn how people are going to find your site in the first place.
Then, just about the time you have figured all of that out, you get to do it again.
Your first useful article may take most of an afternoon.
Later, something similar might take two hours. You already know how to research it. You know how you want to organize it. You aren’t staring at the screen wondering what you’re supposed to do next.
At the beginning, a lot of your time goes into figuring out how everything works. Once you know the process, many of those same jobs get faster.
There is another route.
Some affiliate marketers pay for ads and send people through landing pages or funnels to affiliate offers. That can get traffic moving much faster.
It also changes the bargain.
Instead of risking mostly your time, now you’re risking money. You need to know what the clicks cost, how many people buy and whether there is anything left after you pay for the advertising.
That path can work.
It just isn’t the path we’re following here.
We’re taking the slower route of building useful content and trying to create something that can keep working after the work is done.
Less money upfront.
More time.
Fair trade?
Maybe.
That’s part of what we’re trying to figure out.
The Money Usually Arrives After the Work
Affiliate marketing has an awkward timing problem.
You do the work first.
Someone may find it later.
They may buy something later still.
And even after you earn a commission, that doesn’t necessarily mean the money appears in your bank account five minutes later.
Different affiliate programs have different rules. There may be validation periods, refund periods and payment schedules. Some move faster than others.
The details will depend on the program.
The important thing for us is simpler:
The work and the reward can be separated by weeks or months.
That can be hard to get used to.
You may spend Saturday working on an article that produces absolutely nothing on Sunday.
Or Monday.
Or the following Saturday.
Then three months from now someone finds that same article, reads it, clicks one of your links and buys something.
The work didn’t suddenly become better three months later.
It finally found the right person.
That’s a very different way to think about getting paid.
And it leads to what I think is one of the most interesting things about affiliate marketing.
You Are Learning a Business, Not a Trick
The affiliate link itself is easy.
Getting the right person to click it for the right reason is the harder part.
You have to learn how to answer questions people actually have. How to compare products without simply rewriting the manufacturer’s sales page. How to tell when a topic deserves an article and when it probably doesn’t.
You also have to learn how to recommend something without making every page sound like:
This is wonderful. Buy it. This other thing is wonderful too. Please buy that.
That gets old rather quickly.
There are rules as well. If you have a financial relationship with a company you’re recommending, you need to tell the reader. Affiliate programs have their own rules about their links and where you can use them.
You don’t need to become a lawyer.
You do need to pay attention.
The nice part is that the things you’re learning start connecting to each other.
Research helps you understand what people want.
Writing helps you answer them.
Traffic tells you whether anyone is finding what you wrote.
Clicks start showing you which recommendations interest people.
And eventually a commission tells you that at least one person found what you did useful enough to act on it.
You aren’t really learning twenty different jobs.
You’re learning how the pieces of one small business fit together.
What Can You Realistically Earn?
This is where the internet gets noisy.
There are people showing enormous affiliate commissions.
There are also people who worked for six months and made almost nothing.
I don’t have any trouble believing either of them.
There are simply too many variables for anyone to give you a meaningful answer to, “How much will I make?”
What niche did you choose?
How many people are finding you?
What are they looking for?
What are you recommending?
How much does it pay?
Do people actually buy it?
Do they trust you?
A digital product may pay a much larger percentage than a physical product. That sounds wonderful until you discover that the physical product sells fifty times more often.
A big commission on something nobody wants is still a big commission on nothing.
So I wouldn’t start by trying to calculate what your future monthly income will be.
We don’t have enough information yet.
I’d start much smaller.
Can you make something useful?
Can you get a real visitor?
Can you get someone you don’t know to click one of your links because what you wrote helped them?
Can you earn one commission?
Then comes my favorite question:
Can you do it again?
Now we have something to work with.
When Affiliate Marketing Starts to Become Interesting
Let’s go back to the hiking site.
Suppose you spend four hours writing a genuinely useful article about choosing hiking boots for rocky trails.
If nobody ever finds it, those were not terribly productive four hours.
But suppose people keep finding it.
Next week.
Next month.
Next year.
You don’t have to sit there answering the same question every time another hiker wonders what kind of boots to buy.
The article does it.
You may update it. Products may change. You may discover that part of the article isn’t very useful and rewrite it.
But you aren’t starting from nothing every morning.
That, to me, is where affiliate marketing starts becoming interesting.
You are building assets.
An article is a small asset.
An email list is an asset.
A useful comparison that keeps attracting readers is an asset.
Eventually, a website that people recognize and trust is an asset.
Not every one of them will work.
Some articles will sit there doing very little.
You will probably have at least one that you thought was brilliant and apparently the rest of the internet did not share your enthusiasm.
It happens.
But the ones that do work can keep working long after the afternoon you spent creating them.
Compare that with work where you get paid only while you’re doing it.
You stop working, you stop getting paid.
Affiliate marketing doesn’t automatically escape that problem, but it gives you the possibility of building things once and benefiting from them more than once.
That’s a very different proposition.
When Affiliate Marketing Is Probably Not Worth It
Affiliate marketing isn’t for everybody.
If you don’t enjoy creating things, have no interest in learning how people find information online and aren’t interested in updating things you’ve already done, I would look seriously at another route.
Not because you can’t do affiliate marketing.
You probably can.
The better question is why you would choose a business built around work you don’t particularly want to do.
It also isn’t a great fit if the only part that interests you is the commission.
Traffic changes.
Products disappear.
Affiliate programs change their rules.
An article that worked wonderfully last year may need some attention this year.
And sometimes you are simply going to be wrong.
You will spend time on something you thought people wanted and discover that they don’t.
Welcome to business.
There is another problem if the only products that interest you happen to be the ones paying the largest commissions.
Readers aren’t stupid.
If every recommendation mysteriously leads to whatever pays you the most, sooner or later they are going to notice.
I’d rather lose a commission than lose the reader.
The commission was one sale.
The trust may be worth years of them coming back.
And if you’ve reached this point in the article thinking:
Nope. I don’t want to do any of this.
Good.
That’s useful information too.
Affiliate marketing is only one way to build an online business. There are other routes, and one of them may fit you much better.
Don’t force yourself down this one because somebody on YouTube said it was easy.
Go back to Choose Your Route and have another look.
So, Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?
I think it can be.
I wouldn’t call it easy money.
I’m not even sure easy money exists. If you find it, let me know.
What I do think affiliate marketing offers is a fairly accessible way to start building a small online business around useful information and recommendations.
You can start small.
You can learn while you’re doing it.
You don’t need employees.
You don’t need a warehouse full of products.
And if you build something useful, the work you do today has at least a chance of still being useful tomorrow.
The price is patience.
Some things won’t work.
Some articles will go nowhere.
You will change your mind.
You will occasionally look back at something you were absolutely certain about two weeks ago and wonder what you were thinking.
That’s normal.
Let’s go back to our hiker one last time.
At the beginning, there were a few articles and an affiliate dashboard that wasn’t exactly giving anyone a reason to celebrate.
Six months later, maybe there are thirty useful articles.
Some barely get read.
A few bring people to the site every day.
One comparison article has started producing commissions fairly regularly.
It isn’t a huge business.
Not yet.
But now something has changed.
You have evidence.
People can find you.
Some of them click.
Some of those clicks become sales.
And now the question is no longer:
Does affiliate marketing work?
You already know that it can.
The question becomes:
Is this small thing that’s starting to work worth building bigger?
I think that’s a much better question.